If you were to look at the stunts Evgeni Prigozhin, head of PMC Wagner, is pulling, and read pro-war Telegram channels,
you’d be forgiven for missing something obvious.
With the presidential election upcoming next year, we’re witnessing a new group forming.
It’s a never-before-seen political demand.
This demand is driven by the desire to clinch military victory come what may.
It would seem that this sentiment fits perfectly into the Russian propaganda and official stance.
But in reality, it’s increasingly at odds with it.
That war has turned into a liability. It’s no longer racking up points for those involved.
One can’t face an election with that war raging. There’s nothing positive to be said about it.
There’s no beneficial endgame to offer.
The war with Ukraine has yet to meet any Russian goals, and there are no achievable goals in the first place.
The majority of people distanced themselves from it and got one thing in their heads:
keep this bloody meatgrinder away from me.
There’s one thing people are worried now: a mobilization drive.
If there’s a genius who would want to start enforcing all those pro-mobilization laws, they signed into power;
if there’s a new mobilization wave coming with enlistment teams swooping up more fresh meat across the country;
if they start dragging most people back into this war, there’s going to be a wild backlash. People want to be left alone.
To have the war the way it is now in the run-up to the election is a bad idea. There’re two ways out of it.
The first one is to try and stabilize the frontline to go back to the 2015 status quo.
It would be like putting the war on a slow burner.
There’s something happening somewhere, and people are dying,
but in small numbers, with no setbacks or advancements to report.
People aren’t being hauled to the frontline, which is slowly moving to and fro at the rate of a village a month.
The war will fade away from the headlines and naturally from the public eye.
The second scenario is to remove that war from public discussion.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) are on the offensive, the Russian army lost Melitopol,
Russian forces left Luhansk, and Russian soldiers were surrounded in Bakhmut.
Who cares?
The last bit on the daily newscast would be something so unintelligible that people would spend
a lot of their time trying to make tails or heads of that update.
It’s the COVID scenario over again.
The second wave was a lot worse than the first one, with the third wave toppling the second.
The mortuaries were running out of space, gravediggers seeing unprecedented demand.
People were collapsing in the hallways of the overflowing hospitals.
But according to the news, the pandemic was over by the summer.
True, they did talk about the deaths, but it was done in bulletin style.
They were rattling off mortality stats and new cases with a weather report cadence.
The first option implies that the Russian army has the capability to carry out the missions,
but the key prerequisite is for it to exist.
We know that there are several Russian armies, while the actual number is shrouded in mystery.
That doesn’t bode well for the army’s capabilities.
It’s unlikely that Ukraine will give Putin such a break.
There’s little chance it’ll allow him to waddle through the campaign trail since the consequences of that could be dire.
Full-on mobilization would be one example. That’s not what the AFU want.
You don’t need to be a political science major to know that 2023 is a crucial year for Ukraine.
The AFU have to push back Russian forces as far as they can in the months remaining.
The war isn’t going to stop on its own.
There’s little hope that the frontline will stop bringing horrendous and humiliating news.
Or that the Russian army will manage to stick to the current frontlines.
It means that the second scenario is what’s coming.
The closer we’re drawing to the election, the stronger there’ll be an attempt to erase the war out of the public eye.
The campaign will be based on anything, from welfare policy to handing out free hot dogs, but war.
But there’s a catch. The main difference between today and 2014/2015 is the scale,
the number of people involved, and the stakeholders.
BACK TO 2015
Fighters from the Donbas from the mid-2010s treat Russia a lot worse than people tend to think.
People who went to fight for the “Russian world” feel like they were screwed over.
The Russian government has turned the lives of many people upside down.
The ones living in the Donbas and the ones that came there from all over Russia to fulfill a nationalistic idea:
a war for all Russians. They wanted to build a standalone civilization and revive the collapsed empire.
Next, we’ll talk about those people, but let’s take a commercial break first.
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Let’s keep rolling. So…
People had different reasons to go fight in the Donbas.
Some did, in fact, believe in the reality of Ukrainian fascists and the narrative about a new patriotic war.
Others were cash-driven and career-minded. There were those who treated it as a historical reenactment.
Or those who thought that something great was happening, and they wanted to be a part of it.
We all know full well what happened next. In 2015, the top brass realized that instead of a quick and decisive victory,
like the one in Crimea, they got an all-out dirty brawl on their hands.
There were no political gains to be had from that bloody squabble, and it got the TV viewership down.
One day, the Novorossiya (an 18th-century term for the newly annexed lands)
project was canned, and all its tracks were removed from the public narratives for years.
Those armed men in breakaway republics were left to themselves.
The rowdiest, the most active, and the noisiest fighters and warlords were dying off like flies.
The smartest ones kept it to themselves and ran away. The rest were just abandoned.
Instead of a blooming Russian world, careers, and money, those people were left on poverty-stricken, barren lands.
They were getting by on scraps of Russian support. The cash was barely enough to pay the pensions and salaries.
Some money went to the fighters. There were those who sold humanitarian aid and counterfeited goods.
In general, however, Russians that went to fight in the Donbas in 2014/2015 were left to their own devices.
The Russian government sent a clear message that they weren’t wanted.
AFTERMATH
Where did the strife begin between the commandos of the DPR and LPR armies and Russian soldiers,
especially the mobilized ones? Why are their leaders sending Russian soldiers to die by battalions?
