Editor's note: This is the second installment of a series looking at how Russia has changed since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The first can be found here.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin first launched his ''special military operation'' in Ukraine in February 2022, he likely envisioned that his 2023 — and certainly his 2024 — annual address to lawmakers would be triumphant. Instead, on Feb. 14, 2024, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov admitted that Russia's operation had gone on ''somewhat longer than planned'' but assured all of its goals would still be achieved. That same day, Putin said that his only regret regarding the war was not having started it earlier. As Putin prepares his second wartime annual address to Russia's Federal Assembly on Feb. 29, a Russian victory in Ukraine appears increasingly likely but it is far from assured.
A year ago, we examined how Russia's invasion of Ukraine had come with significant strategic costs for Moscow and how the subsequent year of war had internally changed Russia. The second anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the upcoming address to the nation ahead of Putin's re-election next month offer an ideal occasion to again consider how Russia has and will continue to change as a result of the war.
Domestic Changes Far Beyond the Frontlines
From afar, Putin's control over a hostile, anti-Western and domestically repressive state in the midst of a war of attrition in Ukraine appears unshakable. The Russian economy has not cracked in the ways that many experts initially expected, while the Kremlin has eradicated almost all manifestations of internal opposition — both against the war and Putin himself. The numbers, however, begin to tell a different story. Opinion polls, despite being unreliable in absolute terms in Russia and particularly so in wartime, suggest that while support for Putin remains high, support from the war has begun to cool.
Thus, while the situation on the frontline over the past year has been relatively stagnant compared with 2022, the war has still evolved in ways that have had monumental implications for the Russian homefront, the Russian population and the Kremlin itself.
First and foremost, despite slow Russian progress on the battlefield, the Ukrainian army has inflicted a number of harrowing blows to Russia proper, its military-industrial complex and the country's national pride. Over the summer of 2023, Ukraine attacked downtown Moscow on a handful of occasions, while attacks have also reached Russian gas and oil export facilities around St. Petersburg and on the Black Sea Coast, threatening Russia's future ability to process and export some of its most vital export commodities should Ukraine ramp up its attacks. Sabotage groups cooperating with Ukraine's military intelligence agencies have inflicted damage on Russian critical infrastructure, including the bombing of a railway tunnel on Dec. 1, 2023. Attacks on occupied Crimea and the sinking of a large percentage of Russia's Black Sea Fleet have also driven the Russian navy to find shelter in harbors far away from Ukraine, implying higher costs for the military and the Russian navy, as well as highlighting political failures among the Russian leadership due to the inability to protect what the Kremlin claims as its own territory. In doing so, Ukraine has brought the war to Russia, raising the political stakes for the Kremlin and Russian military command while crossing a psychological barrier for many Russians.
The second year of Russia's war witnessed a whirlwind of violent events taking place inside the country. Multiple assassination attempts on pro-war bloggers — one resulting in the death of a well-known Russian military blogger, Vladlen Tatarsky, in St. Petersburg — demonstrated a radicalization of the anti-war and pro-war factions of society, as pro-war media personalities responded with calls for extremely harsh repressions of all anti-war elements of society. Yevgeny Prigozhin's Wagner mutiny on June 23 also brought the reality of the war to the streets of Russia, while his ultimate death consolidated the regime by demonstrating the risks and perils of voicing any sort of disagreement with the Kremlin (even if broadly in support of its war aims).
Politically, the continuation of the war has strengthened the Kremlin's hand at squashing the slightest forms of dissent. The primary vehicle to do this has been to tie any domestic opposition to the Kremlin to the many Russians who have fled abroad because of the war and who are being targeted by Russian authorities because of their anti-war sentiments. On Feb. 8, Russian authorities barred anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin from running in the presidential election after state propagandists claimed he was supported by ''traitors abroad.'' This move demonstrated the Kremlin's growing resolve to squash any dissent and came only weeks after Russian lawmakers passed a bill on Jan. 31 allowing authorities to confiscate assets of people who ''discredit'' the Russian military by opposing the war in Ukraine. In this context, the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny in prison on Feb. 16 merely served as the latest opportunity to crack down on dissent and further tie domestic opponents to foreign states, where nearly all of Navalny's associates now reside.
