Vladimir Putin was changing gear, not just droning on
The posters plastered up in Moscow before Vladimir Putin’s huffing and puffing marathon address yesterday struck a defiant tone: Russia’s borders, they read, do not stop anywhere.
The Russian president’s speech was delivered in the same uncompromising spirit. One year on from the invasion of Ukraine, Putin is still calling it a special operation rather than a war but he is more determined than ever to create a war economy and a war society that will taste victory only when Kyiv bends to his will.
It’s clear enough that Putin, having failed to secure a knockout blow against the government of Volodymyr Zelensky, is turning 2023 into a prelude for his 2024 re-election as president. The patriotic rhetoric of military mobilisation is supposed to be matched by the mobilisation of young voters.
Joe Biden, of course, may be making a similar calculation for 2024; his transatlantic flight followed by a ten-hour night train to Kyiv demonstrated the kind of stamina demanded of an old man seeking a second term. Indeed it seemed for a while yesterday as if Putin wanted his long, often self-pitying speech to match the length of Biden’s rail journey.
Even hardened Russian generals seemed to struggle to stay awake. They should have paid attention though. Putin wasn’t just droning on, he was announcing a pivot.
Stalin in attempting to shake up the Red Army after the Germans invaded in 1941 faced two apparently contradictory tasks: to impose from above a general mobilisation of the population with all the coercive might at his disposal, while at the same time stirring a genuine emotional readiness to accept the sacrifices needed to win the war. The scale of the challenge was different for Stalin – an extraordinary four million soldiers were killed, captured or missing in the first year of war – and Putin has fewer persuasive tools available to him. Yet Putin seems to have understood that he needs to drive an across-society war effort if he is to break the momentum of the western-backed Ukrainians. Stalin purged generals in the 1930s; Putin is not (yet) travelling down that path. Stalin overcentralised the military machine; Putin is counting on something else: using his war as a modernising device, as a way of transforming society.
In short order yesterday he announced that officers and NCOs who have learnt from the blunders in Ukraine should be sent to advise and instruct at military academies. The lessons from the front about the vulnerability of supply lines and logistic logjams should be passed on rather than buried by the military bureaucracy.
Some of the most modern military technology in Russia, said Putin, was better than the western kit being used by the Ukrainians. It should be tested more quickly, brought into action. The creative energy of small and medium enterprises should be tapped and used to revive the military-industrial complex.
Army salaries had to rise, so did social benefits for the families of soldiers. Cheap, subsidised housing for the armed forces should be made a priority. The generals in the audience perked up: they know how poor housing conditions are pulling down morale.
Putin has made calls like this in the past. Now, however, he is joining up the dots. The lesson of western sanctions was that Russia had become too dependent on imported high technology. Robotics, electronics, pharmaceutical innovation: these were essential growth areas, he said. Basic research had to be encouraged, scientists offered accommodation, the prestige of teachers boosted.
It is the war that is nudging Putin in this direction. If the population is to continue to support his war aims then it must be convinced that there is a Russian future. Hundreds of thousands of young IT specialists, coders and programmers have left Russia in the past year; Putin wants them back, and not just to fight in Donbas. Russia is fighting a digitally savvy enemy in Ukraine.
The Russian leader is, of course, a populist. He mocked the oligarchs who have been complaining to him about the freezing of their assets in the West. “You treated the West as a safe haven,” he said, “and as I predicted you were robbed. Now no one is crying about your frozen yachts and frozen palaces … it’s time for you to come back and invest in Russia.” That will be applauded by ordinary Russians who understand that sanctions hit them harder than multi-millionaires; not many oligarch kids are being called up to the front.
Putin wouldn’t be making speeches like this if he weren’t anticipating a change in pace in the war. There was no hint of peace negotiations, no olive branch to Biden, no public recognition that China might be looking for a way out on behalf of its strategic ally in the Kremlin.
Almost as an afterthought, Putin announced that Russia would be suspending its participation in the new Start arms control agreement. The point was to keep the possibility open of a nuclear escalation and warn off the West from attacking Russian airfields. And yet Beijing would be dismayed if its ally started to make nuclear threats. It would backfire on Putin.
As one observer said yesterday, listening to Putin speak is like listening to the bark of a lonely, angry dog. But there is a gear shift under way. The mobilisation of young Russians has to be justified, a credible road to victory has to be found. Putin rolled out his usual patter about guarding Mother Russia from the decadent West yesterday but you could see from his half-smile that he didn’t believe it himself.
The Times
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