Last Saturday, as Russian forces retreated rapidly in northeast Ukraine, suffering one of the most humiliating setbacks of the war, President Vladimir Putin was in a Moscow park leading the festive opening of a Ferris wheel.
“It is very important for people to be able to spend relaxing moments with family and friends,” Putin said in a deadpan voice.
The stark contrast was startling, even to some of the president’s most outspoken supporters. And it highlighted a growing divergence between the Kremlin and the voices that applauded the invasion with the greatest enthusiasm. For these “cheerleaders”, the Russian withdrawal seems to have confirmed their worst fears: that the top Russian authorities were so preoccupied with maintaining a “business as usual” environment in Russia that they failed to make use of the necessary equipment and manpower. to wage a long war against a resolute enemy.
“You are throwing a billion ruble party,” wrote a pro-Russian blogger in a widely circulated post on Sunday, referring to the festivities led by Putin in Moscow to commemorate the 875th anniversary of the city’s founding. “What’s your problem? Not at the moment when such a horrible failure is happening!”
While Moscow was celebrating, the blogger wrote, the Russian army was fighting without having enough night-vision goggles, bulletproof vests, first-aid kits or drones. A few hundred kilometers away, Ukrainian forces retook the Russian military stronghold of Izium, continuing their rapid advance through the northeast of the country and ushering in a new and tense phase of the war.
The indignant reactions from hard-liners on Saturday showed that while Putin has managed to eliminate virtually all liberal and pro-democracy opposition in Russian domestic politics, Putin still faces the risk of dissatisfaction from the more conservative wing of the political spectrum. There is little evidence, so far, that these sectors will turn against Putin as a result of the apparently successful Ukrainian counteroffensive, but analysts say the growing willingness shown by the hardliners to publicly criticize military leaders points to growing dissatisfaction among the Russian elite.
“Most of these people are in shock and didn’t think this could happen,” Dmitri Kuznets, who analyzes the war for Russian-language news site Meduza, said in a telephone interview. “I think most of them are genuinely angry.”
As usual, the Kremlin sought to minimize setbacks. The Defense Ministry described the Russian withdrawal as a decision to “regroup” its troops, despite saying a day earlier that Russian forces were strengthening their defensive positions in the region. In Moscow, authorities pressed ahead with the festive weekend, with fireworks planned for the night and state television showing hundreds of people lining up to ride the new 140-meter-tall Ferris wheel.
Online, however, Russia’s failings were in full view, underscoring the unexpected role played by pro-Russian military bloggers on the social platform Telegram in shaping the war narrative. While the Kremlin controls television in Russia and has blocked access to Instagram and Facebook, Telegram remains fully accessible and is filled with posts and videos from both supporters and opponents of the war alike.
Pro-war bloggers, who have a large following and some of whom accompany Russian troops close to the front lines, spread the Kremlin’s false message that Russia is fighting “Nazis” and speak of Ukrainians in defamatory and dehumanizing terms. . But they are also releasing much more detailed — and, analysts say, more accurate — information about the battlefield than the Russian Defense Ministry. According to bloggers, the ministry underestimates the enemy and hides bad news from the public.
One of the bloggers is Yuri Podolyaka, who was born in Ukraine but moved to Crimea after it was annexed by Russia in 2014. On Friday he told his 2.3 million Telegram followers that if If Russian forces continue to downplay the actual extent of setbacks suffered on the battlefield, the Russians “will cease to have confidence in the Ministry of Defense and the government as a whole.”
Bloggers were the first to publicly raise the alarm about a possible Ukrainian counteroffensive in northeastern Ukraine.
On Aug. 30, a Kremlin spokesman held his usual teleconference with journalists and reiterated his usual message: he said the invasion of Ukraine was proceeding “as planned.”
On the same day, several Russian bloggers were posting on social media that something was not going according to plan at all. Ukraine was building up forces for a counterattack near the town of Balakliya, they said, and Russia did not appear to be in a position to defend itself.
“Hello, hello, is anyone home?” one of them asked. “Are we prepared to repel an attack in that direction?”
Days later it would become clear that the answer was “no.” Ukrainian forces overran sparse Russian defenses in Balakliya and other nearby towns in northeastern Ukraine. Some analysts estimate that the territory retaken by Ukraine by the weekend (10-11) reached about 2,500 square kilometers, signaling a potential turning point in the conflict, which this summer turned into a war of attrition.
The fury of some bloggers over Russian military mistakes reached a fever pitch on Saturday. One characterized the Russian withdrawal as a “catastrophe”, and others said it left residents who collaborated with Russian forces at the mercy of Ukrainian troops, potentially weakening the credibility of occupation authorities across territory still under Russian control.
And while the Kremlin still characterizes the invasion as nothing more than a “special military operation,” several bloggers insisted on Saturday that Russia is, in fact, waging all-out war — not just against Ukraine, but against a united West.
The incredulous fury reflects how some analysts think many in the Russian elite view the war: as a military campaign marked by incompetence, conducted using insufficient resources, that can only be won if Putin mobilizes the nation for war and imposes conscription.
Both Western and Russian analysts said Putin would need conscription to significantly expand the size of his invading force. But he seems determined to resist such a move, which could break the passivity with which much of the Russian public has viewed the war. In August, 48% of Russians told the independent Levada pollster they were paying little or no attention to developments in Ukraine.
The result, analysts say, is that Putin has no good options. Escalating a war whose domestic support may prove to be superficial can provoke domestic unrest in the country. Continuing battlefield withdrawals could trigger a backlash from hardliners who have accepted the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia is fighting “Nazis” for its very survival.
Since Russia withdrew from capturing the Ukrainian capital Kiev in April, the Kremlin’s goals in the war have been unclear, a fact that is disorienting Putin supporters, said military analyst Rob Lee of the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
“The Ukrainian war effort is evident, it is understandable. On the Russian side, there is always a question: what is Russia doing?” Lee said, interviewed by phone. “The objectives are not clear, and how they intend to achieve those objectives is not clear. If you are fighting a war and you are not sure what the ultimate objective is, you are going to be very frustrated.”
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