It’s the West’s fault, especially the United States. The majority of the public in Russia seems united in pointing the finger at the culprits for the crisis that poses the biggest military threat in Europe since the end of World War II.
But Vladimir Putin, despite his high popularity, has no reason to wait for the blank check he received when he annexed Crimea in 2014, without firing a shot, and destabilized the Donbass region with the help of “little green men”, soldiers reserve or active duty without official uniform of the Russian Armed Forces.
It is a fact that Putin has repressed and devastated independent media since his previous incursion into eastern Ukraine. He attempted to assassinate and then arrested his most visible adversary, Alexei Navalni. Media companies, journalists and their lawyers are now stifled by threats of imprisonment under laws designating them as “foreign agents,” a Stalinist-sounding label that scares advertisers and funders of journalism uncensored by the Kremlin.
At the same time, in the last eight years, the information diet in the Russian media has helped to hammer the image of the Ukrainian “Nazi”, willing to provoke “genocide” in the Russian ethnic population of the east.
A lone independent polling institute, Levada, regularly consults with the Russian public on the fate of the disputed region in the Donbass. A fourth responds that the area should be annexed to Russia; another quarter believe the area should remain Ukraine’s territory; just over a quarter believe they should be independent republics; the last quarter has no opinion.
“There is no general opinion,” political scientist Denis Volkov, director of Levada, tells the independent website Meduza.
Despite the strong anti-Westernism that has grown after the sanctions imposed with the annexation of Crimea, Volkov does not believe there will be what he calls a “Donbass consensus” — unfettered support like the one Putin received in 2014.
Levada polls do not directly ask whether people are in favor of a war with Ukraine. There is no sign that even supporters of Putin’s autocracy would support an attack on Kiev. In 2014, the dead returned home without official honors.
The scale of the military offensive required to crush a better-trained and more Western-armed Ukraine would bring not only the procession of bodies, but another real cost, with unforeseeable consequences.
The same unease over the economy and corruption that reinforced Navalni’s message and was reflected in last September’s parliamentary elections would have to be met with domestic investment in infrastructure to help shield Putin at the polls.
It is not possible to enter an all-out war with Ukraine without tightening the belt on the economy and risking discontent. Putin, the serial killer of dissidents, whose survival — politically and physically — depends directly on his protection scheme, has maneuvered to stay in power until 2036.
Unlike a certain head of state who went to lick his boots last week, Vladimir Putin is not afraid of truck drivers or police. The unrest he fears most is not workers on strike. It is the impatience of their bodyguards, pragmatic, non-ideological kleptocrats who park their multi-million dollar yachts in European marinas.
