By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

As Joshua Yaffa recently commented, the push to claim new territory and mobilize more troops are unlikely to reverse Russia’s losses on the battlefield—but it could move the war into its most dangerous phase yet. On September 21, 2022, when Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his large-scale mobilization of fighting-age men, it was seen as a dramatic move toward total war. No longer could the Kremlin downplay the war in Ukraine as a mere “special operation” in which ordinary Russians had little involvement? Fearful of what was to come, hundreds of thousands of young men fled the country as rumors circulated that the security services would close the borders to prevent more people from leaving—and take drastic measures to pressure those who had left to return and fight. Many also assumed that Putin’s order would be followed by a second, even broader draft and that Russian society would soon be put on a continual war footing.

Yet few of these rumors proved true. For the remainder of 2022, and despite the war's first anniversary in late February, Russia’s borders remained open, and a second mobilization never happened. Instead, the country was left in a state of “partial mobilization,” as Putin had called it. Indeed, despite huge numbers of Russian casualties in Ukraine, not every family has been affected, and for many middle-class Russians, life has continued much as it did before.

The surprising reality of the September mobilization has highlighted a larger feature of Putin’s war in Ukraine. Often, the Kremlin has initially appeared to take a maximalist course. Instead of invading eastern Ukraine, it launched a full-scale assault on the country and tried to take Kyiv. In addition to deploying tanks, missiles, and heavy artillery, Putin has repeatedly threatened to use nuclear weapons. And he has seemingly been willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of men to fuel his war. At home, meanwhile, the government has announced extreme measures to clamp down on the Russian media and popular dissent and put the Russian economy on a war footing.

Yet many of these moves have been considerably less severe in practice than they seem on paper. Despite increasing attacks on civilian areas in Ukraine, Russia has held back from using its full arsenal. And although Putin has done much to tighten his grip on Russian society in the year since the invasion, many of his most far-reaching domestic measures have been incompletely implemented. Again and again, the Kremlin has stopped short of total militarization and total mobilization—whether of the economy or society at large.

By many indications, this partial approach to total war is not haphazard nor simply the result of failed execution. Instead, Russia appears to be pursuing a deliberate strategy aimed at the West and its population. By staking out a maximalist stance on the war, the Kremlin can suggest to the West that it is prepared to do whatever it takes to win in Ukraine without necessarily having to make good on its threats. At home, meanwhile, the Russian government can convey to ordinary Russians that it can tighten the screws further but is not going out of its way to alienate the population. In both cases, the strategy offers Putin an open path toward further escalation without immediate costs.

 

Selective Censorship, Narrow Nationalization

Since the opening weeks of the invasion in February 2022, the Kremlin’s calibrated actions have often defied its total-war rhetoric. Consider how the government has sought to manage Russian society. The military offensive was immediately followed by a frontal attack on Russia’s independent factories and banks after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Yet the 2022 draft legislation was never signed into law, and foreign companies were mostly left to make arrangements about their Russian assets. In October, the government ordered industries crucial for the war effort to come under direct state control via a new special coordinating council on military supplies. But fears of a completely militarized economy have proved to be overblown.

 

President Putin, Not General Stalin

To the extent that Russia is seeking to fight a total war, as many Western commentators have suggested, Putin’s handling of the mobilization question has been especially striking. Not only has the Kremlin avoided a second wave of mobilization, despite significant manpower demands, but it has also used mercenaries from the Wagner Group, some of whom have been recruited from Russian prisons. In this way, rather than pursue a full-scale mobilization, the Russian government has, for the time being, opted to use other resources while keeping the mobilization only partial. The tactic appears to be serving its purpose: in recent weeks, the Wagner Group has been the only unit on the offensive, and although it has suffered heavy casualties, its losses are not of concern to the military.

At the same time, Putin has shown relative restraint toward government officials or agencies implicated in some of the war’s failures or seemingly disagreeing with his policies. Historically, when authoritarian regimes go to war, they almost always use repression to make the country more unified, usually by ruthlessly attacking perceived internal enemies. Typically, such crackdowns are aimed at those who dissent from the leader’s views and elites to ensure they do not waiver from the official line. Such repression can sometimes be systematic, for example, in Russia under Stalin and other leaders. Indeed, Putin seemed to be firmly on this path even before the invasion, sending high-level officials, governors, and officers of Russia’s FSB security service to jail by the dozens.

Yet when the invasion started and quickly went badly, Putin limited his anger toward the siloviki, the security elite. The FSB’s Fifth Service, the arm of the agency in charge of keeping an eye on Russia’s immediate neighbors, was the first to receive the president’s wrath. It was the Fifth Service that had briefed Putin about the political situation in Ukraine and suggested, incorrectly, that the government in Kyiv would quickly collapse. In March 2022, the head of the service, Sergei Beseda, was secretly placed under house arrest and was soon shuffled off to the Lefortovo Prison. Leading political prisoners and spies have long been sent to this notorious prison.

Next, it was the National Guard’s turn: in the same month, the deputy head of the National Guard, Roman Gavrilov, was forced into early retirement: he had been in charge of supplying the National Guard’s special forces, which had been sent to war woefully underequipped. Some units had been given antiriot gear instead of armor and ammunition as if they had expected to meet protesters on the streets of Kyiv, not Ukrainian troops. There were rumors that Gavrilov had been arrested and that various army generals would soon be fired or imprisoned as retribution for the army’s poor performance on the battlefield.

But then, within a few weeks, the repressions suddenly stopped. Some were even undone: Sergei Beseda was released and returned to his office in Lubyanka and then deliberately displayed at several public events. Moreover, in February 2023, his son, Alexander Beseda, was promoted remarkably to the head of the government department that oversees all the security agencies.

With Russia facing increasing pressure from the West and humiliation on the battlefield, hard-line parliamentarians, propagandists, and members of the secret services have been evoking Stalinism as an example of a way to run the country properly during wartime. And some observers, noting the extreme measures that have been mooted, have suggested that Putin is already following a Stalinist playbook. But such an approach would require much more dramatic steps than Putin's. During World War II, the entire Soviet government was militarized; even Stalin and his ministers wore uniforms and assumed the rank of general. The economy and the society at large were completely mobilized and turned into what became known as a “home front,” with parts of the population and entire factories moved to other regions under orders of the Stalin government. For all the talk, the Russian government never adopted a full-scale Stalinist approach to managing the war at home.

Finally, there is the issue of nuclear weapons. Since at least the summer of 2022, Putin has considered using a tactical nuclear weapon to change the situation in Russia’s favor. (In September, he announced that Russia was prepared to use “all available means” in its war and that “this was not a bluff.”) Even setting aside the Kremlin’s rhetoric, hard-liners close to the regime have suggested that the Russian military and Putin considered using a tactical nuclear weapon—for instance, against the defenders of Mariupol in the spring of 2022. Despite major Russian setbacks, however, Putin did not choose that path. Instead, he has doubled down on conventional war, amplified via mobilization and massive airstrikes on Ukrainian infrastructure.

 

Space To Escalate

Throughout the past year, then—arguably the most difficult year for Putin in more than two decades in power—the Russian president time and again escalated on many fronts, at home, and on the battlefield. And yet he has never entirely followed through in bringing Russia into a total war. Why?

Since the early stages of the war, the total-war concept has been in Putin’s thoughts. In April 2022, Putin told the Duma that “all parliamentary parties, despite their competition with each other, invariably come out with a unified position when it comes to basic national interests, to solving issues of defense and security of our Fatherland,” making clear that no debate about the war was to be tolerated. Then, in July, Putin told the leaders of Russia’s political parties that the collective West had started the war in Ukraine, indicating that the war in Ukraine is part of the centuries-long existential battle between Russia and the West. And he made his New Year address flanked by soldiers.

Yet judging by Russia’s actions, it has sought to do something different from wage total war. Throughout 2022, the Kremlin showed that more drastic options were available to it: it could always do more. But it also showed that, for the time being, it was content only to go so far. The point here was that the Kremlin has staked out space to escalate by laying out these extreme options—nationalizing industry, mobilizing the economy, pursuing systematic repression, or even using tactical nuclear attacks. It has already announced, in effect, what more it could do, whether on the battlefield or in conducting repressions at home.

For Putin, this approach serves multiple purposes. The primary target may be Western governments, which are deeply concerned about the possibility of uncontrollable escalation. The Kremlin is adamant about showing them that it has many options but has thus far kept things under control—unlike Kyiv, which in its desperation is, according to Russia, prone to escalation. At home, Moscow’s approach also serves another purpose: to demonstrate that it can calibrate its response to Western sanctions and military failures and does not need to go all the way until it truly must.

 

Worse To Come

Putin’s halfway strategy has scored some notable successes. Throughout 2022, for example, the Russian economy was not hobbled by excessive militarization or government control. On the contrary, Russia’s economic contraction was smaller than most Western analysts predicted. Moreover, the strategy also helped Putin maintain a fine balance between tightening the rules and not alienating Russia’s economically active urban middle class. For their part, many ordinary Russians have been glad to ignore the war as much as possible, and the Kremlin’s strategy has skillfully played on these feelings: it has allowed many Russians to pretend that they will not be affected by the war.

Indeed, the strategy has also been aimed at those who fled into exile. Many Russian men who went abroad to avoid being mobilized have since been signaled that they will not be punished at home if they return. On February 1, for example, Russia’s Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov reported to Putin that 9,000 “illegally mobilized citizens” were supposed to be exempt from mobilization because they perform critical jobs in IT or the banking financial system—had already been returned home. The Russian authorities are also seeking ways to lure the country’s exiled IT specialists—which it needs to sustain the war effort—back to Russia. The government has promised exemption from the draft and a free plane ticket home for workers in this category. Putin knows his people well: some Russians, desperate to believe there is a way back to prewar reality, are returning to Russia thanks to this strategy.

In some crucial areas, Putin’s incremental approach has backfired. For example, in the months since the war started, many independent journalists, investigators, and bloggers who had originally fled the country have launched their own YouTube channels, taking advantage of the lack of censorship. Now, dozens of political shows, interviews, and uncensored videos allow Russians to get the truth about the war daily. Throughout the past year, many people have developed a habit of getting their news from YouTube, including older Russians and young people. Indeed, it was through YouTube and Telegram that many Russians learned of the massacre of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha and the humiliation of Russian troops in Kherson.

At the same time, millions of Instagram users have learned to use virtual private network (VPN) services to access the platform. As a result, though many were not previously interested in political content, they now can access alternative news sources about the war from the non-Russian internet. Thus, by the time of the war’s first anniversary in late February, much of Russia’s urban population could circumvent Russia’s internet censorship. (So far, however, it has not greatly impacted public opinion because many still choose to believe the government’s propaganda.)

Nevertheless, in the first year of the war, Putin’s partial escalation strategy has generally served him well. It has allowed him to maintain political stability through intimidation and indifference. Internationally and domestically, it has helped him prepare Russia for a very long war without making the sacrifices that might ultimately cause the population to rebel. And above all, it has given him flexibility. The more radical options—including economic nationalization and full mobilization—are still open, and the country’s bureaucracy is already prepared to set them in motion.  

The question is, How long can this not-quite-total war be sustained? The longer the war goes on, the more Putin will have to take some of the more drastic steps he has threatened. And at some point, he will run out of room to play with.

 

 

For updates click hompage here