Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a Security Council meeting via a video link in Saint Petersburg
(Picture: SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)The Kremlin’s missile strikes on Kyiv this week brought fearful crowds, once again, inside its metro stations for shelter, just like when the war began. It marked the end of a summer that had seen life in the city return almost to normal and an autumn filled with the excitement of Ukrainian victories on the battlefield. Volodmyr Zelensky’s government fears now this is a taste of Putin’s winter: where the Kremlin is going to try to make its cities unlivable.
Russian targets lay bare the Kremlin’s intentions: Putin wants to freeze Ukraine. This is a war on morale. Commanded by Russian air force veteran Sergey Surovikin — nicknamed “General Armageddon” for what he did to Syria — Kremlin forces struck a dozen power stations this week leaving more than 100,000 people with no water, heat or electricity. This was no one-off week: Russia has now hit more than 500 targets linked to the heat supply.
Zelensky’s officials, long used to searching for weapons from allies and increasingly across the world, are now scrambling to source mobile generators, fuel and water treatments. But morale is still high. Even the fact that iodine pills — crucial to take in the event of nuclear fallout — have run out in Ukraine in response to Putin’s atomic threats this has not led to any groundswell of support to stop at any price. This is why American officials see these attacks as desperate: and like all desperate measures in war unlikely to achieve their desired results — as the Russian army reportedly begins to run low on its cruise missile supplies.
High morale cannot be said about Russia: which is facing its own Putin’s winter. The crash mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of men to serve on the front lines in Donbas and Kherson has broken what Russians call “the contract” between them and the regime: you stay out of politics and we’ll stay out your lives. More young men have fled the country since the call-ups began than have actually been mobilised. Signs of anxiety are everywhere: from chatter in nationalist circles the war is failing to the sky-rocketing sales of anti-depressants.
Russian society is now increasingly polarised. While growing minorities either oppose or support the war with increasing fervour the majority — purposefully depoliticized by the Kremlin for decades — has chosen to go along with the war without investing in it or questioning it too much. Many such families are about to start receiving horrific updates from the front from their loved ones — with American intercepts showing how dejected some soldiers often are, openly criticising both Putin and their commanders for their folly.
One of the rules of war is that defeat deflates a strongman. Russia’s autumn of reversals — being entirely driven from occupied Kharkiv Oblast after its front simply collapsed — has brought the sound of audible recriminations and jockeying around the Kremlin. The notoriously corrupt Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu is being bitterly criticised across nationalist and war-supporting channels online. Though many speculate Putin himself may be trying to engineer some of this to deflect blame — the concealed Kremlin intrigues that Winston Churchill compared to a “bulldog fight under the rug” — have started up again.
The truth is that the beginning of Putin’s winter may also be the beginning of his own. The louder criticism of his handling of both the military war on Ukraine and the energy war disrupting prices of supplies on Europe — which, with the supplies and bailouts ready across the EU, is also being lost — a new reality is coming into view. A somewhat shakier Putin. US officials have briefed that they picked up internal criticism beginning to be delivered to Putin for the first time. This, we have to be clear, is very different from saying he faces a coup. More a period where, looking over his shoulder, he takes ever greater risks.
A chastened Putin, however, is not a less violent one. Both in Washington, London and Paris many officials share the ominous assumption of Sir Alex Younger, the former head of MI6, who issued a warning this week that “we need to be very careful what we wish for here”. Russia’s leader knows very well he risks being outflanked by the pro-war voices he himself created, which the former head of British intelligence believes will eventually replace him. This fear will sadly make Putin more reckless and merciless in Ukraine: not less.
