For two weeks now, soldiers of what Russian President Vladimir Putin considers a “Nazi regime” have been pouring over the border in the first foreign occupation of Russia since World War II. Putin and his propaganda apparatus, from the media to schools to the scholars rewriting history books, have been drumming up this moment: the great threat to Russia’s very survival as a nation on par with the real Nazi invasion in 1941. No matter where they live or what they do, Russians cannot escape the constant barrage of World War II allegories beckoning them to mobilize against any invader.
For two weeks now, soldiers of what Russian President Vladimir Putin considers a “Nazi regime” have been pouring over the border in the first foreign occupation of Russia since World War II. Putin and his propaganda apparatus, from the media to schools to the scholars rewriting history books, have been drumming up this moment: the great threat to Russia’s very survival as a nation on par with the real Nazi invasion in 1941. No matter where they live or what they do, Russians cannot escape the constant barrage of World War II allegories beckoning them to mobilize against any invader.
Yet the response of most Russians to Ukraine’s offensive into Kursk, now entering its third week, has been a passive, fatalistic shrug.
Indeed, Ukraine’s occupation of around 1,000 square kilometers of sacred Russian soil—which Putin’s forces are still struggling to contain—has popped numerous bubbles in Russia and, by extension, in the West’s perception of the regime’s strength and motivations for waging the war.
The first bubble to pop was the Kremlin’s decadeslong propaganda about the supposed existential threat to Russia emanating from Ukraine. As Johns Hopkins international relations professor Eugene Finkel rhetorically asked on X: “By the way, have you noticed the wave of nationalist fervor and mobilization washing over Russia in response to a military invasion?” On the contrary, there has been no massive public outcry, no spontaneous formation of militias, and no long lines of volunteers at the recruitment offices. The Russian military now offers absurdly enormous sign-up bonuses amounting to more than the average Russian’s annual salary, or there would be no takers at all. No impassioned speeches have rallied Russians to the motherland’s defense, and no banners with patriotic slogans adorn Moscow’s streets. The Kremlin has not even ordered a general mobilization to fend off the invasion. Meanwhile, the Russian government’s chief spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, couldn’t even be bothered to interrupt his vacation.
Most Russian anger is directed against Moscow, not the supposed Nazis from Kyiv. Kremlin-controlled pollsters have been registering a sharp uptick in dissatisfaction with the government. Much of that anger is coming from the Kursk region’s residents, including more than 100,000 people who fled the fighting. Many of them complained about being abandoned and neglected by their local authorities and Moscow. To the great disappointment of patriotic bloggers, no one in Kursk has resisted, joined partisan groups, or even protested against the occupiers, as happened in innumerable places in Ukraine. All over Russia, mothers of conscripts are protesting against their untrained sons being deployed in an active war zone. For those who care to look, social media and messaging channels are full of videos showing mass surrenders of Russian soldiers, many of them inexperienced teenage conscripts.
But the rest of the Russian public, whether due to self-preservation, “learned helplessness,” or some other reason, doesn’t seem to care either way whether a part of Russia is now foreign-occupied or not. Russians seem to grasp that, contrary to their own propaganda, Ukrainians aren’t trying to destroy Russia but only get their country back. Even pro-war television pundits point out that Kyiv could use occupied areas of Russia in a land-for-land trade—in other words, they correctly see the incursion as part of a strategy to evict Russia from Ukraine, not to threaten Russia itself.
The second bubble Ukraine’s incursion has popped is Putin’s image as an authoritarian leader, which is built on strength, order, and the promise to make Russia great again. His evident inability to defend the country’s borders makes Putin, who has tied his reign to the restoration of Russia’s lost empire, look weak.
Putin has almost disappeared from public view as the Kremlin attempts to downplay the invasion. On the Kremlin’s official website, announcements in stilted bureaucratese seem designed to normalize a code-red event. In a speech to the Russian Security Council, Putin euphemistically referred to the invasion as a “counterterrorist situation.” In calling on local authorities in Kursk to deal with the “situation” and otherwise remaining mostly absent, Putin appears eager to distance himself from the chaos at the border.
Russian state television took several days before making Kursk its top news story—but never interrupted its regular entertainment programming. The news reports added another dash of absurdity, as the Russian army’s supposed victories kept happening closer and closer to Moscow before finally slowing down last week.
In the TV talk shows, prominent pundits have been tearing at the propaganda edifice. One proposed “sacrificing” Russia’s border regions to Ukraine—hardly a vision of strength. Another called on the leadership to stop the lies and be more honest about military setbacks, while a third wanted strict censorship to shield the populace from embarrassments. For a Kremlin-controlled media apparatus, the cacophony was a refreshing absence of the usual coordinated messaging. On Telegram channels, where Kremlin control doesn’t reach as far, there has been even more candor.
Third, by taking the war to Russian territory, Ukraine has popped the bubble of the Kremlin threats to escalate the war, based on the idea that Russia’s existence—rather than Ukraine’s—was somehow at stake. The supposed threat from NATO is no longer a talking point. Russia has not called on its own defense alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, as one would expect if its existence were at stake. And there has been surprisingly little screaming about German-built tanks advancing in Kursk, where the largest tank battle of World War II took place.
In 2016, Putin infamously claimed that Russia’s borders don’t end anywhere. Today, it turns out that they don’t begin at any particular point, either. This is perhaps the most significant result of Ukraine’s incursion into Russian territory. So far, each of Putin’s threats, including nuclear ones, have turned out to be hollow—not even Russia’s actual border seems to be a “red line.” Thus, another bubble Kursk has popped is the Western theory of escalation and red lines that make Russia look much stronger and more resolute than it really is.
Finally, the invasion punctures the notion that Russians collectively support the war, just because government-sponsored polls say so. It appears that most just take their cue from Putin: In case of trouble, just ignore it and hope it goes away.
The post In Russia, Ukraine’s Invasion Pops Putin’s Bubbles appeared first on Foreign Policy.
