Russians are coming to terms with Putin’s war in Ukraine

Russians are learning to live with the war that Vladimir Putin has unleashed in Ukraine.

With Putin being sworn in on Tuesday for another six years as president, the invasion has become part of everyday life for many Russians, confounding expectations that the pressure of international sanctions and deepening isolation would eventually turn them against him. Far from protesting, many are rallying around the flag.

The Kremlin is using Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II to reshape Russia, combining strident nationalism involving a potent mix of Soviet-era and imperial nostalgia with an intensifying crackdown on dissent. As a result, Putin faces little domestic pressure to end the fighting despite massive military casualties, posing a challenge for Ukraine’s U.S. and European allies as they seek to raise the cost for Russia of continuing the war that’s now in its third year.

That’s in sharp contrast to the first months after the February 2022 invasion when many Russians reacted with anger, depression and shock, according to Anna Kuleshova, a sociologist at the Social Foresight Group who left Russia when the war started and now lives in Luxembourg.

“When there is no way out of a situation with dignity, there is no way to leave, and there is a need to earn money and raise children, then it’s easier to accept a new reality than to resist it endlessly,” Kuleshova said.

The war has permeated every level of Russian society. In many schools, children send gifts and letters to frontline soldiers, and must attend special lessons where teachers drum home the Kremlin’s message that the country is at war with the West in Ukraine and acted to defend itself by carrying out the unprovoked invasion.

TV and radio shows are often filled with war themes, casting those fighting in Ukraine as successors of the generation that defeated the Nazi German invasion in the “Great Patriotic War,” ignoring the fact that Russia is the aggressor this time. Army recruitment campaigns offer lucrative signing bonuses and salaries for those who’ll “be a man” and join up as contract soldiers.

Platon Mamatov, 41, signed a contract in April to return to Ukraine after spending six months at the front last year. He said people in his native Urals city of Ekaterinburg often approach him to offer help and support when they see him in uniform. While not everyone supports the invasion, there’s been a “consolidation of society” behind the army, he said.

“Everyone realized that this is a war and that it concerns everyone,” he said. “Border territories are shelled daily, factories are burning inside Russia, drones are flying, funerals and disabled people are coming back from the front.”

Putin declared his intention to form a new political and business elite from those “who have proved their loyalty to Russia” in the war shortly before he gained a fifth term with a record 87% in the March presidential election. The Kremlin presented the pre-determined election in which he faced no real competition as evidence the public fully supports Putin’s showdown with the West.

Sanctions failed “to create enough economic discomfort at the personal level, to expose to Russians the link between the wars they launch and the erosion of their own wellbeing,” said Maria Snegovaya, senior fellow with the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. The impact on Russians’ living standards is “too small to radically change the public mood,” she said.

Indeed, as Russia adjusted to the unprecedented sanctions that failed to collapse its economy, many Russians found a financial upside to the war. Deepening labor shortages exacerbated by the military’s demand for recruits have added to spiraling wage pressures as businesses hike salaries to retain staff or fill vacancies.

Russia’s war economy is growing strongly for now as the government pours money into the defense industry and seeks to shield domestic businesses from the impact of sanctions. The Kremlin continues to reap income from oil and gas sales, pivoting to countries such as India and China after Europe shunned Russian energy.

“Indicators of public sentiment about the socio-economic situation are at the level of 2008, the peak of Putin’s stability,” said Denis Volkov, director of the independent Levada Center pollster, referring to the energy-driven consumer boom during the president’s first two terms. “The state spends huge resources on creating the feeling that everything is in order, that we live as usual.”

Still, Russia is using up reserves in its national wealth fund to support surging state expenditure, while inflation is running at almost twice the central bank’s 4% target. The Bank of Russia has hiked the key interest rate to 16% and the government has imposed capital controls to ease pressure on the ruble.

Polls show public support for Putin remains high, with 87% approving of his leadership and 76% backing Russia’s army in Ukraine in a March survey, according to Volkov. While Putin’s September 2022 order to mobilize 300,000 reservists was a “powerful shock” that triggered the sharpest spike in public anxiety in 30 years of polling, sentiment rebounded when authorities made clear there’d be no repeat, he said.

“It was like a bolt from the blue, I sobbed and asked friends for help to get my husband out of this meat grinder,” said Marina, 37, whose husband Alexander was among those called up. Now, “we decided that war is also a job,” she said.

The couple got a subsidized mortgage to buy an apartment in Moscow and their children get privileges at university and a summer camp because Alexander is on the front line, said Marina, asking not to disclose her family name because of safety fears.

“Before, it was only money that decided everything” in Russia, she said. “Now, it’s not only like that.”

The start of the war and the mobilization triggered an exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians. That created “a feeling that all these ‘smart’ people have finally left and ‘real men,’” such as skilled factory workers could gain opportunities and advancement, said Kuleshova, the sociologist.

To be sure, the harshest Kremlin repression for decades against even mild criticism has cowed Russians who oppose the war mostly into silence. The state has carried out high-profile detentions of rights activists, journalists and playwrights, and jailed ordinary people for social media posts under a “fake news” law that makes it a crime to criticize the war.

The war has revived a Soviet-era habit of people informing on neighbors, teachers and work colleagues for alleged lack of patriotism, by writing denunciations to the authorities urging criminal investigations.

Paranoia is spreading even among Russia’s elite. Many people are afraid of being accused of disloyalty and prosecuted if they say anything about the war and its consequences, according to two people with close links to the authorities.

Data from Russia’s Supreme Court show 39 people were convicted of treason in 2023, the highest in nine years, while another 730 were found guilty of terrorism, a charge whose definition has expanded to cover opposition pro-democracy groups such as the late Alexey Navalny’s network of activists.

The number of people branded as “foreign agents” by the Justice Ministry has surged since the invasion began, exposing them to the threat of prosecution.

The crackdown has had a chilling effect on Russians’ willingness to protest. The Supreme Court received just 2,000 appeals in 2023 protesting official bans on rallies and mass meetings, down from 22,000 the year before and 19,000 in 2021.

Navalny’s death in an Arctic prison in February underscored the sense of hopelessness. While thousands defied the Kremlin to pay their final respects at his funeral in Moscow, there was no momentum for further protests against Putin and the war.

Support among ordinary Russians for peace talks tends to rise only when the army experiences battlefield reverses in Ukraine, said Snegovaya, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Even when they back negotiations, many insist on retaining territories that Russian troops now occupy in Ukraine and that Putin has declared “forever” part of Russia.

Mamatov, a former political strategist, said he collects money from Russians through a Telegram channel to buy items like drones, bulletproof vests and medicines for frontline troops.

Donations grow bigger every month, he said, because people understand this is “our common war.”