It’s been a year since I last visited Russia. Back then, most people I met thought the prospects of a war with Ukraine were very remote, despite the massive troops build-up on the border. So I was curious to see how attitudes had changed since then. Equally important was to see for myself how the war has changed life in Russia.
The first surprise was how normal life was. Despite all the media reports of doom and gloom as a result of western sanctions, everything works just as before. Domestic banking is working, salaries and pensions are paid on time, ubiquitous e-commerce is bustling with activity, the shops are stuffed with food and consumer goods. In St Petersburg, at least, I’ve struggled to notice any change in daily life compared to January 2021.
Yet, digging deeper and the impact of sanctions is there. One issue that kept popping up was spare car parts, which have become noticeably more expensive. But even there new supplies are being shipped now. This goes pretty much for everything else consumer orientated. There’s no shortages, even of western goods such as whisky – the supermarket shelves are fully stocked.
EU travel restrictions have had their effect – but nothing like the measures introduced during the COVID pandemic. People can still travel to many countries, including Turkey, Egypt or the Gulf states.
Business people complain of facing difficulties, particularly those in the import/export sector. But, after a few months of chaos, business has been finding new shipping routes via third countries such as Turkey or Kazakhstan.
An acquaintance who works in a defence-related sector laughed at the suggestion that Russia could run out of missiles. He told me the defence industry had been stockpiling essential parts for years and is also using more locally sourced alternatives (although this is a claim I was unable to verify). The rest can still be bought – albeit at inflated prices. Their real problem is not a lack of parts, but the capacity to scale up production to meet growing military orders.
The general impression from conversations with people in different businesses is that their main focus is on adapting to the new normal. Many things will be less efficient and more expensive, but the Russian economy will not collapse.
If this is a crisis for Russia – which it is – it’s nothing like the turmoil of the early 1990s when the state, society and economy were all collapsing at the same time.
Don’t mention the war
Another surprising thing I’ve found is the extent to which the war is avoided on a day-to-day basis. You see reports about it on TV news and chat shows (which steadfastly follow the government line), but I felt much better informed about the war using the Telegram app in Belfast, where I live and work, than when talking to actual people in St Petersburg. I found you could have whole conversations without Ukraine ever coming up, unless I deliberately mentioned it.
My overall impression was that the invasion has reinforced people’s pre-existing views. Those who were always opposed to Putin hate it, while those who are supportive of the government remain largely in favour. But the vast majority tries to ignore it as much as they can.
No one I spoke to was happy that the war started – but there’s an important caveat: regretting it doesn’t mean they want to end it at all costs. Some said that one thing worse than a war is losing a war.
Nor did I see much evidence of popular protests. Obviously, many people who oppose Putin had fled the country already, especially since mobilisation began in September 2022. Many others opposing the war have been imprisoned. A couple of my friends (long-time critics of the regime) were planning to leave to avoid future mobilisation.
One of the most frequent questions I was asked related to the energy situation: “How much do you pay for gas in the UK?” The UK and the EU are presently suffering from high energy costs. But it’s unlikely the European economy will collapse or cause political unrest – the implicit assumption behind the question. It’s a similar situation in Russia. Despite western sanctions, it appears that there is little danger of Russia’s economy collapsing.
Perception gap
My distinct impression from two weeks in St Petersburg is that Russia’s society and economy are still nowhere near to being fully mobilised for the war effort. While the partial mobilisation in September and October last year brought the war closer to home, it involved a relatively small percentage of the population – from all of my acquaintances only one friend of a friend was called up. Meanwhile further rounds of mobilisation are to an extent baked in to people’s expectations. Barring huge military setbacks leading to a really extensive mobilisation, it appears that life on Russia’s home front is carrying on fairly normally.
One of the biggest lessons from my trip is the huge gap between representations of Russia in the west and what you see when you arrive there. This gap in perception is likely to increase because of the lack of people currently travelling there from the west and the suspension of professional and academic links.
Important as they are, reliance on comment from anti-Putin activists in exile or those remaining in Russia and still active on social media won’t help as they’re marginalised at home and lose contact with Russian reality while abroad.
The fact is that there is no substitute for seeing things for yourself. I found my recent trip to Russia stressful – but I’m glad I did it.
