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While the escalatory dynamic of a few months ago carried the immediate risk of a nuclear catastrophe, today the war appears to be evolving into a bloody but static war of attrition, with nuclear escalation still a distinct possibility. Upcoming Russian or Ukrainian offensives may reverse this process, but with both sides stripped of the advantage of surprise and deploying most of their available military resources, a radical shift currently seems doubtful. At immense cost on both sides, Russian troops are gaining ground in Donbas, but slowly enough that fully conquering both Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts will take years and yield little but a bombed-out “lunar landscape.”
Western tank shipments to Ukraine won’t be fully deployed for months and are unlikely to fundamentally alter this stalemate. For both Putin and Zelensky, this turn in the nature of the fighting is unwelcome. On one hand, long wars of aggression that fail to achieve real victories may rebound against their initiator, though the political cost can take years to become apparent. On the other, if Ukraine is to win the war rather than merely not lose it — and according to Zelensky, that would require recapturing Crimea and the Donbas — it will have to redouble the superhuman exertions of 2022 against an enemy who has had time to entrench and consolidate, amidst an accelerating socioeconomic downward spiral. Meanwhile, all over the post-Soviet space, the war is revealing unpredictable new contradictions and widening familiar old ones.
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Below the geopolitical level, Putin believes he is waging war on behalf of “ethnic Russians” in Ukraine. Traditional distinctions between Russian ethnicity (russkii) and citizenship (rossiiskii) have faded away on both sides, but it is clear that Russian decision-makers imagined a more or less cohesive group of supporters roughly coterminous with 2010 Yanukovych voters. These are the people whose “genocide” they claim to be preventing, whose right to learn and use the Russian language they defend as imperiled, the victims of Lenin’s allegedly illicit fabrication of a Ukrainian state — and potential collaborators in any favorable political transformation Russia may want to engineer.
For this community, Putin’s solicitude has become an apocalyptic disaster. To the extent that they exist as a coherent group at all, Russian speakers have been the war’s greatest victims. The overwhelming majority of the fighting, and the attendant destruction of homes and refugee displacement, has taken place in historically Russian-speaking regions. Western Ukraine — the region with the shortest history of Russian control and the least sympathetic to Russian culture — has suffered less, though it is far from unscathed.
As a result, Ukraine’s political geography, especially the famous east-west split, is rapidly homogenizing. Twelve years ago, most eastern and southern Ukrainians saw the future of Ukraine as a sovereign and geopolitically independent state with close economic and cultural ties to Russia as well as Europe, which would retain some degree of official recognition for the Russian language and maintain its traditional ambivalence toward the Soviet legacy. The series of escalations that began after the Maidan uprising in 2013–14 has left little space for this position, which has come to seem tantamount to Putinism.
In the wartime context, the political parties representing it, such as For Life, the second-place finisher in the 2019 parliamentary elections, have all been banned, even when they opposed the invasion. Putin’s failed attempt to impose a pro-Russian choice on Ukrainians has instead produced the opposite effect. There is no longer any organized opposition to a cultural agenda that promotes the removal of the Russian language from government and education, the repudiation of the Soviet Union, and the celebration of right-wing national heroes like Stepan Bandera and the Nazi captain and pogromist Roman Shukhevych. Ukrainian society has consolidated around a vision of its identity created in the unrussified west of the country, though its exact contours are still being determined.
Still, Russian speakers in Ukraine at least retain some agency within the formal political system. In Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, they have none at all. Since 2014, referenda carried out effectively at gunpoint have authorized far-reaching political changes, with barely any semblance even of the pseudodemocratic system in Russia itself. From Donetsk to Melitopol, any attempt to protest or modify the terms of Russian control is met with police surveillance, repression, abduction, and torture.
The results are evident. Moscow has long since sidelined or eliminated the local activist core that provided the initial impetus for the LPR and DPR, replacing them with corrupt but subservient functionaries. Donetsk’s current leader, Denis Pushilin (locally nicknamed “Penis Dushilin” from the Russian for “strangler”), is far more interested in demonstrating his usefulness to superiors in Moscow than advocating for his own compatriots. By conservative estimates, some twenty thousand Russian troops had been killed in action by late 2022, while the DPR and LPR together lost about five thousand. This means that Donetsk and Luhansk have a per capita casualty rate ten times higher than Russia as a whole. Approximately one out of every three hundred male DPR residents has been killed in action, a figure that begins to approach the rate of Iranian casualties in the Iran-Iraq War, which lasted eight years.
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Though they are hardly the Nazi drug addicts depicted in Putin’s tirades, the president and his party, Servant of the People, represent the right wing of the European neoliberal consensus; their affiliation with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe in the European Parliament signals their affinities with Emmanuel Macron and other European rightists.
Zelensky’s party has pushed through laws that have effectively destroyed the right to collective bargaining as well as other labor protections in Ukraine. It has also implemented pension law reforms billed as “decommunizing” the social welfare system but in fact amounting to radical cutbacks. Both plans were drafted well before the Russian invasion, but the wartime state of emergency has greatly aided the party’s ability to implement its agenda — whose anti-labor animus has even run afoul of the normally moderate International Labour Organization. Instead of labor rights and social welfare, Zelensky and his advisors promote “smartphone courts” (a joint venture with Amazon) and other public-private partnerships. In effect, they see postwar Ukraine as a gigantic special economic zone on the fringes of Europe, where weak labor protections and lack of tariff barriers will incentivize investment from European multinationals.
