What do Russians think about the crisis in Ukraine?
It’s still early morning in Moscow’s well-heeled Chistiy Prudiy neighbourhood, but the snow has already been heaped into piles lining the side of the roads by an army of workers in orange jumpsuits. A couple wearing thick jackets ice skate in circles around the frozen pond in the centre of the long park that runs the length of the main street. Luxurious apartments overlooking it are among the most sought after in Europe, boasting easy access to some of the Russian capital’s best shops and restaurants, as well as views of the Kremlin, where, Western leaders have repeatedly claimed in recent months, President Vladimir Putin is plotting a bloody war against Ukraine.
Citing satellite photos and reports of more than 100,000 troops massing on the border, the US and a number of its NATO allies in Europe have issued fierce warnings that any invasion of the former Soviet Republic will be met with an overwhelming response. Despite top Russian officials denying there are any plans for an offensive, and warnings that the tanks could begin rolling at any moment repeatedly coming up short, Washington and London have begun shipping tonnes of weaponry and ammunition to Ukraine as part of a plan to reinforce its military. “My guess is Putin will move in,” US President Joe Biden said two weeks ago. “He has to do something.” British Prime Minister Boris Johnson likewise has said that “the plan for a lightning war that could take out Kyiv is one that everybody can see.”
All quiet on the eastern front?
The prospect of an all-out conflict in Eastern Europe has slowly come to haunt public consciousness in the West, but many Russians are almost entirely unaware of the red alert status overseas. “I started reading American news the other day and it was all about Russia and Ukraine,” a translator friend exclaimed. “I don’t understand – do they really think there will be a war?”
State-owned television channels have barely covered the growing standoff and, where it has been picked up by online political sites, the editorial line has largely been mocking of statements being made in the West. “To our dismay, American media has lately been publishing a very large amount of unverified, distorted and deliberately deceitful information about what’s happening in Ukraine and around it,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov claimed on Tuesday. “Hysteria hyped up by Washington is causing hysteria in Ukraine, almost to the point that people are packing their bags for the front.”
Indeed, in a poll of 1,600 people across the country published last month by Moscow’s Levada Center, only around one in three Russians said they thought there was a real possibility of a conflict with one or more countries in the region, and just a quarter of respondents said a war with NATO and the US was definitely or fairly likely this year. By contrast, 22 per cent were worried about a coup d’état back home and almost two thirds about an economic crisis. At the same time, in another study by the research agency, registered as a “foreign agent” by the Russian Ministry of Justice over ties to overseas funding, just 34 per cent of people said they were concerned about the prospect of sanctions from the West. Despite Biden threatening Putin with measures like “he’s never seen before”, fears of sanctions biting are down from an all-time high of 53% in 2014, in the wake of the Crimea crisis.
Victoria Vostroknutova, a student at the prestigious government diplomatic academy, MGIMO, told me that she’d only seen signs that an invasion was imminent coming from outside the country. “The West is going crazy,” she said. “No Western politician is listening to what Russian officials say – they pay attention only to Western press which only escalates tensions.”
However, she went on, the stakes of Moscow’s showdown with NATO and its demands that Ukraine be barred from ever joining its ranks are being felt by the public. “The crisis might just fade with time,” she said hopefully, but “if Russia chooses to go to the end, the tensions are likely to continue escalating.” According to her, “nobody wants to start a war,” and neither she nor anyone she knows thinks it is likely to happen.
Problems at home?
However, despite the apparent absence of attempts to build a domestic pretext so far, a number of analysts are arguing that the Kremlin has already been subtly preparing for a war. Many point to an article penned by Putin in summer last year, “on the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, as evidence the ground is being laid for an annexation. “Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all descendants of Ancient Rus,” he wrote in a long series of passages emphasising the shared origins of the Slavic people. “Step by step, Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia.”
