What I saw and heard in Moscow about the Ukraine war

Perhaps the most striking thing about Moscow today is its calm. This city has been barely touched by the war. In fact, you would hardly know there was a war going on unless you turned on the television – where propaganda is omnipresent. Any economic damage from Western sanctions has been offset by the large number of wealthy Russians who have returned as a result of the sanctions. The Russian government has deliberately limited conscription in Moscow and St Petersburg, and this, combined with a certain level of repression, explains why there have been so few protests by educated youth. Many of the younger Muscovites who fled Russia at the start of the war no longer fear conscription and have since returned.

As for the shops in central Moscow, I can’t say whether the Louis Vuitton handbags are real or Chinese knockoffs, but they are plentiful. And what’s more important, since the war, Russia has shown something that Germany once understood and that the rest of Europe should understand too: that in an uncertain world, it is very important to be able to grow all your own food.

In the provinces, it is reportedly quite different. There, conscription and casualties have really hit hard. But this is offset by the fact that the industrial provinces have experienced a huge economic boom due to military spending, while labor shortages have pushed up wages. There are numerous stories of technical workers well into their seventies being called back to work to improve their income and restore the self-respect they lost with the collapse of the 1990s. As I heard from many Russians, “the war finally forced us to do many of the things we should have been doing back in the 1990s.”

At least in Moscow, however, enthusiasm for the war is low. Both opinions Surveyand my own conversations with Russian elites suggest that a majority of Russians do not want to fight for a complete victory (whatever that means) and want to see a compromise peace now. However, even large majorities are against surrender and against the return of any land in the five Russian “annexed” provinces to Ukraine.

Among the elites, the desire for a compromise peace is combined with a rejection of the idea of ​​storming large Ukrainian cities by force, as was the case in Mariupol – and Kharkov is at least three times the size of Mariupol. “Even if we succeeded, our losses would be enormous, as would the civilians killed, and we would inherit huge piles of rubble that we would have to rebuild,” one Russian analyst told me. “I don’t think most Russians want that.”

Despite the efforts of some figures such as former President Dmitry Medvedev, hatred of the Ukrainian people (as opposed to the Ukrainian government) is very low – in part because so many Russians are themselves of Ukrainian origin. This is perhaps another reason why Putin is portraying this as a war with NATO, not with Ukraine. This was reminiscent of the attitude toward Russia of the people I met last year in the Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine, many of whom are themselves fully or partly Russian. They hated the Russian government, not the Russian people.

Various ideas for a compromise peace are floating around among foreign and security policy elites: a UN-ratified treaty guaranteeing Ukraine’s (and Russia’s) security without Ukraine joining NATO; the creation of demilitarized zones patrolled by UN peacekeepers rather than annexing more territory; territory swaps in which Russia would return land in Kharkov to Ukraine in exchange for land in Donbass or Zaporozhye. However, the vast majority of Russian analysts I spoke to believe that only the US can initiate peace talks and that this will not happen before the US elections, if at all.

The general mood therefore seems to be one of acceptance of the inevitability of another war rather than positive enthusiasm for war; and the Putin government seems content with that. Putin remains very suspicious of the Russian people; so far he has refused to mobilize more than a fraction of the available Russian troops. This regime does not want mass participation and is therefore also suspicious of mass enthusiasm. Its maxim seems to be more like: “Calm is the first duty of every citizen.”

A German version of this article appeared in the Berliner Zeitung on June 29, 2024.