Western defense chiefs have not been able to agree today on the sending of heavy tanks to Ukraine. A prime sticking point appears to be German unwillingness to release Leopard 2 tanks unless those Leopards that are in the possession of its allies agree to seek German permission before sending them. This may be an indication of growing impatience in western military circles with NATO’s Ukraine policy. The critics rightly perceive that the provision of tanks to Ukraine is not a solution to anything. Rather, it is an indication that NATO has no real solution but is prepared to dump more weapons into Ukraine to make it look as though they have a solution even if they dont really. Tanks to Ukraine – and, for that matter, all the other weapons that the US, in its latest $2.5 billion package (even as the USA hits its debt ceiling!) is proposing to send to Ukraine – will make little to no difference in the battlefield.
Brian Berletic, at New Atlas (Brian Berletic 01.20.2023) explains why, in great detail (as always). The bottom line, however, is this: no matter how many weapons the west is sending to Ukraine at this point they are not going to make up for the loss of Ukraine’s weapons to this point in the war. They started with 1,000 tanks and much else besides, including a working air force, but they have burned through all that (most of it was Soviet era); the west tried to replenish these losses with their stocks of Soviet era weapons and some western air-defense systems, among other things, and those have been burned through; now the west is proposing, among a lot of other stuff that is only barely relevant to Ukraine’s needs, to send some “advanced” western tanks which are, on balance, no more advanced than the equivalent weapons Russia already possesses, but in greater abundance, and for which the Ukrainian army is not yet equipped or trained to handle and which, because the new supplies are coming from a hodgepodge of different sources (bear in mind that effective battlefield weaponry should be part of a coordinated system of weaponry, not a trashcan full of isolated pieces) may be creating more problems than those they are intended to solve.
Battlefields
The battlefield situation appears to be turning in Russia’s favor. Russia is steadily advancing towards the encirclement of Bakhmut, where Ukraine has over-invested its troops and machines and from which it can retreat only with great difficulty – not only physically, but in terms of morale and optics. And while Ukraine is preoccupied with Bakhmut, Russia has launched an offensive in Zaporizhzhia that so far has gained it a cluster of settlements, and put many others within medium or even short-range Russian artillery fire, and putting Russia in striking distance (60 kms) of the major industrial city of Zaporizhzhia itself, the loss of which would constitute a major blow, a fatal blow possibly to Ukraine’s economy and war effort.
This development will presumably further complicate whatever remains of Ukrainian plans to launch an offensive from Zaporizhzhia down to Melitopol and then to cut across to the Azov. The US head of the CIA was in Kiev last week to brief Zelenskiy on Russian plans, suggesting that Russia’s much talked about major offensive is getting very close. US military officer Vishinin, who has written about the return of industrial warfare in Ukraine’s battlefields indicates that what we are seeing with Russia’s advance in Zaporizhzhia may indeed be the start of the next phase of precisely that form of warfare.
There is still no sign of Ukrainian withdrawal from Sversk or from Bakhmut. General Zaluzhnyi has recommended to President Zelenskiy that Ukraine withdraw from Sversk. A spokesman for the Lugansk militia has reported that strategically the land taken by Russia over the past day or so near Bakhmut is very important. He refers to the road leading into Bakhmut from Ivanovka and the west and says that Russian artillery is now very close to this location and is able to shell it and shell any Ukrainian supplies that try to enter Bakhmut along it. This does seem to confirm that Bakhmut is now almost entirely encircled.
There are air-raid alerts throughout Ukraine (perhaps in response to the take-off of Kinjal hypersonic missile-carrying Mig 31 fighter bombers from Belarus on exercises, and there are reports of a major Russian strike on an ammunition dump in Odessa.
Ukraine Missile Offensive on Moscow?
Russian and international media show Russia is positioning Panzhir air defense systems on the roofs of key buildings in Moscow, suggesting they have received some kind of tip-off about an intended Ukrainian missile strike. Ukrainian missiles do have the range for this as was seen a few weeks ago with a Ukrainian strike on a Russian airfield not far from Moscow. Media (specifically, NYT) reports suggest that the US is becoming more willing to countenance Ukrainian missile strikes on Crimea and is probably giving a green light for attacks deeper into Russia proper. Russia clearly wants the world to see these installations and to know that Moscow is defended.
Russian sources have commented on western plans to send more weapons to Ukraine. War industry leader Medvedev,the Russian ambassador to Washington, and Putin’s spokesman, Peshkov, have all talked about this and Peshkov says that if there are deliveries of advanced tanks by the west, there will be consequences, and that such deliveries will only add to Ukraine’s problems. He warns against over-estimating the significance of such deliveries, as they will not change anything that could hinder Russia from achieving its goals. The US has promised a further 50 Bradleys in addition to these already promised; the British are supplying 50 Bulldog armored personnel vehicles and France is upplying LeClerc tanks. Yet the Russians do not appear to be particularly alarmed by any of this. The main drama for the west, meantime, is around the Leopard 2s.
