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Russian Roulette
War, Inflation, and Putin's Paranoia: has Russian Public Opinion Begun to Shift?
00:41:10
Max and Maria welcome back Dr. Sam Greene, professor of Russian Politics at King's College London, to discuss the state of Russian public opinion today, and whether domestic conditions have begun change given the state of the economy, war, and reports of increasing paranoia in the Kremlin.
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- [00:07]
A
Welcome back. I'm Max Bergman, Director of the Stewart center and Europe Russia Eurasia Program at csis.
- [00:12]
B
And I'm Maria Snigavaya, Senior Fellow for Russia and Eurasia.
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A
And you're listening to Russian Roulette, a podcast discussing all things Russia and Eurasia from the center for Strategic and International Studies. Hello everyone and welcome back. I'm Max Bergman, joined as always by my co host, Maria Snagovaya. And today we're thrilled to welcome back Dr. Sam Green to the show. Sam is a professor of Russian politics at King's College London. He's a prolific author and writer and today he's a perfect person to help us unpack what is going on inside of Russia. Sam, welcome back to the show.
- [00:55]
C
Thank you.
- [00:56]
A
We're recording on May 8, 2026. Increasingly, there are reports coming out of Russia that perhaps all is not well inside the country, that there's increasing, I think, anxiety in the Kremlin. There was a recent Financial Times piece which we can put in the show, notes describing Putin's creeping paranoia, his ongoing fear of potential assassination. We know that there's widespread Internet outages in Moscow and St. Petersburg, supposedly tied to security concerns. There's also what looks like an FSB crackdown on the Internet to really repress telegram and other means of Russians getting information from the outside world. Crackdown on VPNs. Maybe you could give us sort of your quick take to begin with. What is going on? Is this just sort of, you know, kind of an extension of a trend that we've seen or, or do you think this is, represents a kind of structural change in how the Kremlin is approaching its, its society and then we can get into all the reasons why that is the case.
- [01:55]
C
Sure. I think we should all be incredibly surprised to learn that there are problems in Russia. Right. And that all is not well. And frankly, it's, you know, flabbergasting that Putin is paranoid. I don'. Mean to be flippant. I mean, the reality, of course, is that it's a challenging season for Russia. The economy is not doing terribly well. We've got dual elections coming up in a few months time. That is always a stressful moment for the system. There are divisions and disagreements within the elite in the system that is not monolithic. But on another level, none of this is new. Right. Economic malaise and disaffection has been a long running problem in Russia. And we have a government that hasn't really been able to generate much in the way of economic growth. Probably now for about 12, 13 years. A little bit of war, Keynesianism in the middle, but not really enough to boost most people's income. So that's not surprising. Russians don't like inflation more than anybody else does. And again, the idea that you have an elite that is while all committed to authoritarianism and willing to comply with the system of power that they operate in, doesn't like one another very much is also not terribly new. And the fact that Putin likes to sit at the far end of very long tables and hide in bunkers is also not terribly new, I think. So when I look at this, yes, I see the issues, but they feel to me like issues we've been seeing in some way for a very long time and that the Kremlin has been able to deal with more or less effectively up until now. So if the question is, do we see something that makes me feel like this whole thing is going to come crashing down near term, probably not.
- [03:31]
A
Maybe we can break this down in sort of various buckets. So maybe to start with the war, because it does strike me that maybe this time a year ago you had Trump was in office, I think probably real hope on the battlefield, if you're Russia, that U.S. weapons to Ukraine, that flow is going to be turned off or turned down. And Trump would put pressure on the Ukrainians that the Russians could make real gains. Over the winter, they pummeled the hell out of Ukraine's energy infrastructure, but they haven't really made any gains. And in fact, the drone war, which looked like it was advantageous to Russia in the fall, now I think has see sawed back in Ukraine's direction. The Europeans just provided 90 billion to Ukraine. You know, the Orban blockage is gone, meaning that there's now going to be an endless flow of European money to Ukraine. How would you put sort of war morale in the stew here? And also maybe just, you know, there's been more than a million casualties. What I'm hearing is that a lot of Russians, everyone have people in their family or know people who know people that have lost people in this war. So at some point, does the casualty rate begin to kind of really grind down the support for the regime? So what is your view of how the war really plays a role here?