This was widely interpreted as a shot across the bow of politicians and activists in Kyiv who have done so much since the 2014 Euromaidan to define their country, their culture and their language as distinct to everything that Moscow, and the Soviet Union before it, stood for. Putin’s affirmation that “Russia has never been and will never be anti-Ukraine” was largely written off as a platitude, as was the conclusion that “what Ukraine will be – it is up to its citizens to decide.” Since then, though, Putin has scarcely mentioned the country by name, and aside from accusing NATO of inflaming tensions during an end-of-year press conference, has hardly weighed in on the subject at all.
Others have claimed that Moscow doesn’t even have to worry about public opinion, and could launch an invasion without the need to secure support for it. In reality though, the Russian government has consistently shown deference to popular feeling in recent years, shelving plans for a nationwide vaccine passport system in the face of mass uproar and rolling out a series of crowd-pleasing policies like one-off payments to pensioners and police officers in the run up to last summer’s parliamentary elections. With the country, like much of the world, facing a cost of living crisis, as inflation hits 8.4 per cent, and rising food prices increasingly hitting everyday life, a colossal European war, coupled with massive sanctions and a rising casualty count at the front line, could easily sour the domestic political situation in a country where the authorities prioritise stability above all else.
Panic on the streets of Kyiv?
The prospect of their country soon being locked into a battle for its very existence, however, is a familiar one to many Ukrainians, who have heard similar alarm bells sounded almost annually.
Olha Tsurkan, a human rights lawyer and one of the founders of the Liberal Democratic League of Ukraine told me that “the current atmosphere in Kyiv is quite calm, people aren’t in a state of panic. In a way, over the last eight years, we have grown accustomed to living in a state of constant threat from Russia. For us, since 2014, the war has never ended.”
“At the same time though, we don’t downplay the fact the risk has grown. Of course, around the dinner table, talk of having an action plan in the event of an invasion or possible shelling is usually present. But everyday life, work, study, goes on as usual. There are a number of training courses about how to behave in the event of a war, and I’m planning to attend one myself this weekend. There are also units of territorial defense being created around the city districts and any resident of Kyiv can join them.” According to Tsurkan, she and her family and friends would be ready to fight back in the event of a conflict.
Russia has also accused the West of making the prospect of conflict more likely, with Washington and London flying in hardware and special forces instructors. “For many of us, the surprising part is the support being provided by the UK – even for a couple of days, #GodSaveTheQueen was trending on Ukrainian Twitter,” she added. However, tensions have emerged with Berlin, where Foreign Minister Annelina Baerbock put a hold on the shipment of arms, saying “the idea that Germany delivers weapons that could then be used to kill Russians is very difficult to stomach for many Germans.”
“The rejection of the export of weapons to Ukraine and the blocking of exports of German weapons through other NATO partners makes many of our citizens question the trust of what it seemed was a long-standing partner,” Tsurkan went on.
Despite the warnings from abroad, however, the Eastern European country’s own president, Volodymr Zelenskyi, has repeatedly played down the scale of the threat which he claims is, while serious, unlikely to be imminent. In an address to the nation last month, he said that the risks of conflict “existed for more than just today and hasn’t been growing worse – there is just more hype around them now.” Yet Tsurkan says it is likely the government is trying to avoid panic. “We all understand in the current situation how difficult it is to make predictions – after all, it is Russia and Putin we are talking about,” she added. “We here in Kyiv are hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.”
But while there may be fears about the prospect of the Kremlin ordering its forces to begin pouring over the border, Tsurkan says there is little appetite for conflict among those living across the border. “I am sure that the average Russian citizen does not want a war with Ukraine. A large number of Russians still have certain ties to Ukraine – relatives, some roots. Some of them, especially mothers, also remember the return of their children in coffins from Donbass,” she said. “And they understand that in the case of a large-scale war, there definitely will be many more of those.”
For the time being, like people in Kyiv, those in Moscow’s Chistiy Prudiy seem to be hoping it doesn’t come to that.