Biden-Scholz Acrimony
There is a huge, concerted western effort to pressure Germany on delivery of Leopard 2s, which is unpopular in Germany and among the German officer class. The former German defense minister resigned after mounting criticism, perhaps because she feared taking the backlash from German generals if she allowed delivery of Leopards, and the new defense minister has been thrown into the argument almost immediately. Yet it is generally agreed among experts that these tanks are not especially suitable for Ukraine. In the past, at every red line that Germany has faced, it has caved (although on this occasion such a cave-in has not yet happened).
The Leopard 2 is a 70 ton tank. The British Challenger is up to 80 ton. The French LeClerk is lighter, at 50 tones, and has an automatic loader like the one that Russian tanks have. The French have been unwilling to provide LeClerks because it does not have many of them: 400 in total, of which 180 are in store. The most it could safely provide without cutting significantly into its total arsenal would be around 20. Production of these tanks has stopped, and it would take time to tool up production again. The only country that bought a large number of these is the UAE and the UAE would be unwilling to give up what it has got. There are many more Leopard 2s around than LeClerks -perhaps 2,300 across various ministries. They come in various forms and some are in very poor condition; the total number that could be supplied to Ukraine is likely to be fairly small, perhaps around 100 (Berletic has discussed the possibility that it might be many more, say around 200 to 300), but what difference is even 300 going to make?
German General Criticizes US/NATO War on Russia
Germany’s General Kuyak (spelling provisional!) is critical of the supply of Leopard 2s to Ukraine, even more so than General Vad, whose interview was reported recently by John Helmer on Dancing with Bears. Kuyak thinks this war is not a straight forward case of Russian aggression against Ukraine, and asserts that this was a very preventable war. He even published proposals for a settlement in January 2022. Perhaps the question will one day be asked, in effect: who wanted this war, and who stood in the way of stopping it? There were certainly outstanding voices in Britain and elsewhere who were determined that there should be a war. Kuyak expresses his regret that the Istanbul negotiations in March 2022 were called off, because the conditions were relatively light for Ukraine. The future of the Donbass was to be resolved in the space of 15 years. Kuyak blames Boris Johnson for sabotaging those negotiations, and he is angry that this sabotage has not been discussed in German media even though it has been discussed in US media like Foreign Affairts and the Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Kuyak is seriously worried about a confrontation between NATO and Russia. Instead of rebuilding its own armed forces,he says that Germany is in effect, disarming itself, as a result of the Ukraine war, even cannibalizomg its armed forces in order to free up weapons for Ukraine, on the pretext that Germany is fighting for its freedom! (Which, of course, is nonsense). The main players here are Russia and the US; the US’ declared goal is to weaken Russia. for other parties the core issue as to why this war is being fought continues. Kuyak talks bitterly of the sabotage of Minsk (by Merkel and others).
On the Leopard 2s he notes that these tanks may work in combined arms combat when the weaknesses of one system are compensated by the strengths of another. But when there is no such functional coordination, and in difficult operational conditions, this enhances the liklihood of the weapon being knocked out or falling into the hands of the enemy. Kuyak reminds his listeners that Russia has investigated the characteristics of western weapons in order to refine the effectiveness of its own weapons.
For Kuyak there remains the fundamental question of means-end effectiveness. Zelenskiy has repeatedly changed the strategic goals of Ukraine in this war. It currently wants to recapture all Russian held territories including Crimea. Yet Germany promises its support regardless, even though the US is committed only to recovering territories occupied by Russia since February 2022.
Are the means of weapons deliveries suitable for the purposes intended by Ukraine? Ukraine’s commander Zaluzhnyi has listed the weapons he says he needs to push back Russia. He has not yet received these; and it is not clear that even if he had them they would be sufficient to make up for those he has recently lost. It seems likely that were he to be given the weapons he has asked for, this would serve not to give Ukraine victory but only prolong the war. Russia could surpass western escalation at any time. In Germany these connections are not being properly discussed. The kind of pressure that is being imposed on Germany by NATO has never happened before in the history of NATO and it demonstrates lack of western respect for Germany.
Kuyak proposes there is an agenda [but whose agenda, precisely – that of the USA?] of destroying any possibility of a German-Russian rapprochement in the future, and that this is ultimately what a lot of this is all about. The new weapons could help Ukraine in the face of the coming Russian offensive but there is no way that Ukraine is going to recover the Russian occupied territories. US Chief of Staff General Milley has said that Ukraine has already achieved what it is capable of achieving militarily; more is not possible. Diplomatic efforts should be started now.