- [04:50]
C
It's a great question and one to which I don't. We don't think we have perfect answers. But if we break it down and start with the general fatigue issue and this sense of morale, I think to a certain extent there's a problem of Putin's own creation here. He allowed Russians and really encouraged Russians to believe that there was a light at the end of the tunnel of this war in the form of Trump forcing the Ukrainians and the Europeans essentially to capitulate and to agree to terms that would be favourable to Russia and allow Russia to declare victory. That has evaporated for a number of reasons. One, because it turns out that Trump is a difficult person to do a deal with. But also Europeans have been more consistent in their support for Ukraine than maybe than the Russians or even the Americans had expected. The Ukrainians have continued to be very good at innovating and finding ways to stay in the field. You bring those things together alongside the fact that now Trump's attention very much is elsewhere. And the idea that there might be a near term negotiated solution in Ukraine has begun to fade. I think to a certain extent, that expectation had begun to be priced into Russian public opinion. And thus we saw a fairly durable shift from the beginning of the Trump administration onwards in favor of a negotiated solution. I think people began to believe that that was likely to be in the offing. And I think there is some disappointment now as a result of the fact that it's not there. Coupled again, Max, with the things that you're pointing to. Right, the war is now costing more lives than it had cost before for Russians on the front line. If we take these numbers seriously, that there's 35 to maybe 40,000 casualties a month, that's above the replacement rate at as best we can understand it. And, yeah, people begin to notice these casualties. That gets into the second part, which I think is the harder one, which is how are people assimilating all of these casualties, right, the dead and wounded? And I think we don't really understand what's going on there. I think you're right that surveys have consistently shown really since the beginning of the war, that people actually have a lot of exposure to this war. People, as you said, know people who know people who've gone and fought. And that means they know people who know people who have been injured or killed. Broadly speaking, ordinary Russians have somehow managed to keep that at bay with this idea that nobody is being forced to fight this war. This war from the Russian side is not a conscript war. They didn't go for full scale mobilization or even the partial mobilization that they tried to do in the autumn of 2022, and instead have bought people into this war. And so people take that risk, they get paid for it. And thus maybe it's something that ordinary Russians don't need to take too seriously. On the other hand, I think the Kremlin has also tried very hard, as best we can tell, to keep the walking wounded invisible. Part of that's because the people who have spent the most time in high risk combat operations seem to be from the most marginalized and underprivileged communities in Russia. Which means when they come back from the front line, they're not coming back to places where most Russians would see them, but also because they seem to be keeping people closer to the front line, whether that means putting people back into the fight as soon as they can or just keeping. Keeping them in field hospitals. But they're not accumulating on the streets of Moscow and St. Petersburg and other major cities the way that, for example, they did after the first war in Chechnya. And so they become maybe a little bit less of an eyesore, less of an emotional drain on people.
- [08:11]
B
Thank you so much, Sam. And as one of the most astute watchers of the Russian public opinion, I wanted to ask you about what role do you assign to it? Most recently, the big news was that even the Kremlin official, Polstov Tion, reported some decline in Putin's approval, quite significant 12 percentage points. Not something that we have not seen before. And with the approval now reportedly at 65, 66%, it's not completely unusual, even perhaps much lower than what we witnessed for Putin since the start of the war. But I'm curious as to what. Of course, we can engage in the fascinating debate about how much we can trust the Russian polls. But the real question is, based on your book with Graham Robertson, Putin and the People, do you think it matters at all? It seems that Kremlin, at least in the last years, sort of not really concerned about what Russians are thinking or to what extent. Do you think that it is a factor that shapes the Kremlin's policies, especially the foreign policy. Do you think it can have some decisive effect on the war in Ukraine?