However, the repressions have not been isolated to Russia's liberal opposition. Moscow has also cracked down on ultranationalist escalation advocates and far-right figures, most notably nationalist agitator and Donbas war instigator Igor Girkin, which has intimidated war bloggers and nationalists into remaining distinctively supportive of Putin despite growing public disenchantment.
Somewhat tellingly, on Feb. 12, Sergey Karaganov, the chairman of Russia's Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, noted that the war had ''made us different'' and caused Russians to completely expel their pro-Western elite. It was merely a ''pity,'' he said, that Russia was expending so many human and economic resources, but noted that this was necessary because the war would ''secure the safety and prosperity of all future Russian generations'' and ''save the entire world.'' Karaganov's remarks exemplify just how ubiquitous such talk about how the war has allegedly changed the Russian people has become over the past two years. Pro-war propagandists' claims that Russians are different — better — from their European neighbors and are changing because of the invasion of Ukraine is not new rhetoric. However, as time goes on, the number of Russians actually believing and acting as though statements like this are true will likely rise, inevitably affecting how Russians view their country, the war and the world more broadly in both the near and long term.
As the Kremlin pushes to connect the war with everyday life in Russia and promote these anti-Western societal changes, one is thus left to wonder whether the discrepancy between Russians' growing disenchantment regarding the war's fallout, and the real changes being engineered by the government's ideology and programs, will eventually backfire on the Kremlin. The changes already taking place among the Russian people, even if subtle, offer a framework that can help understand this paradox.
The Unassailable Iron Fist of the Kremlin
Russia's repressive measures mean that despite growing pressure points from the ongoing war in Ukraine, there is no serious threat to the Kremlin or stability in Russia, at least not in the next year. Developments in the second year of the war have effectively empowered the Kremlin's heavy hand and will enable Moscow, in the short run, to avoid most negative consequences stemming from continued hostilities and maintain standards of living for most of the country via targeted social and economic support measures.
On Feb. 29, Putin will give his annual address to the Federal Assembly, which will offer a glimpse into the fundamental means by which Moscow plans to further achieve this in the coming year. The most important of these will be increased social payments that the Russian government has made over the last year, such as pension increases, as well as the announcement of new payments, which will likely be directed toward supporting children and childbirth. While not fully compensating for high inflation, these measures will help foster political stability by putting more money into the hands of the Russian people and making the Russian government appear proactive in responding to wartime economic difficulties. They will also ensure consumption, a proxy indicator for living standards, remains stable for the foreseeable future. These payments are possible because Russia's sovereign wealth fund and budget are not in danger of exhaustion amid sufficiently high oil export revenues this year and likely the next, even though budget constraints will grow over time. Indeed, Russia's nominal economic growth rate is currently — and may remain — higher than that of many European countries in the years ahead, and will further blunt the effects of inflation felt by most Russians.
Putin's upcoming speech will also focus on the need to continue prioritizing the war and military-industrial complex amid Russia's fight for survival against the ''evil of the Collective West,'' a euphemism that the Kremlin uses to blame the West for the war. In addition, the Russian president's annual address to lawmakers has historically offered a format to unveil new weapons intended to increase perceptions of Russian power — a particular possibility during Putin's speech this year amid recent Western concerns over Russia testing anti-satellite weapons. While these pronouncements and the aforementioned economic measures will not further bolster regime support on their own, they are likely necessary to reassure Russians that any hardships felt now and in the coming years will not be permanent or in vain.
Recent Russian tactical victories in Ukraine will feature heavily in the speech and bolster the Kremlin's argument that the costs of the war are worth it because victory is not too far off. On Feb. 17, Russian troops took the Ukrainian city of Avdiivka after Ukrainian troops withdrew, citing shell starvation and lack of equipment as fatal to their defense of the city.
Meanwhile, Western financial support for Ukraine has begun to wane at the same time that Russia is manufacturing unprecedented amounts of artillery shells, drones and other weaponry, with over $60 billion worth of crucial aid for Kyiv still stalled in the U.S. Congress. Incremental Russian gains combined with a lack of new support for Ukraine will enable the Kremlin to signal to Russians that everything is going according to plan.