Military Deliveries: Why?
There is a huge amount of incoherence as to what is the purpose of the promised armoured vehicle deliveries, the hundreds of tanks (Madars, Bradleys, Strykers, AMXs, Ceasar Howitzers, etc….) to be sent.
What does the west say is their purpose? Mercouris has recently read two entirely different explanations. One is that Ukraine needs them so as to stall the expected big Russian offensives. They might help, yes, but it is far from certain that they will. The other explanation is that the machines are needed so as to break the stalemate (if indeed “stalemate” is actually the right description, as opposed to “Russian advances”) so that Ukraine can launch its own offensives. In that event, both Kuyak and Mercouris consider that the number of vehicles to be provided are nowhere near sufficient.
So why send them? Do they actually have a military purpose? One suggestion is that the west has now given up any hope of being able to match Russian artillery power and they have simply transferred as many as they can send. Rather than give up, and having exhausted stocks of air defense systems and missiles, they are turning instead to armoured vehicles because that is all they have left that they can send.
There has been talk of the US sending some combined missile-bomb systems – a recommendation from Raytheon – with a 160km range, a delivery that is pending. Publication of what is going to be in the next US military package does not include this hybrid system, since it would only become available in a few months. The warhead of such a system would be fairly small, and it would probably not be the most powerful system that could be sent. ATACMs and Abrams are off the agenda; we are clearing Israel of its remaining stocks of ammunition rounds. We are looking for Soviet era weapons in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East from the 1970s, scraping the bottom of the barrel, bullying the Germans into supplying Leopard 2s so as to complicate further the relations between Germany and Russia.
There is a general atmosphere of panic and hysteria, and no public willingness to admit that things are not going well for Ukraine on the battlefield, with Zelenskiy still not even admitting that Soledar has fallen. The latest Russian offensive in Zaporizhzhia has been unreported in British media. The Pentagon is said to be “surprised” that the fighting has been as dynamic as it is this winter. None of this comes close to an admission of reality, that Bakhmut, even Zaporizhzhia, may soon fall. All considerations of logistics are being thrown out of the window in the impetuous rush to get something to Ukraine.
It looks very muddled, chaotic, hysterial. And there is another factor that is causing alarm. William Burns, CIA Director, has returned from a secret (why?) visit to Kiev even though the visit has been confirmed. Some reports say that his purpose was to reassure Ukraine that some level of support would continue but that, with the Republicans now in control of the House, there may be enough only up until July, but that there is uncertainty about what will happen beyond that.
What happens if these various weapons systems fail to achieve their purpose? The US keeps talking about air defense systems being the priority (though so far they have not held Russia back) but doesnt have any to offer, so comes up with armored vehicles in their place. Mercouris has never known western policy to be as chaotic and misguided as it is. Even the Polish Chief of Staff is critical. Yet any time critical voices are heard, the hardliners still prevail.
Research conducted by New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”
Which is to say that all the years of hysterical shrieking about Russian trolls interfering in US democracy and corrupting the fragile little minds of Americans — a narrative that has been used to drum up support for internet censorship and ever-increasing US government involvement in the regulation of online speech — was false.
And to be clear, this isn’t actually news. It was established years ago that the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency could not possibly have had any meaningful impact on the 2016 election, because the scope of its operations was quite small, its posts were mostly unrelated to the election and many were posted after the election occurred, and its funding was dwarfed by orders of magnitude by domestic campaigns to influence the election outcome.
What’s different this time around, six years after Trump’s inauguration, is that this time the mass media are reporting on these findings.
The Washington Post has an article out with the brazenly misleading headline “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters“. Anyone who reads the article itself will find its author Tim Starks acknowledges that “Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior,” but the insertion of the word “little” means anyone who just reads the headline (the overwhelming majority of people encountering the article) will come away with the impression that Russian trolls still had some influence on 2016 voters.
“Little influence” could mean anything shy of tremendous influence. But the study did not find that Russian trolls had “little influence” over the election; it failed to find any measurable influence at all.
Starks does some spin work of his own in a bid to salvage the reputation of the ever-crumbling Russiagate narrative, eagerly pointing out that the report does not explicitly say Russia definitely had zero influence on the election’s outcome, that it doesn’t examine Russian trolling behavior on Facebook, that it doesn’t address “Russian hack-and-leak operations,” and that it doesn’t say “doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.”