- [09:16]
C
I think the Kremlin continues to think that public opinion matters. And so to the extent that the Kremlin thinks that, I think it's probably, you know, behooves us to think that it does, I think, shape decision making. We can really go back to the start of the war to see that. That this was a war that was supposed to last only a few days. Right. And when it began to last a bit longer, we saw they were very careful about what they put on television. It took a few weeks before they felt comfortable really having full scale coverage of the war on Russian television. I think that the Kremlin was not convinced that Russian public opinion would accommodate burning Ukrainian cities. Right. Or would accommodate large scale Russian casualties. And I think that, yes, the Kremlin has become a little bit more relaxed about some of this, as frankly, Russian public opinion has given them a tremendous amount of leeway. Russian public opinion has been very inert throughout this war. If you look at the numbers when it comes to levels of support for the war, for example, we've seen minor fluctuation, most of it within the margin of error of these sorts of surveys. But it hasn't responded to increasing Russian casualties. It hasn't responded to mutiny by Prigozhin. It hasn't responded to the occupation of Russian terrorists territory in Kursk and Belgorodoskaya Oblast by Ukrainian troops. It hasn't responded to Ukrainian drones landing in oil refineries and in major Russian cities. And so, on the one hand, you could conclude from that that actually maybe the Kremlin doesn't need to worry about public opinion. On the other hand, I think you look at that, or I look at that, and I think to maintain that degree of equanimity takes a lot of work, that you've got to be actively trying to control your own emotions and the emotions and thoughts that you communicate to others. And the reason that you're doing right is probably less because you're concerned about getting hit on the head by the Kremlin. Some people do get hit on the head by the police, obviously, and get arrested, but that's not the experience for most people. I think that what you are afraid of is being ostracized or criticized by your friends, your family members, your colleagues, the people you rely on to get through everyday life, who every television and ironing board are telling you has this high level of support for the war. So the danger for the Kremlin is that that begins to soften, that people be to look around and say, actually, maybe there isn't as much consensus as I thought there was. And that then gives me permission to maybe lower my guard a bit. And the problem that the Kremlin has is that for all of the repression that we've seen, it still doesn't have a great way of reaching into every head and every kitchen table to bring the conversation back to the place where it wants it to. Right? And so it does, I think, worry about these things. And it has reason to worry. As you said, support for Putin is beginning to soften, at least in some of these polls. If you look at the Levada polls, we also see that the sense of whether the country is heading in the right or the wrong direction has also really come back to well below where it was before the full scale invasion of Ukraine. And so if you take that number, it looks like the rally around the flag might actually be over. And that is something again, is it something that the Kremlin can't deal with? No, I don't think so. But is it something they have to take seriously, particularly in the run up to doomo elections later this year? Probably, right? That will hit united Russia. It will hit people's willingness to take part in the rituals of politics.
- [12:32]
B
Sam, thank you for that. As you were speaking, I realized that the rail around the flag effect lasted for again, if we're true in our diagnosis, that this is evaporating, it's lasted for about four years, just as long as it lasted after 2014. You remember the Teflon approval since 2014, 2018 points, approval that stood flat after he annexed Crimea. Seems to be that Russians in general sort of we willing to last Putin to experience enthusiasm about Putin's wars for about four years on average. But I'm wondering if this is just a natural. You know, everything erodes and so does Putin's approval eventually, even if perhaps it's the last thing that will erode. But also there's other factors that are accumulating, right? There's specifically, for the first time since the start of the war, we finally see the signs of economic stagnation and decline. So there's no longer this military Keynesianism effect, as you mentioned. It's gone, most likely. We also see obviously Ukrainians striking very successfully into Russia more and more literally. Reporting at this point is almost daily. You mentioned war fatigue. So which one is it, in your opinion? Is it economy, stupid, or is it just that there's end to anything, including Putin's wars? So how do you see that?
- [13:47]
C
I think it's just life. The economy is a big part of it, I think. And look, we're all operating at a distance here, right? I don't think any of us can go to Russia right now and see what it's like on the ground. There are a few people who do and lucky enough to have some colleagues still on the ground. And when I talk to people, I am hearing increasingly about what feels like a real shift in the mood. Seeing this in some of the polling numbers, seeing this in some of the focus groups as well. Increasingly, people feel like they're sort of at the End of their tether. Mostly that has to do with economics. Salaries are either stagnating or falling, in some cases, actually beginning to hear about salary arrears. And so people are having to make do with less at the same time that prices are continuing to rise. This money that's coming in through oil prices as a result, in part of a large measure of the war with Iran, has not trickled down to ordinary Russians, or not likely to trickle down to ordinary Russians the way that the government is managing the windfall profits. And so there is this sense that maybe the government's not quite looking out for us. And then, of course, it goes and does other things. It starts to clamp down on the Internet, as we talked about, right, Making it more difficult for people to communicate, which maybe doesn't have a material effect, but just makes life more inconvenient and to a certain extent adds insult to injury. And then you have this sense, well, wait a minute. This war that we were told a year ago is about to end is about to end on our terms, doesn't really show any sign of that. And Trump, this guy that we thought was going to come to our rescue, isn't quite our white knight. So I think these things probably accumulate to create a sense of malaise. Whether that leads to a durable end of the rally around the flag, I think we'll have to wait and see usually what that requires. I mean, rallies around the flag happen in lots of places. They tend to dissipate once kind of normal politics returns, once it becomes possible to sort of put the emotion aside and talk about the materiality of life again, and to have a bit of opposition again. Of course, opposition is really never part of the conversation in Russia. And so these could last longer than they might say in the US after 9, 11, or in Britain after the Falklands. But it is nonetheless likely that these things eventually dissipate as life moves on. And again, it's not entirely surprising that we would see that as a result.