The DPR and LPR fighters are saying it’s all because Russians were cozy at home all those 8 years they fought.
Because Russia abandoned them for many years, and when it did show up, the results were underwhelming.
Of the bunch of people that Vladimir Putin could do without, the only one alive and kicking is Col. Igor Strelkov-Girkin.
He represents a pretty large demographic: people who were promised all the riches and glory of the world
but were left to fend for themselves, with the most active ones being purged every now and then.
He represents those who were living between a rock and a hard place.
They had Ukraine on one side and Russia on the other. Both aren’t happy about them,
both have court orders with their name on them or a bounty on their heads.
The group whose motto is “If you can’t fight, why would you start it?” and “Russia abandoned its soldiers”
wasn’t born today. The breakaway leaders understood long ago that they were used and disposed of.
There were not too many of them, though.
We are talking about thousands, worst-case scenario dozens of thousands of people.
It’s an insignificant number when spread across the population.
There were some Donbas veteran associations that tried to attract attention and sought justice,
but the anti-extremism police departments made short work of them.
WHAT NOW?
It’s a different story now. There are hundreds of thousands directly involved in that war.
If you take their families and friends into consideration, there are millions of people for whom that war is an everyday reality.
Why is Prigozhin so popular? Whether he wants it or not, he’s channeling the sentiment of those fully invested in the war,
life and limb, but they see the government playing some game.
They see the president disappear from the spotlight.
He’s trying to distance himself from the war and all the problems it connotes.
Those people see the propaganda machine talking about another war. They see themselves abandoned on a curb.
The government doesn’t give a damn about them.
If the war is pushed out of the public eye the closer we get to the election;
if the campaign looks like we think it will, there’ll be a new political party in Russia.
A political party not the way it’s enshrined in Russian law, but the way it’s meant to be:
an organized grassroots group representing the interests of a substantial demographic.
To sum it up, here’s a political conflict that’ll be unfolding over the next 10 months.
There’ll be those who pretend that nothing bad has happened. Moscow is getting a revamp, so is the subway.
The pensions are on the rise, the sanctions are useless, and the country is at its most stable.
The other side will say that the army has no ammunition, and there are no fresh troops at the frontline.
They’ll claim that mass mobilization is needed and that Russia is losing one city after another.
The Russian army is getting surrounded and decimated. The command is incompetent, and life is worthless.
That’s what they’ll say.
We see that confrontation going on already. One side is represented by the “special military operation” party.
They see the war as something far away, not having any effect on real people’s lives. The other is the party of war.
They understand that it’s a real deal. People are dying as a result of corruption and incompetence, they claim.
The closer we draw to the election, the more of a pain in the butt the latter party is going to be.
Those ranting about the real problems will be posing a threat.
The ones who keep reminding them that everything has gone sideways.
That capturing Kyiv in three days, weeks, or months, irrelevant now, has devolved into a battle for a backwater town
that’s now a symbol of resistance: a battle for Bakhmut.
The closer the election is going to get, the higher the demand to make war the norm. We’ll see less news from the battlefield.
The propaganda will become less bloodthirsty.
There’ll be attempts to silence everyone who will dare to argue that a new footbridge
in one of Russia’s regions isn’t a major event.
But those people aren’t going anywhere. And the stronger the push to evict them from the political agenda,
the angrier they’ll get. The worse it’s going to get at the frontline, the brighter their anger will glow.
If a string of defeats and countless casualties is going to draw a blind eye from the government,
that discontent will turn into a political demand.
Since that government started this war but has no idea how to fight, we need the one that does.
See the conflict? The propaganda, the whole election campaign will be tailored to the majority,
the ones that want to distance themselves from this war.
But the more the government is going to cater to that majority, the more it’ll annoy people
for whom that war is very real, and not a TV show.
In a sense, we’re going back to 2011.
That was the time when the majority was passive, but there was an active minority who got so fed up with the government,
they took to the streets to fight it.
The difference with 2011 is that the minority was fighting for the right to form the government.
People came up with catchy billboards and staged peaceful protests. Today’s minority has stakes set a lot higher:
their lives. Thus, their grievances with the government are a lot more serious. Another notable feature is that they are armed.
THREE PARTIES
The closer the March 2024 election gets, the more we’ll see of all the three parties that Russia is divided into today.
The first one we’re well acquainted with.
That’ll be the No War party. That’s us.
Our party can’t freely present itself in public view, but that’s around 15% of the nation.
People who are railing against the war and will be eager to vent their discontent the very moment they get a chance:
at the polling station.
Party number two is Leave Us Alone. That’s the one the Kremlin will be running on since that’s the majority.
The narrative will be combed into normalcy to lure them in.
But the prettier they try to make it, the more it’ll annoy the third party.
Those are the You Can’t Fight party.
Their key narrative is that Russia and Ukraine will come to an agreement, the elites will reclaim their villas,
the sanctions will be lifted, and they’ll be left to die in the trenches.
Right now, this party is a real player in the public arena. We are yet to find out what it’s going to do.
The main thing is that Putin’s regime is only backed by loyalists in this election.
Those are people who excluded themselves from the political scene and public life.
They are ready to accept any official reality.
All politically active people, regardless of their side, are the enemies of the current regime.
People who oppose the war in its entirety from one side and people who aren’t happy with the way
it’s waged from the other. There’s no chance of appeasing them.
See you tomorrow!