The Guardian Weekly

A forever war

Over a year into the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the president puts Russia on an ongoing war footing with west

By Pjotr Sauer and Andrew Roth MOSCOW

In late December, as Muscovites looked forward to end-of-year celebrations, a group of old friends gathered for dinner at the flat of a senior state official. Some of the guests present, which included members of Russia’s cultural and political elite, toasted a new year in which they expressed hope for peace and a return to normality. As the night went on, a man who needed little introduction stood up for a toast.

“I am guessing you are expecting me to say something,” said Dmitry Peskov, Vladimir Putin’s longtime spokesperson, according to one of the two people who separately recounted the evening to the Guardian under conditions of anonymity.

“Things will get much harder. This will take a very, very long time,” Peskov continued.

His toast darkened the mood among the guests. “It was uncomfortable to hear his speech. It was clear that he was warning that the war will stay with us and we should prepare for the long haul,” one guest said.

More than a year into an invasion that, according to Russian planning, was supposed to take weeks, Putin’s government is putting society on a war footing with the west and digging in for a multiyear conflict.

Speaking to workers at an aviation factory in the Buryatia region, Putin last week once again cast the war as an existential battle for Russia’s survival.

“For us, this is not a geopolitical task, but a task of the survival of Russian statehood, creating conditions for the future development of the country and our children,” the president said.

It followed a pattern of recent speeches, said the political analyst Maxim Trudolyubov, in which the Russian leader has shifted towards discussing what observers have called a “forever war” with the west.

“Putin has practically stopped talking about any concrete aims of the war. He proposes no vision of what a future victory might look like either. The war has no clearcut beginning nor a foreseeable end,” Trudolyubov said.

During Putin’s “state of the nation” speech last month, the Russian leader repeated some of the many grievances he holds against the west, stressing that Moscow was fighting for national survival and would ultimately win.

One western diplomat in Moscow described Putin’s message in the speech as preparing the Russian public for “war that never ends”. The diplomat also said it was not clear that Putin could accept a defeat in the conflict because it did not seem that Putin “understands how to lose”.

The person said the Russian president was a former KGB operative and said they are trained to always continue to pursue their objectives, rather than reassessing the goals in the first place.

Others have noted that the Russian leader, who, according to western intelligence, is personally making operational and tactical decisions in Ukraine, has stopped discussing the situation on the front in Ukraine in his public comments.

‘Putin has practically stopped talking about any concrete aims of the war’

Maxim Trudolyubov Political analyst

It is easier not to talk about the war efforts when your army is making no progress,” Vladimir Gelman, a Russian politics professor at the University of Helsinki, added. “But scaling back is not an option for Putin; that would mean admitting defeat.”

Despite the setbacks on the battlefield in Ukraine, the Kremlin has weathered any potential backlash against the war at home, crushing the remnants of Russia’s civil society.

“The propaganda campaign has been successful despite the initial hesitance of the people,” said a source close to the Kremlin’s media managers, referring to the early anti-war protests, which led to more than 15,000 arrests in the first weeks after the invasion.

“The government has managed to rally people around the flag. The way the conflict was framed helped people to accept it,” the source added.

The full power of the state has been deployed to spread and enforce the message that the war is necessary for Russia’s very identity and survival.

At a Moscow launch event for the International Movement of Russophiles, a group backed by Russia’s Foreign Ministry and populated with fringe European activists and conspiracy theorists, the message was dire.

“We are not just seeing neo-nazism, we are seeing direct nazism, which is covering more and more European countries,” said Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, during a speech.

Yet there were few direct allusions to the situation on the front in Ukraine, and on the sidelines of the conference, some spoke about Russia’s difficult progress and the costs of the war.

“Not everyone in this country yet understands what we’re going to have to pay to win this war,” said Alexander Dugin, a radical Russian philosopher and prominent supporter of the war.

Dugin’s daughter, Darya Dugina, was killed last year in a car bombing that may have targeted him. Putin has spoken several times about the attack on Dugina and her name was written on a briefing paper held by Putin during a recent security council meeting, a video uploaded by the Kremlin showed.

“Some people have woken up, some people have not. Despite the year of war, it is going very slowly,” Dugin said.

Inside

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2023-03-31T07:00:00.0000000Z

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https://theguardianweekly.pressreader.com/article/281968906945191

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