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Professional-Ukrainian fighters stormed throughout the border into southwestern Russia this previous week, prompting two days of the heaviest preventing on Russian territory in 15 months of conflict. But President Vladimir V. Putin, in public, ignored the matter fully.
He handed out medals, met the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, hosted pleasant overseas leaders and made televised small discuss with a Russian choose about how Ukraine was not an actual nation.
In managing Russia’s greatest conflict in generations, Mr. Putin more and more appears like a commander in chief in absentia: In public, he says subsequent to nothing concerning the course of the conflict and betrays little concern about Russia’s setbacks. As an alternative, he’s telegraphing extra clearly than ever that his technique is to attend out Ukraine and the West — and that he thinks he can win by exhausting his foes.
“There’s no want for any illusions,” stated Natalia Zubarevich, an professional on Russian social and financial growth at Moscow State College. Mr. Putin, she stated, has laid the home groundwork to maintain the conflict for a “lengthy, lengthy, lengthy, lengthy, lengthy” time.
However whereas Western analysts and officers consider that Mr. Putin’s Russia does have the potential to maintain preventing, his navy, financial and political maneuvering room has narrowed, presenting obstacles to prosecuting a prolonged conflict.
At the same time as Mr. Putin refers back to the preventing as distant “tragic occasions,” the conflict retains hitting house — with rising fissures within the navy management, unease among the many Russian elite and worrying indicators for the financial system because the West vows to additional wean itself off Russian vitality.
On the battlefield, Russia’s potential to go on the offensive has shriveled as ammunition has run low and the monthslong battle for the japanese Ukrainian metropolis of Bakhmut took 1000’s of troopers’ lives. Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the chief of the Wagner mercenary group that led the assault on Bakhmut, stated he was beginning to pull his troopers out of the town whereas releasing one profane tirade after one other aimed toward Russia’s Kremlin-allied elites.
To mount a significant new offensive, Western officers and analysts say that Mr. Putin would wish to search out new sources of ammunition — and impose a politically dangerous, second navy draft to replenish his depleted troops. Nonetheless, the U.S. director of nationwide intelligence, Avril D. Haines, informed Congress this month that the probabilities that Mr. Putin would make any concessions in talks this 12 months had been “low,” until he had been to really feel a home political risk.
Western officers additionally stay involved concerning the risk that he might resort to nuclear weapons, however calculate that the danger is biggest if Mr. Putin is going through a catastrophic defeat that threatens his maintain on energy.
At house, Russia’s financial system has proved versatile sufficient to adapt to Western sanctions, whereas authorities reserves have been enough to finance greater navy spending and elevated welfare funds. However the longer the conflict drags on — particularly if oil costs drop — the likelier it’s that the Kremlin can be pressured into laborious decisions on reducing authorities spending or letting inflation surge.
Politically, some researchers argue that public assist for the conflict in Russia is broad however shallow — able to shifting rapidly in response to unexpected occasions. The incursions throughout the border this week introduced the conflict into Russia in a means it had not earlier than, stirring unease amongst navy bloggers, who’ve a widespread following.
Then there may be the wild card of Mr. Prigozhin, who has been morphing right into a populist politician taking over prime Russian officers, and who this week delivered a broadside in opposition to the technique of ready out the West.
In an hourlong video interview with a Russian blogger, Mr. Prigozhin described an unlikely “optimistic state of affairs” wherein “Europe and America get uninterested in the Ukrainian battle, China sits everybody down on the negotiating desk, we agree that every little thing we’ve already grabbed is ours.”
The extra probably state of affairs, Mr. Prigozhin asserted, is that Ukraine pushes Russian troops again to prewar traces and threatens the Crimean peninsula — the crown jewel amongst Mr. Putin’s Ukrainian land grabs.
Western analysts and officers doubt that Ukraine’s upcoming counteroffensive can ship a knockout blow. On the similar time, they are saying that Russia’s potential to wage the conflict is steadily degrading, as evidenced by tens of 1000’s of casualties in Bakhmut and the sharp decline within the variety of shells that Russian forces are firing per day in japanese Ukraine in contrast with the peak of the battle final 12 months.
“It’s not as if the Russians will abruptly cease with the ability to wage a conflict,” stated Max Bergmann, a former State Division official now on the Heart for Strategic and Worldwide Research in Washington. “The query is can they nonetheless wage it with any form of depth.”
