Putin is not the only one with a sense of humour.
“This [mobilisation] means the war is coming ever closer to ordinary Russians.” “Petya” is a Ukrainian soldier on the country’s southern front, and he’s weighing up what recent events mean for those on the front lines. “He recognised that he needed more troops, more people to reach his goals. Before this moment, for ordinary people in Russia, this war was something very far away but now, ordinary Russian people will feel what this war means in their personal life.”
This is important. Even in a dictatorship, which Russia emphatically is — no matter how many democratic veneers Putin tries to paste over his actions — you can’t enrage too many people too many times if you want to govern more or less unhindered. When I was last in Ukraine, over the summer, I lost count of how many people told me the USSR’s failed invasion of Afghanistan was the final nail in its coffin.
At first glance, Russians are unhappy. The most searched terms on the internet in Russia following the announcement were, according to one anonymous tweeter, “how to break your arm”; “how to leave Russia”; “foreign passport”; and then “how to avoid mobilisation”. There’s a great joke doing the rounds in Moscow right now, too. “As a reservist, you have been mobilised!” “Who are we fighting with?” “The Nazis.” “Yes, but against whom?”
Discontent is being expressed in various ways. One-way airline tickets are soaring in price and selling out fast. Meanwhile, small-scale protests are making themselves heard in towns across the country, and over 1,000 Russians have now been arrested for dissent. In a country where you can get 15 years in prison for speaking out, these are the acts of either extremely brave, or extremely fed up, people. Both are a grave danger for despotic regimes.
Then again, Russians are often unhappy. As a Russian friend once said to me: “Yeah, politics sucks, but it’s like the weather: you can’t do anything about it.” Any claim that Putin is in imminent political or indeed personal danger must be dismissed as almost certainly false — with the caveat that in life, and especially in Russia, anything can happen.
Petya understands the truth of all this. “The future of this war depends not only on the force of the Russian army against the Ukrainian army, but also on the views and position of the Russian people.” And he is hopeful. As are most military-minded Ukrainians I speak to. Ignore the noise (or as one so memorably put it, “politician bull poo poo”) and look at what is happening on the ground. Ukraine continues to advance in the North, having retaken over 8000 square kilometres to date, and soon hopes to encircle the city of Kherson in the occupied south (a goal that might be a touch too ambitious).
Kyiv is not letting up. Zelenskyy is now focused on “speed” in liberated areas. Ukrainian forces just captured Bilohorivka, a small village in Luhansk, which is a small but symbolic achievement, as it’s 10km west of the city of Lysychansk, which fell to the Russians in July. This causes Russia more problems. In each new territory that Ukraine seizes back, more evidence of Russian atrocities emerges: more mass graves, more scenes of torture, more tales of the brutality of occupation from those who endured it.
Putin’s response is simple. “People in the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, in Lugansk and Donetsk, saw and are seeing now the atrocities perpetrated by the Neo-Nazis in the (Ukrainian-)occupied areas of the Kharkiv region,” he said. It’s a simple rhetorical device beloved of despots everywhere: just deny the reality of everything. And keep denying it. Blame the victims; you know most won’t swallow the nonsense, but the crucial constituency will.
It doesn’t matter that people can see the truth on TV. It doesn’t matter that they can read it in the press and hear it on the radio. This is what totalitarianism is: the Leader controls not just your civil rights and your freedoms, but your very senses, too. What you heard you did not hear; what you saw you did not see.
But once you go down the road to outright despotism, there is no going back. There can be no failure either, as failure can only lead to downfall or death, and usually both. “Partial mobilisation by Russia means only one thing,” continues Petya. “The defeat of the so-called special military operation declared by Vladimir Putin. And practically, it means that Putin has recognised defeat.”
But if Putin has recognised the defeat of what he thought would be a “special military operation”, he cannot accept the defeat of the wider invasion of Ukraine. In his speech, he said Russia will “use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff.” He was talking about nuclear weapons — his ultimate trump card. If it’s a sign of weakness (and it is), it’s also a sign of how far nuclear taboos have been eroded. Throughout the whole of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, neither John F. Kennedy nor Nikita Khrushchev once mentioned the possibility of nuclear strikes. The Kremlin now alludes to it on a daily basis.
The Russian establishment remains mostly united and on message. Recently, Andrey Gurulyov, State Duma Deputy, expressed a desire to end Ukraine’s existence. Russia’s largest defence company, Rostec, has drastically increased its arms production after bringing in an overtime schedule.
On the ground, though, Petya is equally determined. “Nothing has changed because we still continue to defend our country,” he says. “We see our task as still the same as it was before [the mobilisation]. Our goal is to liberate occupied territories of Ukraine and achieve victory over Russia. Every soldier understands this goal, and the military spirit [morale] is still very high.”
But to do this, as Petya knows, Ukraine will keep needing Western weapons and support. Key to the Kremlin’s strategy is the belief that we will eventually give up and abandon Ukraine. It’s easy to see the logic behind this. Putin looked at Iraq; to Barack Obama’s failure to keep to his own redline after chemical weapon use in Syria; and most recently to the flight from Afghanistan; and he concluded the West was exhausted and spent.
So far, we have proved him wrong. The EU Council just adopted a new €5bn assistance package. When I met Foreign Office officials recently, the message was simple: full steam ahead with supporting Ukraine. Britain has a new Prime Minister, fully aligned with her predecessor. She has made this abundantly clear.
Petya is keen to emphasise the importance of this continuing support. “To reach victory we need more help from the side of our Western partners,” he says. “We need new armaments, we need new technologies. We see that Russia’s entire policy is its human potential but not technology — winning by quantity, not quality. That’s all they can do.”
Now, across the occupied territories the referendums are beginning. Putin is going to annex larges parts of southern Ukraine to Russia. But as much as he tells himself — and Russians — otherwise, this will only make Ukrainians, yet again, more determined to resist; and the Russians, yet again, more violent. Yesterday morning I received a message from a Ukrainian friend. “News from Kh [Kherson] are bad. Russians with riffles and unforms [sic] coming in villages from house to house and press people top vote. Often threaten if they don’t want to.”
The war is far from over — the violence will continue; Ukrainians will continue to die. And so the West’s involvement must continue, too. There can be no retreat — either for Ukraine, or for the international order we have so painstakingly built over the seven decades, since the last time a tyrant unleashed industrial war on the European continent.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe