Earlier this week, Vladimir Putin held a televised meeting with Alexei Smirnov, the acting governor of the Kursk region, to discuss the impact of Ukraine’s cross-border attack. “Today, 28 settlements are under enemy control,” Smirnov said. “The depth of penetration in Kursk region is 12km. The frontline width is 40km.” At that, Putin cut him off. “Listen, the military department will report to you about depth and width,” he said. “Tell us about the socioeconomic situation and aid.”
The exchange was unintentionally revealing, Olga Vlasova said. “You could hear the level of anxiety in the governor’s voice later in the meeting. It was quite clear that he wasn’t prepared for the war to be fought on his territory. And when he tried to share the information that he had, Putin wouldn’t allow it. He wants to stop the communication of anything that will raise the level of anxiety in Russian society.”
That has been a broadly successful approach throughout the war in Ukraine, building on 20 years of work by the Kremlin “to stop people thinking about politics”, Vlasova said. “But this is the biggest challenge to that method since Prigozhin’s rebellion, and we are seeing the same silencing strategies at play in response.”
The state of the incursion
Since Ukrainian forces crossed the border with Kursk region on 6 August, they have taken control of about 1,000 square kilometres of Russian territory, Ukraine’s armed forces commander in chief, Col Gen Oleksandr Syrsky, claimed on Monday. Since then, Zelenskiy claims that they have continued to advance. The city of Sudzha (pictured top) is said to be the subject of heavy fighting.
While Russian officials claim the situation is under control, up to 200,000 civilians have fled their homes or been evacuated, and Ukrainian drone attacks have hit the Kursk, Voronezh, Belgorod and Nizhny Novgorod regions. In this piece from the Sudzha border crossing area, Dan Sabbagh reports that “the advance has been such that there are tentative signs that some Ukrainian areas are no longer being hit because Russian guns have been pushed back”.
Meanwhile, the Kremlin has been sending reinforcements to the region, with claims from Kyiv that a small number of units are being redeployed from the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson sectors of the frontline in southern Ukraine. In this analysis piece, Dan notes that most experts say there is only evidence “select elements of Russian irregular units” had been moved so far. The response appears to have been “slow and poorly coordinated”, Shaun Walker wrote on Tuesday, with little substantial resistance in some areas and hundreds of Russian soldiers captured by Ukraine.
The story Russians are hearing
The Kremlin appeared to be taken by surprise by the Ukrainian advance, and its propaganda response has seemed correspondingly improvised and inconsistent: on the one hand, the situation is very serious; on the other, it is under control. “In the first days, you could observe that they were using the same communications strategy that they had for the terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow,” Vlasova said. “They were focusing on people who were helping each other, talking about civilians who had to leave their homes and the money they were getting from the state, but not giving details about the attack itself.”
At the same time, the BBC reported that even pro-Kremlin newspapers gave a grudging respect to the assault, with descriptions of “a strong move with unpleasant consequences for our side” and admissions that “the enemy is acting skilfully and daringly”. But the Russian defence ministry claims to have killed 2,300 Ukrainians in the area since last week, and yesterday Maj Gen Apti Alaudinov, deputy chief of the main military political directorate of the Russian armed forces, was quoted by the Tass news agency as saying that “the enemy is really suffering very large losses” and “the situation is under control”.
“They acknowledge that there are troops in Russian territory, but say that nearly no territory is occupied,” Vlasova said. “They avoid numbers so that no one can really grasp the scale of the invasion.” Above all, she added, the message being sent to ordinary Russians is a familiar one: “You shouldn’t pay attention to it, because the Kremlin knows what it’s doing and you don’t have to worry. It is all aimed at reducing social anxiety.”
So far, Ekaterina Schulmann of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin told Shaun Walker, analysis of news consumption data suggests that there has been no significant spike in public interest over the incursion. “Overall, routinising the event seems to be working so far, because it unites the wishes of the elites and the people alike,” she said.
The audience Putin is talking to
Last November, Denis Volkov of the respected independent Levada Center polling group described three main groups in Russian society: those who are “opposed to authoritarianism and bloodshed” and in some cases express their views openly; “turbo-patriots” who vociferously back Putin and the invasion of Ukraine; and an apathetic majority, who live in a state of “learned indifference” and see no realistic alternative to Putin. Overall, he said, support for the war has averaged about 75%.
This third group are the same ones who Vlasova says are the target of Putin’s “politics of pacification” today. “It is very hard to analyse what they are thinking or talking about,” she said. “We have to be careful when we analyse TV propaganda or Telegram channels, because they are ultimately aimed at people who are politicised to some extent and interested in what is going on. That’s not the majority of the population at all – most people watch entertainment [programmes], or post about their pets. So you have to look at the media that may reach those parts of society.
“The coverage they are seeing, in contrast to the much more aggressive propaganda programmes, carries a pacifying message – that sanctions are not working, that western countries are suffering, that there is no war, just a special military operation,” she says. “They highlight economic news that portrays the government as successful, and they say that the mobilisation will only touch 1% of the population. The message is that normal life continues.”
How they might respond
You might wonder whether, even among the most apathetic segment of the public, the shocking news that the war is now being fought within Russia itself could challenge the belief that everything is fine. “There is always hope of that,” Vlasova said. “The anxiety that is being suppressed may come out somehow one day. But what you have to remember is that the level of anxiety rose at the start of the war, and people got used to it.
“Yes, they are anxious. But after the shock of the first month, most people began to justify the situation, or to walk away from it. Many people ask themselves: what is the point of dwelling on the war? We only have one life. And so they try to escape thinking about the news.”