None of these are valid arguments. Claiming Russia definitely had no influence on the election at all would have been beyond the scope of the study, the report’s authors do in fact argue that the effects of Russian trolling on Facebook were likely the same as on Twitter, the (still completely unproven) “Russian hack-and-leak operations” were outside the scope of the study, as is the question of whether foreign influence operations can be a threat in general.
What Starks does not do is make any attempt to address the fact that mainstream news and punditry was dominated for years by claims that Russian internet trolls won the election for Donald Trump. He does not, for example, make any mention of his own 2019 Politico article telling readers that the Russian Twitter troll operation ahead of the 2016 election “was larger, more coordinated and more effective than previously known.”
Starks also does not take the time to inform The Washington Post’s readership about the false reporting this story has received over the years from his fellow mainstream news media employees, like The Washington Post’s David Ignatius and his melodramatic description of the St Petersburg troll farm as “a sophisticated, multilevel Russian effort to use every available tool of our open society to create resentment, mistrust and social disorder” in an article hysterically titled “How Russia used the Internet to perfect its dark arts“. Or The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg in her article “Yes, Russian Trolls Helped Elect Trump“, in which she argues that it looks increasingly as though the Internet Research Agency “changed the direction of American history.” Or NBC’s Ken Dilanian (a known CIA asset), who described Russian trolling on Twitter in the lead-up to the election as “a vast, coordinated campaign that was incredibly successful at pushing out and amplifying its messages,” a claim that was then repeated by The Washington Post. To pick just a few out of basically limitless possible examples.
Starks and his editors could easily have included this sort of information in the article. It would have greatly helped improve clarity and understanding among The Washington Post’s audience if they had. It would have been entirely possible to clearly spell out the fact that all those other reports appear to have been incorrect in light of this new information, or at least to acknowledge the fact that there is a glaring difference between this new report and previous reporting. It would do a lot of good for awareness to grow, especially among Washington Post readers, that there’s been a lot of inaccurate information circulating about Russia and the 2016 election these past several years.
But they didn’t. And nobody else in the mass media has done so either. Even The Intercept’s report on the same story, despite having the far more honest headline “Those Russian Twitter bots didn’t do $#!% in 2016, says new study,” doesn’t name any names or criticize any outlets for their inaccurate reporting on Russian trolls stealing the election for Donald Trump.
Indeed, it’s very rare in the west to see mainstream journalists hold other mainstream journalists accountable for their false reporting, facilitation of propaganda, or journalistic malpractice, unless it’s journalists whose approval they don’t care about like members of the opposite political faction or independant media reporters. This is because western journalists are worthless, obsequious cowards whose entire lives revolve around seeking the approval of their peers.
The most important reporting a journalist can do in the western world today is help expose the lies, propaganda and malpractice of other western journalists and news outlets. But that is also the last thing a western journalist is ever likely to do, because western journalists seek praise and approval not from the public, but from other western journalists.
You can see this in the way they post on Twitter, with their little in-jokes and insider references, how they’re always cliquing up and beckoning and signaling to each other. Twitter is a great window through which to observe western journalists, because they really lay it all out there. Watch their bootlicking facilitation of status quo power, their ingratiating tail-wagging with each other, the way they gang up on dissenters like zealots burning a heretic. To see what I’m talking about you have to pay attention not to their viral tweets that go off but to all the rest that receive little attention, because the ones that take off are the ones the public are interested in. If you watch them carefully it becomes clear that for most of them the intended audience of the majority of their posts is not the rank-and-file public, but their fellow members of the media class.
Look at this Twitter conversation between Australian journalists right after the Ecuadorian embassy cut off Julian Assange’s internet access in 2018 for a good illustration of this. Former ABC reporter Andrew Fowler (now a vocal supporter of Assange) questions ABC’s Michael Rowland for applauding Ecuador’s move, and ABC’s Lisa Millar rushes in to help Rowland argue that Assange is not a journalist and doesn’t deserve the solidarity of journalists, and that Fowler is putting himself on the outside of the groupthink consensus by claiming otherwise. Millar and Rowland are part of the clique, Fowler is being ostracised from it, and Assange is the heretic whose lynching they’re braying for:
Western journalists have a freakish herd-like mindset that makes the derision and rejection of their class the most nightmarish scenario possible and the approval of their class the most powerful opiate imaginable. They’re terrified of other journalists turning against them, of being rejected by the people whose approval they crave like a drug, of being kicked out of the group chat. And that’s exactly what would happen if they began leveling valid criticisms at mass media propaganda in public. And that’s exactly why that doesn’t happen.
