It was not the ideal moment for a party. On Saturday evening, as Russian troops speedily retreated from numerous towns in the Kharkiv region, and the Ukrainian army triumphantly raised its yellow and blue flag, spectacular fireworks crackled across Moscow.
City authorities claimed there were more than 30,000 fireworks in total, at 23 coordinated displays in different parts of the city, all to mark the city’s 875th anniversary.
It was an incongruous sight at the end of a day when the news from the frontlines in Ukraine had grown more disastrous for Moscow by the hour, with even patriotic Ukrainians amazed at the speed with which Kyiv’s forces were advancing in the north-east.
Numerous Russian politicians called on Moscow to postpone the annual City Day celebrations, but the bad news seemed to catch the Kremlin flat-footed. Reluctant even to admit that what is happening in Ukraine is a war and not a “special military operation”, the Kremlin decided that cancelling the festivities would have been too direct an admission that everything was going wrong.
As Ukraine took back towns where just a few weeks ago Russia was loudly proclaiming itself the new overlord “for ever”, all Russians were given was a forlorn statement from the defence ministry that a “regrouping of forces” was under way.
Meanwhile, state television showed Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, giving Vladimir Putin a tour of a new martial arts centre in the capital, chuckling obediently as Putin recounted a jokey anecdote. Later, the pair inaugurated a new observation wheel, the tallest in Europe.
The time in the spring when Putin was either absent from public view or meeting people across absurdly large tables now appears to be long past, but the optics of the Russian president’s current appearances are not much better.
At a speech in a central Moscow park, Putin waxed lyrical about the changes to the city over recent years. “Moscow is rightly considered to be one of the most beautiful and comfortable metropolises in the world, every year confirming its global competitive edge, including in attracting talented and energetic people and in the rising rate of economic, infrastructure and social changes,” he said.
His speech conveniently ignored the fact that the past months have seen tens of thousands of Moscow’s brightest talents flee the country, the withdrawal of most western brands from the Russian market, and a travel embargo that has cut the country off from much of the western world.
The disastrous course of the Ukraine invasion threatens to turn into the biggest crisis of Putin’s long presidency. Already thwarted in his initial war plan of capturing Kyiv in a few days and installing a friendly puppet government, the plan B of annexing large parts of Ukraine’s east also looks more tenuous in light of the recent Ukrainian offensive.
All eyes are now on Putin’s response. Will he try to gloss over the current retreat, as he did the withdrawal from Kyiv, or will he double down with mobilisation or nuclear threats?
Life comes at you fast: pundits on Russian TV realize that their military is failing and their country is in trouble. They are starting to play the blame game. Some of them finally understand that their genocidal denial of the Ukrainian identity isn't working in Russia's favor. pic.twitter.com/jNNn5xifI5
— Julia Davis (@JuliaDavisNews) September 11, 2022
There is an uneasy hiatus in Moscow. On state television talkshows, the established narratives about the war in Ukraine have been fraying, and unsure which line to take next, guests have engaged in polemics coming unusually close to a real debate.
Some have simply continued with rhetorical business-as-usual. “Zelenskiy’s Nazi regime must be destroyed,” said Sergei Mironov, a veteran pro-Kremlin politician, on an NTV chatshow.
The former prime minister Dmitry Medvedev, who has awkwardly rebranded himself as an anti-western hawk, popped up on Monday with one of his periodic bellicose public statements: “Today’s ultimatums are child’s play compared with the demands of tomorrow. And [Zelenskiy] knows them: the Kyiv regime’s total capitulation on Russia’s terms.”
The problem for Medvedev and other purveyors of this kind of rhetoric is that Russia has proven itself unable to impose its terms on Ukraine.
The Kremlin now risks anger and a possible backlash from nationalist and pro-military bloggers if it steps back, but a potentially dangerous path if it decides to go down the road of escalation.
Recent research suggests that while a majority of Russians say they support the “special military operation”, some of them do so only passively and remain confused about the goals of the campaign.
“Compared with the group offering unconditional support, people in the second group were twice as likely to express feelings of anxiety, fear and horror about what is going on,” wrote Andrei Kolesnikov, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
With Ukrainians proving stubbornly resistant to the “liberation” that Moscow insisted it was bringing to the country, it may become harder to sell the war to ordinary Russians – and most oppose mass mobilisation.
On one talkshow on the NTV channel over the weekend, Boris Nadezhdin, a former politician often called on to be the “liberal punchbag” on chatshows, seemed to be the person talking the most sense as he laid down some home truths about the war.
“We are now at the point where we have to understand it’s absolutely impossible to defeat Ukraine using the resources and the colonial methods with which Russia is trying to wage war,” he said.
When another guest countered that the war would go on for as long as was necessary to defeat “the Nazi regime”, Nadezhdin exploded in anger: “So, if I understand correctly, my 10-year-old children will also get a chance to fight?”
