The Russian elite wants an end to the War in Ukraine, but the way to do so varies from an immediate negotiation for the more moderates to a radicalization of the conflict, for the militarists around the Kremlin.
This was the conclusion, impressionistic of course, of the Sheet during a few days of conversations with government officials, businessmen, analysts and members of the support system for Vladimir Putin’s regime.
They took place in Moscow and in Rogozinino, a small town near the capital that hosted the annual meeting of the Valdai Club, an entity that brings together international and local analysts with members of the Russian elite to discuss the course of the Kremlin’s foreign policy.
There, the closed sessions have free discussion with the likes of Chancellor Sergei Lavrov or the Russian energy czar, Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak, but, as a rule of engagement of the participants, nothing they said can be published.
The same goes for foreign guests, such as military analysts or American economist Jeffrey Sachs. But general impressions can be recorded, as well as conversations at intervals, respecting the anonymity of the interlocutors.
There is dissension in the upper echelons of Russian political life over Putin’s conduct of the war. It is even tolerated, under some controlled conditions: the moderator of the session in which the president spoke to Club Valdai, on October 27, began his speech by saying how all those present were “shocked” by the decision to invade.
Putin then spoke about the reasons he has already presented about the conflict and did not want to reveal the limit of his ambition in the neighbor.
A member of the so-called War Party, an informal nickname for members of the elite who only see the end of the conflict with an even more brutal escalation in the fighting, drew his vision for this on a napkin.
On the sketched map, Russia would take the entire Ukrainian coast as far as Transnistria, a Russian separatist enclave in Moldova, a former Soviet republic sandwiched between Ukraine and Romania.
The result in his vision, shared by influential regime “hawks” such as Yevgeny Prigojin (of the Wagner mercenary group) and the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov: the establishment of at least a demilitarized area running along the natural border of the Dnieper River to the east/southeast and keeping the entire coastline, turning Ukraine into a “Polish Slovakia”, in his words.
But are there objective conditions for this? “Only with total war, and it will happen. Wait for the winter,” he said, predicting an end to hostilities by the end of next year and reducing the mobilization of 300,000 reservists to a “bandage.”
The same term was quoted by a person on the moderate side, who considered without speaking too loudly that the war was a mistake. Without criticizing Putin, she said the priority was to end the conflict as quickly as possible, preferably with concessions on either side, with the annexation of more pieces of the neighbor confirmed at the end.
In common, both commentators agree that the West is to blame for the crisis, emulating the president’s view. It’s a familiar script, dating back to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, when US and European-led structures expanded eastward, swallowing up the old satellites that had separated their forces from those of Russia since the time of the Romanovs.
This generates outrage among the Russian elite, even those who do not see Putin as a savior. The view that the overthrow of Kiev’s pro-Moscow government in 2014, which led to the annexation of Crimea, the civil war in Donbass and laid the roots of the current conflict, was an American machination prevails.
Outside the forum, someone else with Kremlin access uses more nuance. In his view, Putin did think Volodymyr Zelensky would flee in the first week of the war, but now he works in damage containment mode. For this observer, the war has become entropic, impossible to win and impossible to lose.
“We could have years of that,” he summarized. Conversations throughout the Valdai debates suggested the same thing, as did the risk of a nuclear escalation of the conflict, an issue that terrifies elders. “I never thought about it, but now I’m afraid to live in Moscow because I don’t know where the war might end up,” said a respected political analyst in more conservative circles.
All this is anecdotal, not least because nobody knows what goes through Putin’s head. Everything you read in the West of coups being prepared in the elite against him reminds us of the most fanciful items in the president’s speech: interesting, but not very viable. The idea that Russia may never recover as a credible player in the West is common to all sides.
The proponent of a military exit uses a familiar metaphor: Putin, like the tsars of old, governs based on his mythical relationship with that people, as measured today in opinion polls. The royals, the boyars, fight each other as they follow the dynamics of this Kremlin-street link, which according to the latest poll by the independent Levada center was still at 79% approval.
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