The western media class is a cloistered, incestuous circle jerk that only cares about impressing other members of the cloistered, incestuous circle jerk. It doesn’t care about creating an informed populace or holding the powerful to account, it cares about approval, inclusion and acclaim from its own ranks, regardless of what propagandistic reporting is required to obtain it. The Pulitzers are mostly just a bunch of empire propagandists giving each other trophies for being good at empire propaganda.
A journalist with real integrity would spurn the approval of the media class. It would nauseate and repel them, because it would mean you’ve been aligning yourself with the most powerful empire in history and the propaganda machine which greases its wheels. They would actively make an enemy of the mainstream western press.
Journalists without integrity — which is to say the overwhelming majority of journalists — do the opposite.
None of this will be news to any of my regular readers, who will likely understand that the role of the mass media is not to inform but to manufacture consent for the agendas and interests of our rulers. But we shouldn’t get used to it, or lose sight of how odious it is.
It’s important to be clear about how gross these people are. You can never be sufficiently disdainful of these freaks.
Throughout the year, we have written about the impact of the war on Russia’s economy and society. But the main victims of this war are Ukraine and its citizens. Here is a short list of the losses and destruction inflicted on the country by the Russian military. In addition to those killed and injured — including civilians — Ukraine faces a budget deficit of at least $50 billion, a 70% fall in industrial output and a fivefold increase in poverty.
Russia’s economy: -6% GDP
The Russian economy in 2022 was expected to grow about 3%, according to government and Central Bank predictions from early February. However, in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a broad coalition of nations, both Western and Eastern, imposed several rounds of sanctions against Moscow. As a result, Russia’s economy contracted 2.8% this year. That means the war and sanctions caused Russia’s economy to be about 6% smaller than it would otherwise have been at the end of 2022.
At 2021 prices, 6% of Russia’s GDP is equivalent to 9 trillion rubles ($130 billion). That figure would cover Russia’s healthcare budget for 6 years, or pay for education for 7 years. However, the bigger issue is the long-term consequences.
External restrictions will prevent Russia’s economy from developing: Western markets are closed and in Asia there is high competition and overstretched infrastructure. It will take some time to fully enter these markets. Instead of proactive investment in innovation and technology, the authorities are choosing to spend on the military. Investment in people is increasingly linked to political views: funding for nurturing “patriotic” feelings is up sixfold, academic mobility is effectively at an end and access to cutting-edge equipment is blocked. In the modern world, economic development is shaped not by resources, but by human capital. Ignoring this fossilizes economic development.
The middle class is hardest hit
Russia’s middle class is the main economic victim of the Kremlin’s war. Real disposable incomes for Russians will fall 2.2% in 2022, the Ministry of Economic Development predicts. Incomes fell 1.2% year-on-year in Q1, 0.8% in Q2 and 3.4% in Q3 (figures for Q4 are not yet available). At the same time, middle class incomes (before we take into account the third quarter) are already down 5% year-on-year, according to calculations by an analyst at one of Russia’s biggest investment banks using data from the State Statistics Service.
At the same time, there was steady growth in the incomes of the poorest groups in society, probably due to a wide range of social benefits.
This is not the first time Russia’s middle class has been hit hardest by an economic crisis. First, it was hobbled by the 2008-09 crisis, then it suffered a protracted squeeze on incomes after 2014. The coronavirus pandemic only worsened the situation, with part of the middle class dropping into poorer income brackets. There’s no quick fix for Russia’s middle class, as the National Agency for Financial Research admitted. To achieve an uplift, the state would need to explore technological development, increase labor productivity, boost real incomes and support families with children. The government pledged to do these things in the 2010s, but those promises now appear to be long forgotten.
500,000 have left the country
The war in Ukraine has sparked two waves of emigration. In spring, amid rumors of imminent border closures, hundreds of thousands of people rushed to leave the country. The authorities kept the borders open, and many returned to the country. However, seven months later, after the announcement of a “partial” mobilization, there was another exodus. In addition to the panic buying of airline tickets, which pushed prices sky-high, there were also enormous lines at Russia’s land borders.It’s almost impossible to get an accurate figure for how many people left the country because of the war. But we estimate that, since February, at least 500,000 Russians have fled the country and not returned.
25,000 fewer births
Russia’s reproduction rate is already below “break even” and further decline seems inevitable. The direct impact of mobilization alone could amount to 25,000 ‘missing’ births in 2023, according to calculations by leading Russian demographer Mikhail Denisenko.Several factors lead to a declining birth rate including men of reproductive age being “taken away” from family life, according to Salavat Abylkalikov, a senior lecturer at the Institute of Demographics at the Higher School of Economics. There are also losses due to people leaving the country. However, the most important factor is people deciding to postpone having children until things are better — meaning many births will never take place.