- [16:04]
A
Sam, what do you make of the social media crackdown? There was, I'm sure you saw the news about the public video message from the Russian influencer, Victoria Banya. It went viral. She criticized the Russian bureaucracy for the crises in the country. You know, there's been efforts to push Russia's or the FSB's own messaging app, Macs. And in all the crackdowns about VPNs and really trying to stifle the Internet economy in social media conversations, that strikes me as a real structural shift and a real sign of paranoia and also clearly creating a lot of backlash. Suddenly the war is really impacting people, or whatever is prompting this action is really impacting people. How do you interpret this and what do you think it signifies? And how do you think this is going to sort of evolve?
- [16:59]
C
I'm a little bit cynical about all of this, to be honest. Maybe too much. People like Victoria Borgna, they serve a purpose. So she's this influential blogger, not usually getting anywhere near politics. Right. All kinds of things that, frankly, I was aware she existed, but kind of only marginally. My daughter's probably more aware than I was, but she is part of a landscape that has been permeated by the presidential administration for a long time, because the presidential administration has a job to do in terms of winning over hearts and minds for the Kremlin. Back, Maria, to your question about does public opinion matter? Well, we got elections coming up, and even in between elections, the Kremlin has genuinely and generally believed that it's easier to operate on the base of something approaching genuine compliance rather than compliance that you have to coerce out of people. It's cheaper, it's safer, at least while things are working. And you've got a large part of this political apparatus whose job it is to go out there and win hearts and minds and win elections. And that means building up these coteries of bloggers who can help manage public opinion on the part of the Kremlin. And I think Bonya is part of that ecosystem, which doesn't mean that she always takes her marching orders from the Kremlin, or even what she's doing is because the Kremlin wants her to. But, you know, she represents a segment that is not inherently opposed to the Kremlin. And I think is communicating up the line, right? The sense that, look, you guys need to pay attention to popular politics here. You need to pay attention to what people think. Not just because that would be a good thing to do, right. But because that's the job of a lot of people in this system. And they need to make the argument for the job that they do. I mean, we've had. Look, Zugalov, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, right, got up and said it would be probably a good idea if the government prevented a rerun of 1917. You would think that of all the people in the Russian political system, the head of the Communist Party might enjoy a rerun of 1917. But what they're making a pitch for is the relevance of the kind of retail politics that they do and the kind of political engagement that they do. At the same time, you've got this one group of people whose job it is to win elections. You have another group of people whose job it is to make elections not matter. And that's the security apparatus who also have to make a pitch, right, that there's problems that need to be solved and the best way to solve them is through repression and coercion. And you have new agencies, relatively new. Ruscom, Nadzor, the information sensor has been around for a while, but they're gaining in prerogative all the time, gaining in power and budget all the time. And so they point to something new and say, we need to really deal with Telegram now or with WhatsApp now or move everybody over, as you said to Max Messenger. I'm assuming that was named after you, Max. But that creates a conflict, right? And this is not a new conflict. Again, you know, you very kindly mentioned that the book that Graham and I wrote back in 2019, we were writing about this conflict then, even going back to 2011, 2012, that 1st Mass movement against Putin that we saw then. Right. The Kremlin's response to that was also circling around this conflict. Is it better to try to work through the Internet to convince people, or is it better to shut it down? And at that point, you're right, right. They made the decision, let's keep it going because it's a useful communication channel for us. But you still had then the creat of the infrastructure to be able to shut it down when they wanted to. And so you're going to have some people who are, who are trigger happy, perhaps.
- [20:17]
B
Last question on this. I wanted to clarify, and I completely agree with everything you say in a lot of ways, however, it's always easier to prevent a predict inertia. Right. I will flag that. For example, 2011-12 and Prigozhin Rebellion were two developments I once did not foresee. Even if I definitely could see Princeton in power forever already back then. So do you think we may be analytically a little bit tempted, you know, to predict, like just to project the current trends and we are not seeing some major events accumulating again, some sort of progression kind, or maybe, you know, Russian liberals protesting, although this is really unlikely given the trends going forward. Is this something we don't see about Russia, tend to, like, underestimate?
- [21:01]
C
So here's the thing. First of all, we all have colleagues that we know and love, and I'm not going to name them, right. Who have been predicting, not without good reason the collapse of this regime within six months for the last 20 years, eventually they're going to be right because eventually this thing will collapse because that's what happens. I look at this and as I said earlier, I don't see anything that feels like it's qualitatively new, that it rises to a level that creates a challenge that the regime can't handle. And so my position is to look at that and say, well, this is not going to be what brings it down and I will be right until I'm wrong and I'll look silly. Hindsight, I think we all make decisions as analysts in this space as to whether we want to look silly ahead of time or afterwards. I don't know that there's a great answer to that question, but just Sam,
- [21:49]
A
just to Maria and I have this fight all the time. In my view, Maria is going to be right 99 times, but wrong once. And I'll be wrong 99 times but right once. And then when I'm right once, Maria will be wrong the entire 100% of the time.
- [22:05]
C
Well, so maybe what I need to do is pivot and worry more about my legacy. But, but I mean, the way I look at it is this. The Kremlin sees what we see. And thus far it's shown its ability to deal with most of the challenges that have been thrown at it. It's been lucky sometimes, right. But it's also been pretty skilled and particularly skilled at preventing these challenges from coming together. There's a lot of things happening out there. We haven't even talked about livestock in Siberia. Right. Which is going to be a total non sequitur to most listeners probably, but is still something that was a very big issue just a couple of months ago or floods in Dagestan on. Right. These issues that can really piss people off locally and get some other people angry. And again, Victoria Borgna talked about them, but don't seem to coalesce into something that becomes this kind of agglomerated challenge to the Kremlin. Eventually that may happen. Eventually something that was disparate may come together to create a challenge that nobody really expected. And we should absolutely be alive to that. But the reality is that that sort of non linear political developments are non linear by nature. Right. So they're not going to be accumulations of little things that we're looking at if the Kremlin is going to be brought down from below, say nothing of a palace coup. Right. But if the Kremlin is going to be brought down from the masses. On some level, it will be because it didn't see something coming. To be perfectly humble about it. Right. If the Kremlin can't see it coming, what are the chances that I'm going to see it coming?
- [23:36]
A
Having humility as an analyst, especially for those of us that sit in think tanks, it's just we can't be that humble. Sam, you have to make bold predictions.
- [23:46]
C
But I'm just an academic.
- [23:48]
A
No. Well, yes, I guess maybe to unpack it a little bit, to maybe take a step back. It does seem to me, though, that maybe we're going about this a little bit the wrong way and saying, okay, there's discontent. Is that going to lead to a million people on the streets of Moscow demanding change? It does not seem that that is likely. But what does seem to be happening is that sort of every node of society that impacts politics, that impacts regime stability, the dial on that from being sort of totally secure, if you're the Kremlin, is getting turned, I think, in a direction that goes against you. Discontent about the war, the economy. Crack down on social media. And then the fear that I would have as the Kremlin is you start getting into a reinforcing vicious cycle where you're worried about people being discontent. You crack down on social media, that only leads to people being more pissed off. You're still fighting this war. It all sort of goes together. And I don't know, you're drawing down your resilience. One question I have is the role of Russian elites as well, because it does strike me that when, if you start kind of losing the public, it's not just about people being brave and going to the streets. It's also like a general sense in society that this is all crappy. Something needs to change. We don't really know how to do it. And that kind of then impacts both the front lines, the elites, the Russian leaders in the business world, the oligarchs. How do you see the oligarchs that have really gotten in line behind Putin? There was a view sort of before the war or in the early days, weeks of the war, that part of the role of sanctions is to really squeeze the oligarchs, because you can squeeze them. They have money, they have power, they have influence. Maybe that will put pressure on Putin. Didn't work. I don't think it was a bad bet. But I'm curious how you see that now.
- [25:43]
C
I think about three years ago, I made a New Year's resolution to stop using the word oligarchs. And I've probably broken it on numerous occasions, but because oligarchs to me implies power. And so the idea of sanctions was predicated on the idea that they had power. Right. And then if you put them in a position where they were going to lose their primary source of autonomy, which was the ability to move money in and out of Russia and have the west as an insurance policy, that would at least create the opportunity for them and the reason for them to move against the Kremlin. And they didn't. Now there's lots of reasons that they didn't. The Kremlin is very careful and is much more worried about them than it is about the public. And so polices the hell out of them and surveils them, but also has provided reasons for them to remain happy. Right. So as much as the oligarch class was hammered by sanctions, they've also made a lot of money in the last several years. Right. There's been a lot of rent seeking going on around the war. Lots of opportunities to take over assets either from elites who've fallen out of favor or from Western companies or Ukrainian assets that had been captured during the war and that kind of thing. So there's been a lot to play for. But they don't look like they get a say in this, in this game. Does that mean they couldn't get a say? Of course they can. Right. And at some point they get to make a decision about whether or not they think that this regime is going to serve their interests. The problem that they face is that right now, even if many of them are not as well off as they were before, they're all winners, they're all powerful. Ish, they're all rich, they're all unaccountable. Change is going to create winners and losers. Some of these people are going to end up being losers. And you can't predict the outcome of that before you start the change. And so in order to take that risk and run the risk of becoming a loser, you have to think probably that things are so catastrophically bad that I've got nothing to lose, that I'm going to become a loser anyway. If we don't create change, we're not at that moment yet. I think you're right, though. The situation with the generalized kind of anxiety that we're seeing in the public probably increases the anxiety within the elite. They can begin to think, actually maybe we are approaching that moment of, of crisis at which we really need to act before the crisis. And then when that happens, you know, Sort of the animal spirits kick in and you have a cascading regime failure because people don't want to be the last rat on the ship.
- [28:05]
B
Thank you, Sam. In defense of the sanctions on oligarchs, you're absolutely right. I completely agree on your assessment of that. These are not really the people with power that have impact on political decision making. Having said that, the eyes you flagged yourself and we find out more and more are direct beneficiaries of the war. All right. They often contribute to the war effort directly and for the financial system, for the banks. And I think it also matters that sanctions sort of insulate the west somewhat from the influence of these people with money who are totally controlled. Not to you, but this point often get missed when the sanctions are often being criticized, especially in the Russian liberal community. But to essentially push a little bit deeper on these rumors about splits in the elites, more recently there was reporting that the FSB is becoming stronger and stronger. Frankly, I keep reading it for the last maybe 10, 15 years. So, you know, tell, tell me something else that's new. But this time they're also leading the attack on the Internet. There's all these shutdowns that we're witnessing. On top of that, there was also the news, the rumor that Minister of Defense Bellossov and Kiriyanka in the procession administration are feuding about the membership of ruling party electoral lists for the coming parliamentary elections that you mentioned. Apparently it was like the debate who the real special military oper hero is and who deserves to be favored to enter the parliament as a result. And last but not the least, we have seen very few elite defections since start the war. Sort of confirming your broader point here. However, just recently in May, Deputy Minister for Natural Resources and Environment Denis Butzai reportedly fled to the United States after being dismissed on corruption charges and rightfully anticipating, I guess, some criminal charges. So is this something to. This seems to be like, you know, a lot of points, interesting points of observation that may or may not been reflective of some tangents accumulating within the lit circles. Or is it just the regular, you know, sounds from under the rug as the, as Churchill has described Russian politics. And occasionally a bone will pop up, but you will never see the dogs actually fighting underneath the rug.
- [30:15]
C
I mean, look, the idea that these, these dogs are fighting right is again, not, not terribly new. I think there has been competition over rents. I think kind of one of the surprising things for me maybe shouldn't be surprising, but one of the surprising things for me in this war has been the degree to which the war itself was not insulated from rent seeking. You mentioned the Prigozhin uprising before. I mean, that was a rent conflict between himself and Defence Minister, then Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. And we've seen. We continue to see that. I think that that's the best way to explain a lot of the arrests that we're seeing now in the Defense Ministry and around the military industrial complex. That this is about rents and the power and the influence that are associated with.
- [30:57]
B
With.
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C
With Rens. You would have thought that if you were Putin, you might have wanted to insulate the war, right, from this kind of behavior, because it could get very dangerous, and it does get very dangerous. But it is kind of the overriding logic of how Russian politics works. It maybe shouldn't be all that surprising that the war functions on the same logic you mentioned. But this is the ex Deputy Natural Resources Minister who was dismissed and then fled. And I think you're right. We have not seen really anything in the way of elite defections. I really would hesitate to put that in the elite defection category. I think he left because it was that or prison. Could have a conversation about whether prison was deserved. There's a lot of corrupt bureaucrats who are not in prison. But it's also not difficult to believe that a deputy minister of Natural resources in Russia was corrupt. So I haven't seen any indication that he's left for political reasons where we have actually seen political differences. People like Dmitry Kozak, for example, they stayed in power as long as they could. They left relatively quietly. It was written about more in the New York Times than anywhere else, and that was that.
- [32:10]
A
Sam, one sort of policy question for you, if you sort of put on a policy hat either here in Washington, but really probably more now for Europe, given where Washington is on Russia and Ukraine. You know, since the war began. In the beginning of the conflict, the Biden administration was very reluctant to have any sort of messaging or effort to do outreach to the Russian public, in part because they were in the midst of a massive military escalation. We were fighting a proxy war with the Ukrainians. We were providing them advanced weaponry to kill the Russians. And we didn't want to stoke the sense in Putin's mind that we were coming after him personally, deploying our quote, unquote, color technologies against him. And so the Biden administration was very careful about not sort of crossing that line of trying to sort of look like they were instigating regime change. But we're kind of in A new place now. And it's clear Putin thinks that the west has these tools. And I'm curious. We know that the west does not have an ability to just hit a button and then suddenly change the Russian public and get the Russian public out on the street. Streets. But is there something that the Europeans and others should be doing or thinking about to engage the Russian public to sort of highlight the costs of the war, to highlight how many casualties they've been and that this isn't going well, and Steve Kotkin has kind of highlighted this as well, is that there isn't really. We have no message to the Russian public. We're not offering them any sort of alternative future of maybe you could come back into the European family if only this Putin guy would go. There's just sort of, no, we don't offer anything. So I'm curious, is that because we don't have anything to really say or offer. We don't have input. What do you think about the kind of public messaging part of the effort to support Ukraine vis a vis Russia?
- [33:58]
C
Yeah, I don't think we're going to tell the Russians much about Russia that they don't already know. The reason that investigations into Putin's corruption don't resonate isn't because people don't believe them. It's because they believed them before they saw the investigations, and it just didn't matter in the way that people think about politics. So that kind of thing. I think it was plausible early on in the war to believe that Russians really didn't know how badly it was going. I don't think that's plausible anymore. I think people are aware of the casualties. They're aware of the scale of the war. Some people choose to insulate themselves from it. Others find ways of excusing it, and the majority, I think, just sort of keep it at bay. You know, I think you're right what you're pointing to, and I think Steve is right, that there is a message that could resonate about not the cost of the war, but the opportunity costs of the war. War. This is something that Tsikhanovskay has done with some success in Belarus, which is to say, look, if we had different leadership, Belarus could have a very different future. Right. It could have a very different present. It could have a different relationship with Europe. Europe is willing and open to work with us, wants to see us as part of the European family. Start from the fact that there is not a Russian version of Tchikhanovskaya. Right. There's nobody who's plausibly won an election who could really speak to and on behalf of the Russian population. But more problematic than that, Europe can't send that message because it hasn't necessarily come to that conclusion. In the European imagination, Belarus is a victim, as Ukraine is a victim, and Russia is alternately, depending on whose point of view you take, either a unified perpetrator of this war on Ukraine as well as broader imperialism, or it is a state that includes a largely victimized population. But that's not a point of consensus in European politics. It's a point really of quite vociferous debate in European politics. And so, yes, at some point, I think it would be good for Europe to have a sense of the future it would like to see for Russia and to begin to communicate that to both internally. Right. But then to a Russian population that could decide whether they want to move towards that future. But that first requires Europe to. It really is Europe. First of all, they share the continent. And second of all, they have at least some consistency of foreign policy. But the proximity matters here. And I think it is for Europe to do that, but we're not there yet.
- [36:14]
A
Yeah, I think that's one of the side effects which I think has been generally positive of the Eastern Europeans having a much larger role in shaping EU and European foreign policy, particularly on Russia, is that they're just inherently pessimistic about the future of Russia. But therefore I feel like Europe isn't really offering Russians a choice.
- [36:34]
C
Well, I would push back against that a little bit. I mean, one of the strongest voices really throughout the war in Europe. Europe for keeping doors open for Russian exiles, for example, and has been Andrius Kubilius, the Lithuanian official who's now Europe's first commissioner for defense. Right. And there are others from Germany eastward who have continued to make this argument at the same time that you have others in the same place or some of the same people arguing that we really need to make sure that borders are secure and that kind of thing. Those two things don't have to be at odds with each other. Other. But there are various sides in this debate. I don't know that it's a geographical divide so much as a genuine analytical divide. This is not an easy question to answer, but it is the question that will require an answer before any policy will be credible.
- [37:24]
A
Right. And it's also the policy path to offer the Russian public or a path it's not very clear. So it's sort of quite vague. Maybe one final question, Sam, is do you think the pressure that we're seeing, maybe it's not bubbling up to cause Putin to collapse in a month and the regime to fall. Do you think that will impact Russia's decision making regards to Ukraine and increase their willingness to sort of bring this to a close, dial down the fighting, agree to a ceasefire, whatever it may be? Do you think that we're going to be this time next year still talking that Russia won't be fighting the war in the same way that it's fighting it now? Or do you think this will lead to a change in calculus and how it's approaching the conflict?
- [38:10]
C
It's probably my baseline scenario that we continue to be in the situation that we're in. And I certainly think, if I were giving advice to policymakers, that that's the best scenario to plan for, better to be in it for the long haul. But I think also the more that Europe in particular settles in for the long haul, and frankly, if we look at European policy on the war right now, that's a baseline assumption in most European capitals, right? That is not going to end anytime soon. Ironically, that actually makes it more likely that it ends soon. Because I think that the Russian position is predicated on the assumption that European patience, and thus Ukrainian ability to keep fighting, will run out before Russian patience does. Partly because they have assumed that they would have consistent American pressure on the Europeans to draw things down. That pressure is fading, partly because Europe is insulating itself against pressure from the United States, and partly because the United States just isn't focused on Ukraine at the moment. But I think that that does plausibly change the calculations in Moscow, right? If it thinks that there's actually not much more that it's going to gain on the battlefield, the war creates some unpredictabilities, right? The Russian lines can collapse at some point. They have in the past. So that's not something you can rule out. But also, at some point, these accumulated casualties do begin to bite, and you don't know exactly when that's going to happen. Plus, something happens, some unexpected event that leads to a rapid ramp up in sanctions. Maybe even the US Gets involved if the first lady complains too loudly to the President and all of a sudden the central bank is playing catch up to get the ruble back in shape. So you might come to the conclusion that, in fact, it's better to cut your losses, put in place a ceasefire that doesn't really give security to the Ukrainians, but that probably ramps things down until you can recover and probably also demobilizes the Europeans because nobody in Europe is going to want to start fighting once the the Russians have stopped.
- [40:03]
A
Sam, unfortunately, we've taken up way too much of your time on this, what looks like a beautiful evening in London. There's sun, I think, coming out of your window. We'll let you go and enjoy the rest of the evening. But I want to thank you so much for joining us on Russian Roulette.
- [40:17]
C
Well, thanks for having me and as
- [40:19]
B
always, thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you haven't already, please be sure to subscribe to our show and to give us a five star rating. Additionally, be sure to check out our sister podcast, the Europhile, wherever you get your podcast. See you next time. You've been listening to Russian Roulette. We hope you enjoyed this episode and tune in again soon.
- [40:46]
A
Russian Roulette releases new episodes every two weeks on Thursdays and is available wherever you get your podcasts. So please subscribe and share our episodes online.
- [40:55]
B
And be sure to check out all the latest analysis by the Europe, Russia and Eurasia program program@csis.org.