There is no longer any credible parliamentary opposition to this agenda, in part because every party on Ukraine’s political left has been banned based on largely unproven claims of collaboration with Russia. Zelensky was able to secure overwhelming majorities for his reforms because deputies from these parties remain in parliament, now especially vulnerable to political pressure. It is true that these parties were in fact pro-Russian and their politics were often incoherent. For instance, the leader of the Socialist Party from 2017 to 2019 began as a regional boss in the neo-Nazi and anti-Russian Right Sector organization, but now lives outside of Moscow and has called on Putin to nuke Ukraine.
The vision of society they represented was, at best, socially conservative and nostalgic rather than progressive or left-wing in any meaningful sense. In the Ukrainian context, however, the firm linkage between pro-Russian (or pro-peace) views and welfarist politics has meant that when the Russian invasion discredited the former, the latter lost out, too. The banned parties were the main electoral force defending welfare state institutions inherited from the Soviet era, and their disappearance has facilitated far-reaching neoliberal restructuring.
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Despite the excision of LGBTQ people from the media and the concentration of economic assets in the hands of state-linked power elites, Russia is no more a civilizational alternative to neoliberal Western capitalism than Poland, which has comparable levels of religiosity and social conservatism. On issues like abortion, Russia has more liberal legislation and public opinion than most US states. The minority of Russians who are most invested in an anti-liberal civilizational vision — for instance, some segments of the far right and the red-brown followers of the late Eduard Limonov — are continually subjected to police repression by the Russian state, which fears any political activism not channeled through top-down institutions.
As for the rest of the population, there may be plenty of YouTube interviews where people on the street dutifully recite the propaganda clichés they hear on television, but for most Russians the important conflicts in their lives take place at home and in the workplace rather than in the assembly halls of world governing bodies. Russia’s capitalist economic order and escalating climate of political repression has only served to encourage this tendency to turn toward private life and leave public affairs to those who monopolize them. This is why opinion polls about support for the war are misleading, and comparisons to Stalin’s role in World War II and invocations of “totalitarianism” are even more baseless. Stalinism was rooted in its ability to mobilize enormous masses of the population, while Putinism demobilizes them. As a result, even after a year of war, Putin has failed to convince his people that victory in the conflict is a matter of life and death. He would have had to be a different kind of ruler.
This has forced the state to tread carefully in calibrating wartime demands to the expectations of its population. Until January, thousands were being prosecuted for referring to the “special military operation” as a war. Though this may still be illegal, Putin has now started using the word himself. While Russia’s partial mobilization in the fall seemed at first to represent a watershed moment, the situation has largely reverted to the mean — except for the emigration of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them educated professionals, who are forming yet another generation of Russian exiles who may never return to their homeland.
Those Russians who remain are watching fewer political talk shows, and no flood of volunteers for the front has appeared at recruiting stations. Civil-society support for the troops mostly amounts to donation campaigns. The situation is reminiscent of the United States after the Iraq invasion, but with much weightier emotional consequences, owing to the heavier casualty toll and the rupture of long-standing social and familial ties. Literal or metaphorical escapism is one solution, psychiatry another. Spending on antidepressants grew massively in 2022. Those who actively oppose the war remain as much of a minority as active supporters, however, and police crackdowns mean that they are either already exceptionally skilled at evading arrest or are politically unorganized. Someone who throws a Molotov cocktail at a recruiting station may be a neo-Nazi, an anarchist, or simply a random, fed-up pensioner.
For elites, everything is different. Those of Putinism’s beneficiaries who have expressed anything short of full-throated support for the war have become alarmingly accident-prone. After safely offshoring their wealth, others have renounced all ties to the regime and attempted to integrate into new societies in Europe or Israel, cleansed of the moral stain of Russianness. As in the reign of Peter the Great or the Stalinist Great Terror, places among the elite left vacant one way or another seldom remain so for long. For every aspiring minister or oligarch, the war offers an opportunity to climb a treacherous career ladder.
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In the long run, the war will end only after both societies have become too exhausted to fight any further, when immediate peace and reconstruction become more urgent than the more exalted ideological ambitions of the combatants. If Ukraine does manage to recover its lost territories, it will have to develop a more inclusive vision of its nationhood that offers collaborators forgiveness and reconciliation rather than punishment — a way to win back its citizens and not just the land they happen to live on.
If it does not regain them, it will have to learn to redefine itself to accommodate their loss. Putin is likely too old to change his mind about the threat of Euro-Atlantic expansion and the future of Russian great-power nationalism, but his successors, whether they are his venal and bloodthirsty henchmen or the avatars of a hypothetical future wave of mass anti-Putin politicization, will have to accept the diminution of Russia’s standing even in its own former empire. This outcome will not be a draw but a defeat: the failure of Putin’s effort to resist the growth of US power by means of militarized great-power nationalism. Russia’s loss will not change the fact that its principal victims are millions of innocent Ukrainians. This is why war is so bad — for everyone, so far, except Lockheed Martin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and the ghost of Roman Shukhevych.
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by Nektivni Ugnelj Tue Feb 28, 2023 11:58 am
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