©Reuters. FILE PHOTO: Russian President Vladimir Putin walks to deliver his annual speech to the Federal Assembly, in Moscow, Russia, February 29, 2024. Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Kremlin via REUTERS/file Photo
By Guy Faulconbridge
MOSCOW (Reuters) – In a Russia at war, there is only one real candidate and only one winner: Vladimir Putin.
As Russians have begun voting in the March 15-17 elections across the country’s 11 time zones, the 71-year-old former KGB lieutenant colonel’s popularity is high, amid strong support for the war in Ukraine.
“I support Putin and, of course, I will vote for him,” said Lyudmila Petrova, 46, who was buying counterfeit Chinese-made New Balance sneakers in southern Moscow at one of Russia’s largest wholesale markets.
“Putin has raised Russia from its knees. And Russia will defeat the West and Ukraine. You cannot defeat Russia, ever,” Petrova said. “Have you in the West gone completely crazy? What does Ukraine have to do with you?”
The West sees Putin as an autocrat, a war criminal, a murderer and even, as US President Joe Biden said last month, a “crazy son of a bitch” who US officials say has enslaved Russia in a corrupt dictatorship leading to strategic ruin.
But in Russia the war has helped Putin tighten his grip on power and increase his popularity among Russians, according to polls and interviews with senior Russian sources.
“Be in no doubt: This is a job for life,” said a powerful Russian familiar with the thinking at the top of the Kremlin. He spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity to express his views on political issues.
“Putin has no competitor, he is on a completely different level. The West has made a very serious mistake by helping to unify a large part of the Russian elite and the Russian population around Putin with its sanctions and its defamation of Russia.”
Another Russian source said Putin’s tenure as leader is not a matter of politics but of his health, which appears robust. He has no visible successor.
Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, after eight years of conflict in eastern Ukraine between Kiev’s forces on the one hand and pro-Russian Ukrainians and Russian representatives on the other.
Tens of thousands of soldiers were killed and many more wounded on both sides, thousands of Ukrainian civilians died, and Ukraine’s economy and infrastructure suffered hundreds of billions of dollars in damage.
The West, which believes Putin is a threat far beyond the former Soviet Union, has provided Ukraine with hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of high-level aid, weapons and intelligence. Western leaders accuse Putin of waging a brutal imperial-style war aimed at restoring Russia’s global clout.
WAR WITH THE WEST
Putin sees the war as part of an existential battle with a declining and decadent West that he says has humiliated Russia since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, encroaching on what Putin sees as Moscow’s sphere of influence, including Ukraine.
This pleases many Russians who are suspicious of the West’s policies and intentions, if not its consumer goods. Senior Kremlin officials, some wearing sports sweatshirts reading “Putin’s Team,” openly talk about war with NATO.
According to the Levada Center, a respected Russian pollster, Putin’s approval rating is currently 86%, up from 71% just before the invasion of Ukraine. Putin’s rating also jumped during the 2008 war with Georgia and Ukraine’s 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Russian television and a sophisticated social media operation project Putin as a strong patriot and deride Western leaders like Biden as weak, foolish and deceitful.
“For many Russians, inspired partly by propaganda but mostly by their inner beliefs, Russia is engaged in a centuries-old struggle with the West – and what is currently happening is an episode of this struggle,” said Alexei Levinson, chief of sociocultural research at Levada, he told Reuters.
“Those who express these feelings in our surveys see themselves as somehow participants in this struggle with the West. They are like football fans who imagine themselves to be participants in the football match.”
While some within the Russian elite are skeptical about continuing the war, they have nothing to gain and much to lose by opposing the Kremlin – as the failed mutiny of Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner mercenary group, demonstrated in 2023.
Prigozhin’s plane crashed on August 23, two months after the mutiny.
Putin leaves little to chance. After the full-scale invasion, the authorities cracked down on any sign of dissent. Hundreds of people have been arrested for expressing their opposition and protests are banned.
The state media, which dominates Russian airwaves, is staunchly loyal to Putin. The task of the three rival candidates is to lose. None of their approval ratings are above 6%.
An election official told Boris Nadezhdin, a pacifist candidate who was excluded despite collecting tens of thousands of signatures to register, that he should focus on his own failures rather than complain.
The Kremlin’s main concern is ensuring high voter turnout. Some state-owned company managers ordered employees to vote and send photographs of their ballots, six sources told Reuters. ATMs also remind Russians to vote.
The leaders of Russia’s fragmented opposition are abroad, in prison, silent or dead.
Alexei Navalny, Russia’s most prominent opposition leader, died on February 16 in the Arctic penal colony “Polar Wolf”, the prison service said. His widow, Yulia, called on Russians to show up at polling stations at noon on March 17 to show their opposition.
Navalny had described Putin’s Russia as a fragile criminal state run by thieves, flatterers and spies who only care about money. He had long predicted that Russia could face seismic political turmoil, including revolution.
Asked whether Putin was strong or weak, Leonid Volkov, a top Navalny aide, said: “The dinosaurs were very strong before they became extinct.”
Shortly after speaking to Reuters in Vilnius, Volkov said he had been attacked with a hammer in an attack that Lithuania blamed on Russia. The Kremlin declined to comment on the incident.
From the court, where he was sentenced last month to 2 1/2 years in prison for “discrediting the armed forces”, veteran Russian rights activist Oleg Orlov compared Putin’s Russia to something out of a Franz Kafka novel or Vladimir Sorokin.
“Those who brought our country into the pit it is in now represent the old, the decrepit, the obsolete,” Orlov said.
“They have no sense of the future, only false images of the past, only mirages of ‘imperial greatness’. And they are pushing Russia backwards, into dystopia.”
BLOOD AND TREASURE
The war cost many thousands of Russian lives, the Russian army and security services failed to carry out a short victorious war and mobilize the frightened parts of the population.
But Western sanctions have so far failed to sink the Russian economy, Putin has managed to recruit hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers and tilted Russia sharply towards superpower China.
Russia’s war-focused economy grew 3.6% last year and real wages rose 7.8%, but it faces labor shortages, investment shortages and population decline, data show. data.
Putin believes he has more power in Ukraine than in the United States and can keep Russia in the fight for many more years, according to three Russian sources.
“The war is not necessarily bad for the economy in the short term,” said a Russian source who asked not to be named.
“Putin can fight as long as he wants.”