There are even suggestions that the total fertility rate will drop to the level of the late 1990s.Demographer Igor Yefremov estimates an imminent decline in the total fertility rate to 1.3, and then to 1.2 per woman. That compares with 1.5 last year. That will bring the number of births next year down to 1.2 million (last year there were 1.4 million).
25 million people without Instagram
The past year has seen Russia blocking websites on an unprecedented scale. Just three weeks after the start of the war, communications watchdog Roskomnadzor — which has evolved into a sort of censorship agency — started restricting access to photo sharing social media site Instagram (at that time the second most popular social network in Russia). Within a week, the courts listed the platform’s owners, Meta, as an “extremist organization.
At first it seemed that this cyber-blockade would do little to undermine Instagram’s position. After all, a similar ban on Telegram a few years earlier did little to affect the messenger’s audience. This time, though, the blockade was far more successful. According to Mediascope, 32 million people a day were using Instagram at the end of February. By early April, that had halved, and by early December the numbers dropped to just 7 million. An average user now spends 15 minutes a day on the site, compared with a pre-war 41 minutes. The main reason for the dramatic decline is the more effective blocking mechanisms available to the authorities that have followed a law “on sovereign Russian internet”. That law forced providers to install special devices to control traffic, making blocking far more effective. They also enable the state to block VPN services. Despite this, between March and July, 2022, Russia was second in the world for VPN downloads.
We don’t know what will happen to Russia’s internet next year, but indications are not encouraging. So far, Russia’s authorities have shied away from the most radical step — a block on YouTube. Banning YouTube would “trigger another wave of interest in mechanisms to get round the block” and “greatly increase the load on Russian services that are barely ready to cope,” said parliamentary deputy Anton Gorelkin who has been at the forefront of legislative restrictions on the internet. Gorelkin added that YouTube, like any bad habit, should be suppressed gradually.
Isolated by visas and prices
Contrary to widespread fears, the Russian authorities did not close the country’s borders. However, 2022 still saw journeys outside of Russia — especially to the West — become more difficult and more expensive. Land borders to the European Union are almost completely closed to Russians with tourist visas, getting a visa is far more expensive and time-consuming and flights to Europe are two or three times more expensive.
A source close to the travel industry told The Bell that the average cost of tickets from Russia to Europe has increased from its pre-war average of €400 ($423) to between €1000 and €1500. Flight times have increased from an average 3-4 hours to 8-24 hours. The key factor is the need to fly via third-nation hubs such as Istanbul, Yerevan or Astana (because most of Europe’s airspace is closed to flights from Russia). By the end of 2022, the total number of passengers carried by Russian airlines will be about 95 million. That’s down almost 15% compared with the previous year, or 26% compared with 2019 (before the pandemic), according to a source close to the aviation industry.
Tell us, Washington, how do you really feel about American public opinion?
For years now, Beltway establishmentarians have been trying desperately to countermand the idea that they are in fact, elites: out of touch, impervious to what regular Americans want and need, and slaves to conventional foreign policy doctrine and dogma.
But it is wartime again, and that’s when the masks slip. It began with the steady stream of Eliot Cohen and Anne Applebaum columns from the start of the Russian invasion, all demanding that Americans see the war in Ukraine as our fight, a struggle for democracy, the liberal world order. If Americans do not have the stomach for it, there is something wrong with us, a moral failing.
These ham-fisted approaches befit the neoconservatives who wield them, as they did the same in the Global War on Terror, and to a great extent, worked to keep the Iraq War going for almost a decade and the war in Afghanistan shambling on for a full 20 years.
In addition to the destruction of two countries, trillions of dollars, a massive refugee crisis, a new generation of U.S. veterans dependent on lifetime assistance, and countless dead and wounded, these “elites” are in great part responsible for the mistrust of Washington that has eaten away at the culture and politics here to the core.
Poll after poll show a plunging lack of faith in American institutions, including the once-vaunted military. That’s what going to war based on lies, distortions, and rhetorical bullying will do to an already strained and tribalized society. Add a financial collapse (2008) that Washington addressed with an unprecedented bank bailout, while homeowners and workers struggled to survive, and you have the basis for major populist movements — on the left, and the right.
The rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were buoyed in part by a continuing skepticism of the ongoing wars and of the elites at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, which had become as self-serving and disconnected from American interests as they were.
You would have thought they had learned their lesson.
