The war in Ukraine has entered a new stage; this much we know. In the weeks leading up to the Ukrainian armed forces’ long-anticipated counter-offensive, a series of attacks in Moscow and in the Belgorod Region, near the border with Ukraine, marked the most significant incursions into Russia since the full-scale war began. In the Belgorod Region, armed units overran villages and took hostages. In Moscow, two drones were shot down near the Kremlin on May 3rd. Four weeks later, eight drones crashed into residential buildings on the outskirts of the city. Since then, drones have shown up in two other Russian regions, Kursk and Voronezh. Much media coverage in the West has suggested that these attacks, in the heart of Russia, would undermine support for the war. This is wrong.
Many people who opine professionally, or at least frequently, on the Russian-Ukrainian war—policymakers and Russian dissidents among them—like to frame the war as the undertaking of a lone madman tyrant. It is, they say, “Putin’s war,” for which ordinary Russians, at least those of them who are not actively killing Ukrainians, bear no responsibility. It is true that, were Russia ruled by someone other than Putin, there would most likely be no war. It is also true that Russia is a totalitarian society in which people have little to no political agency and in which the mildest protest can land one in prison for a decade. It is true that totalitarianism, by its nature, robs people of the ability to form opinions. And it is also true that, under these conditions, most ordinary Russians support the war. This is Russia’s war. That happens to be the title of a new book by Jade McGlynn, a research fellow in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, in London. Using nine years’ worth of data, including dozens of ongoing in-depth conversations with Russian respondents, McGlynn shows that a majority of Russians are in some way invested in the war or identify with it.
McGlynn divides Russian attitudes toward the war into five categories: active support, passive ritual support, loyal neutrality, apathy, and active opposition. The extremes comprise negligibly few people. The Kremlin brutally cracks down on antiwar protests, and, McGlynn argues, it also discourages active support for the war. It’s not hard to see why: zealous support easily morphs into criticism of the regime for not doing enough, not acting decisively enough to defeat Ukraine. Putin’s regime relies for support—and canon fodder—on the broad majority of Russians: those who enthusiastically shout the slogans fed to them but claim no political agency (“passive ritual supporters”), those who hold to the position “my country, right or wrong” (loyal neutrals), and those who will acquiesce to anything so long as they feel like they will be left alone. I asked McGlynn if she thought these positions may be altered by the war’s crossing over into Russian territory. If anything, she said, it may nudge some people from the apathetic cohort into the loyal-neutral one. Having the war come closer to home scares people. Fear rarely serves as a catalyst for critical thinking. More often, it leads to what the political scientist Jeremy Morris, who also studies Russian attitudes toward the war, calls “defensive consolidation.”
It is only human, when you are being attacked, to blame the attacker rather than yourself, your country, or your leader. Russian propaganda helps this idea along by telling Russians that Ukrainians instigated the war. On the morning of the drone attacks in Moscow, Putin delivered an impromptu speech during an unrelated event in the city, claiming that Ukraine, acting as a puppet of NATO, started a war in the Donbas back in 2014, forcing Russia finally to intervene eight years later; that Russia has been hitting only strategically important military targets; and that Ukraine, now, was trying to escalate by attacking inside Russia in hope of provoking a reaction. None of this was true. But it was consistent with what Russian television had been saying for more than a year. And the drones were tangible evidence of Ukraine waging an attack inside Russia, as though making Putin’s claims retroactively true. Historical narratives often work like this.
But, wait, you might say, doesn’t Putin claim that Ukraine doesn’t exist? He does—and, in commenting on the drone attacks and the counter-offensive (which he calls “the offensive”), he referred to Ukraine as “the regime in Kyiv.” But contradictions are also a mainstay of totalitarian propaganda. The great Russian sociologist Yuri Levada theorized that antinomies—pairs of mutually exclusive beliefs—were key to understanding the Soviet totalitarian mentality. An example of a Soviet antinomy was, “The state is always screwing us over” and “I’m proud to live in the greatest country on Earth.” The most recent developments in the Russian-Ukrainian war call forth similar antinomies. In Shebekino, a Russian village near the border with Ukraine where civilians died as a result of an apparent Ukrainian attack that began on June 1st, people felt abandoned by the state, McGlynn said, “but they are used to that.” They are also, naturally, angry that civilians were killed. That can only strengthen their support for the war effort. But McGlynn told me that her longtime respondents have stopped engaging in what she called lengthy “geopolitical discussions,” in which they often tried to convince her that Ukraine doesn’t exist. Perhaps, she said, it’s harder to pursue this line of argument “when you could be killed by Ukrainians who very much think they are Ukrainians.” The function of contradictory, destabilizing propaganda is to discourage thinking. It works in concert with fear to render totalitarian subjects passive.
Russian state media reported on the attacks inside Russia as both deplorable and insignificant. On one evening talk show, for example, the propagandists Roman Babayan and Margarita Simonyan began by talking about how “the enemy” was hoping that incursions into Russian territory would destabilize Russian society and undermine support for the war. “It’s being done so that you will show scary footage,” Simonyan said. “So that we all become horrified, to frighten us, make us stop supporting the goals and reasons for our special operation, to make us get scared and start stomping our feet, screaming, ‘Let’s put everything the way it was so there won’t be any more burning buildings in the Belgorod Region.’ ” Russian media had published photographs that showed giant plumes of black smoke spilling from residential buildings in Shebekino. But, a minute later, Babayan shifted to dismissing the danger. There were only seventy fighters involved in the attack on Shebekino, he asserted. “This is not a serious threat.”
Propagandists referred to the fighters as “the enemy” and “they,” and avoided using “Ukraine” and “Ukrainians” (who don’t exist). In reality, though, the men who took responsibility for attacks on the Belgorod Region identify as the Russian Volunteer Corps and say that they are Russian citizens fighting on the side of Ukraine. Only a minority of Russian-media consumers—those who track news of the war closely by following Telegram channels—would have learned that the Ukrainians who struck inside Russia were actually Russians. They might also have learned that members of the Russian Volunteer Corps hold far-right nationalist views and are fighting, in their minds, » …
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