However Mr. Putin isn’t betraying any public sense of urgency.
He stays remoted in his pandemic-era cocoon, requiring Russians who meet with him to quarantine for days. (A cosmonaut honored at a Kremlin medal ceremony on Tuesday began his speech with, “Sorry, we’ve been silent for every week in isolation.”)
Mr. Putin seldom goes into element concerning the course of the conflict, at the same time as he sits in prolonged televised conferences on subjects like interethnic relations. So banal was the dialogue that an Armenian civic chief informed Mr. Putin that his group had despatched “300,000 chocolate bars with raisins and nuts” to japanese Ukraine.
As an alternative, he typically speaks of the conflict he ordered as a phenomenon outdoors of his management. In televised remarks to businesspeople on Friday, he referred to “in the present day’s tragic occasions.” His silence concerning the dramatic, two-day incursion into Russia this week was a shift from his reaction to a smaller such strike in March, when he referred to as off a visit and denounced the episode as a “terrorist” assault.
When he does talk about Ukraine, his remarks are heavy on distorted historical past — as if to inform the world that it doesn’t matter what occurs on the bottom, Russia is destined to manage the nation. On Tuesday, the Kremlin launched footage of Mr. Putin assembly with Valery Zorkin, the chairman of Russia’s Constitutional Courtroom, who introduced with him a duplicate of a Seventeenth-century French map of Europe.
“There’s no Ukraine” on the map, Mr. Zorkin tells Mr. Putin.
Mr. Putin then falsely asserts that earlier than the Soviet Union was fashioned, “there was by no means any Ukraine within the historical past of humanity.”
Some Russian officers are already waiting for subsequent 12 months’s presidential election in the US, hinting {that a} Republican victory might flip the tide. Dmitri A. Medvedev, the previous Russian president and the vice chairman of Mr. Putin’s safety council, said this week that “the primary factor” was that President Biden not be re-elected.
Former President Donald J. Trump, who’s the early front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, “is an effective man,” Mr. Medvedev stated, and, “traditionally, it was at all times simpler to work with the Republicans.”
However there are dangers to Mr. Putin’s wait-and-see method past the opportunity of a battlefield breakthrough by Ukraine. Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow on the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Heart, argues that Mr. Putin’s “tactic of inaction” might increase the affect of hard-liners like Mr. Prigozhin.
“Russia’s elites are liable to see defeatism in inaction,” she wrote this month. “Already, Putin is struggling to clarify what precisely he’s ready for.”
The sturdiness of Russian public assist for the conflict — just like the financial stability that helps underpin it — is way from clear.
However some researchers and American officers consider that cracks in pro-war sentiment have already begun to show due to heavy casualties.
A current report from a bunch of Russian sociologists, based mostly on scores of in-depth interviews, argues that Russians see the conflict as “a pure catastrophe” they can not do something about, slightly than as one thing they’re firmly satisfied is correct.
“This assist isn’t constructed on elementary political positions or some ideological views,” stated Sasha Kappinen, one of many report’s authors, who makes use of a pseudonym for safety causes as a result of she works at a college in Russia. “This isn’t secure assist.”
Russia has spent closely to placate most of the people for the reason that conflict started, rising welfare funds and easing the burden on small companies. Its financial system has tailored to sanctions, benefiting from the quite a few nations outdoors North America and Western Europe that proceed to do brisk commerce with Russia.
Ms. Zubarevich, the Moscow financial growth professional, stated the federal government had the capability to maintain spending at its present clip at the least till the presidential election subsequent March, when Mr. Putin, 70, is anticipated to run for a fifth time period. However a fall within the value of oil might drive the federal government to chop spending on issues like infrastructure.
“The 2 sacred cows are state protection procurement and assist for low-income teams and pensioners,” she stated, referring to the necessity to fulfill key constituencies. “They are going to be stored in place for so long as potential.”
On the similar time, analysts and Russians who know Mr. Putin nonetheless see him as essentially versatile and opportunistic — a person who would in all probability settle for a freeze within the preventing if it had been supplied, at the same time as he prepares to combat on for years. Consequently, well-connected individuals in Moscow see an unpredictable future whereas girding for a protracted conflict.
“Putin’s spectrum of choices is fairly broad,” a outstanding businessman in Moscow stated, “from doing a cease-fire in the present day to preventing a hundred-year conflict.”
Julian E. Barnes and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.