But the war in Ukraine has given them new purpose and in that vein, to both patronize and ignore the wants and needs of the American public. A new commentary by Gian Gentile and Raphael S. Cohen, deputy director of the Rand Corporation’s Army Research Division, and Air Force Strategy and Doctrine Program, respectively, says it all. Clearly written for Beltway practitioners and politicians, the takeaway from “The Myth of America’s Ukraine Fatigue” is clear: don’t mind the polls, or even American public opinion. Ukraine’s (and in effect, Washington’s) long war will go on no matter what the hoi polloi is thinking, or feeling.
“In war, from a purely political perspective, it’s usually safer for politicians to stay the course.
“Perhaps this is why democracies’ track records of playing the long game in armed conflicts is actually pretty good. From the ancient Athenians during the Peloponnesian War on through to the present day, democracies have not usually been the fickle, shrinking violets their detractors make them out to be. In the United States, the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were all eventually deeply unpopular. Yet the United States fought for three years in Korea, almost nine years in Iraq (before going back in after the initial withdrawal), and almost 20 years in both Vietnam and Afghanistan. All these campaigns involved significantly more investment of American blood and treasure than the U.S. commitment to Ukraine has demanded thus far.”
The authors are referring to a number of recent polls that would appear to show that Americans’ unconditional support for Ukraine against the Russian invasion has its limits and in some cases, may be flagging. To start, Cohen and Gentile say that isn’t true, that Americans support Ukrainian sovereignty and the fight for it. Absolutely. What the authors don’t say is that the polls indicate that Americans are also concerned about a protracted war that could lead to more death and a direct U.S. confrontation with the Russians. That they are less enthusiastic about supporting Ukraine “as long as it takes,” and have shown a growing interest in negotiations to end the war sooner than later, even if that ultimately means concessions for both sides.
Instead of recognizing the nuance and giving credit to Americans for understanding the implications of another long war (whether they are directly involved on the ground or not), the authors blame the media for hyping up what they believe is the negative messaging from the surveys. Furthermore, they suggest that — citing the cases of Vietnam and our recent wars — conflicts will go on (and rightly so!) no matter where public opinion is at.
“If past is precedent, and present trends continue, it could be years before any of the declines in the American public’s support actually result in a change of policy,” the authors contend. Cohen and Gentile (much like their counterparts in the Iraq and Afghanistan War eras, did) diminish those “amplifying the Ukraine fatigue narrative,” claiming they fit into neat little categories: 1) “America First” Republicans who’d rather focus on domestic issues 2) “knee-jerk” anti-war activists on the left, and 3) those who “may genuinely sympathize with Russian talking points” that Americans will tire of the war.
Meanwhile, “some Americans may really believe that they are paying more of a price for the conflict than they in fact are, but this is primarily based on perceptions—not facts.”
Right. That is exactly what Fred Kagan, the AEI neoconservative who helped to craft the Iraq War Surge plan said in this lengthy National Review piece in 2008, entitled “Why Iraq matters: Talking back to anti-war party talking points,” in which he deployed this fatuous bromide:
“Americans have a right to be weary of this conflict and to desire to bring it to an end. But before we choose the easier and more comfortable wrong over the harder and more distasteful right, we should examine more closely the two core assumptions that underlie the current antiwar arguments: that we must lose this war because we cannot win it at any acceptable cost, and that it will be better to lose than to continue trying to win.”
Which makes this all very ironic, since (Col.) Gian Gentile was one of the few brave souls in the active duty military who were openly speaking out against Fred Kagan’s “Surge” and the counterinsurgency craze that was rocking the Blob during that period. He was an arch critic of Washington’s hyper-message management and selective history machinations. It is head scratching that he would oversimplify the effects of public opinion on recent wars — and suggest its relative unimportance — while offering the thinnest of arguments for in essence, “staying the course.”
“The leaders of the free world need to remind their publics what is at stake in Ukraine—not just for European and global security, but for democracy at large,” Gentile exclaims in his recent piece with Cohen.
This, from an historian who in his 2013 book, “America’s Deadly Embrace of Counter-Insurgency,” not only took on what he called the “myths” of Iraq and Afghanistan, but the shibboleths of the U.S. counterinsurgency in Vietnam and the British military’s “success” in Malaya (1948-60) as well.
Gentile’s “Ukraine fatigue myth” article is elite thinking, which reads as a pep talk for Beltway insiders in the wake of recent polling. For the rest of us, it is a cogent reminder that the same people who did not want regular Americans to actually think about foreign policy during the Iraq War, are still out there, whether they want to call themselves “elites” or not.
