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The author is the director of Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin
A month into Ukraine’s incursion into Russian territory, one thing is clear: the Kremlin is ready to continue the war of attrition that Vladimir Putin still believes he can win. Hopes that the conflict can be brought to a swift end by some form of military or economic shortcut have so far been dashed. Now, what started as Putin’s war is increasingly becoming Russia’s war, boosting the Kremlin’s ability to ignore the costs.
It goes without saying that the Kursk debacle is embarrassing for Putin: after all, it’s the first time nuclear-armed Russia has been invaded since the second world war — and by a non-nuclear state to boot. But it remains unlikely that this humiliation will cause political problems for Putin at home, as senior officials in Ukraine and the west have suggested.
Deep reserves of social inertia, apathy and the enforced atomisation of Russian society were the sources of Putin’s power long before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. And since then, the Kremlin has carefully cultivated these pillars of the regime — while at the same time beefing up the apparatus of repression and showering the population with money.
Moreover, in the regions along the border that have witnessed Ukrainian retaliation, support for the Russian war effort is 10-15 per cent higher than the national average of roughly 60 per cent. These are the same regions where, before the war, thousands of people used to visit their Ukrainian relatives and friends across the border. The growth of pro-war sentiment isn’t necessarily resulting in more army recruits, but it makes the government’s job of persuading the Russian people to tolerate an open-ended fight with their neighbours easier.
This is why Putin is in no rush to push back the invader at any cost. His military focus this year has been on eastern Ukraine, where Russian troops are gnawing their way through Ukrainian defences. For now, it’s enough for the Kremlin to patch the breach in the Kursk area by haphazardly scrambling military units from all over Russia while continuing to employ the most combat-ready fighters in the Donbas. The Russian president believes that he needs to advance as far as possible before winter sets in, and that he can afford to deal with Kursk later.
This helps to explain why the Kremlin, despite the embarrassment, is not rushing to use some of the most potent tools at its disposal, including tactical nuclear weapons. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, for understandable reasons, wants to portray the incursion into Russia as ultimate proof that the Kremlin can be pushed around by force — and that the west shouldn’t be afraid of escalation. “The whole naive, illusory concept of so-called red lines regarding Russia which dominated the assessment of the war by some partners, has crumbled,” he said last month.
The truth is that for every setback in this war, Putin has been able to push back and extort a price from the Ukrainians — and, increasingly, from Kyiv’s western allies. In the last two and a half years he has conducted a large-scale mobilisation, started ruthless air strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure and launched a sabotage campaign in the west. In response to the Kursk incursion, the Kremlin has ordered a massive strike against Ukraine’s electricity grid, and has continued to terrorise the country every night since.
There will be further painful reversals for Putin in this war, as Kyiv seeks approval from the west to use Nato-supplied long-range missiles to strike deep inside Russia, as well as developing its own missile programme with western help. But the Kremlin is not short of tools to respond. The most crucial decision right now is whether Putin will attempt a fresh mobilisation, given that Russian troop numbers are depleted.
This manpower shortage can be addressed through an electronic draft summons system that was introduced last year and will be operational by November. After the panic and exodus that followed the partial mobilisation of 2022, the new system is designed to reduce public anxiety and make it impossible for draftees to flee abroad.
Given the determination to fight on in both Moscow and Kyiv, there is unlikely to be a shortcut to a swift victory for either side. With diminished prospects for meaningful diplomacy in the coming months, the war will drag on. It remains unpredictable and is only getting more dangerous. Western leaders should be prepared to stand by Ukraine for a long and painful period.
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