Domestically, regional protests will be key to watch, such as those in Bashkortostan on Jan. 15, when thousands of ethnic Bashkirs gathered to oppose the sentencing of an ethnic activist to years in prison. This and similar protests in Russia's regions demonstrate that harmony between Moscow and its regions is only a pretense. While regional protests highlight the blatant inequalities between Russia's center and its peripheral spaces and ethnic grievances against the Kremlin, they also suggest that dissatisfaction with the war is growing, as ethnic minorities like Bashkirs are disproportionately affected and called up to fight in Ukraine, especially compared with citizens in Moscow. These protests could grow in the coming years as citizens of Russia's far-flung regions are likely to continue dying at disproportionate rates and experience reduced living standards.
Anti-Kremlin sentiment in the peripheries could combine with a protest movement among the mothers, wives and girlfriends of soldiers mobilized in Autumn 2022, which has provided an additional challenge for the Kremlin. These women do not demand an end to the war per se, but rather the demobilization of soldiers, and they are well aware that a harsh suppression of female protestors would only intensify and strengthen anti-war grievances throughout the country. The Kremlin has thus been reluctant to preemptively squash the movement with overwhelming force as it has with Navalny-aligned protestors. While casualty rates in Ukraine may eventually fall and the rotation of soldiers increase over time, protest movements have the potential to metastasize over time and pressure and constrain the Kremlin's political ability to escalate the Ukraine war.
Finally, continued Ukrainian strikes against Russia's oil and gas industry could weaken Russia's production capacities, exports and domestic price stability. While incapable of rapidly upsetting Russia's economic or energy security, such attacks will have adverse economic effects that increased spending may not be able to counter indefinitely, particularly if combined with expanded Ukrainian attacks on other economic and military targets across Russia.
Over time, the above factors could combine with contradictions between government rhetoric and narratives about the war and its effects on Russia to reveal cracks and lead to public expressions of opposition and disenchantment in sudden and unexpected ways. Despite the Kremlin's currently secure position, growing pressure points stemming from the war could weaken Moscow to the point that Russia eventually boils over, though this is unlikely to happen in the next year.
Greater Changes in the Years To Come?
On Feb. 20, Putin said his upcoming address to the Federal Assembly would set the country's goals for the next six years. This makes his speech of particular interest because the most significant changes taking place in Russia are deeper ones likely to take place not this year but over many years, especially as Putin's words are often translated into government policy.
A topic likely to come up in this context is technology and innovation. Putin will likely set ambitious goals about creating more high-tech components and substituting them for foreign imports. However, results will likely be modest due to a lack of specialists and high costs. Russian officials, meanwhile, will likely exaggerate success in import substitution, fueling an echo chamber and vicious cycle of insufficient funding for hi-tech development, research and production. Meanwhile, Russia will continue to receive plenty of semiconductors and other high-tech components — albeit at a higher cost — from illicit sanctions-busting schemes. The Kremlin will seek to hide these failures, but they will nonetheless fuel a brain drain from Russia, as limited domestic scientific and technological development capabilities impact the civilian and military economy, and lead ambitious Russians to move elsewhere.
In this light, during his Feb. 29 address to the Federal Assembly, Putin will likely share his vision for greater changes among the Russian populace, reflecting those already taking place in Russian society. To that end, Putin's embrace of social conservatism and efforts to homogenize society could have significant, long-term implications.
In November 2023, Putin issued a decree designating 2024 as the Year of the Family in Russia, urging Russians to start families earlier and aspire to have at least three children, but ideally aim for eight. New initiatives in this area will likely feature prominently in Putin's address to lawmakers, as Russia still lacks the incentives to fill its deepening demographic decline — aggravated by its invasion of Ukraine — apart from politically sensitive immigration from Central Asia. While these efforts may partially succeed, they constitute yet another pressure point on Russia's current political economy that could fail.
Relatedly, in 2024 alone, Russia will expend immense resources on new youth programs designed to educate children on the importance of combat and sacrifice for one's motherland, along with a new all-Russian competition for patriotic youth named ''Big Change.'' These initiatives showcase the kind of sweeping changes the Kremlin wants to see in the values of young Russians — away from liberal notions of self-realization and toward sacrifice in service of their government in the years ahead.
Together, such programs and the increasing lack of access to outside information will lock in a steady brain drain from Russia and the flight of young, ambitious and creative people. But over time, they will likely also have at least some minor success in homogenizing Russian society and securing the regime by creating a feedback loop that bolsters support for the current political system's trajectory. Because Russia's fight against Ukraine — and the West — will not subside anytime soon, the changes taking place within Russia appear likely to last for many years.
