A feeling of calm runs through Russia despite these being dangerous months. The hopes the Kremlin placed on Donald Trump handing over Ukraine on a silver platter have faded, the war is a bloodbath for Russia without strategic victories, and the security forces are strengthening their control over the state just months before legislative elections that are shaping up as a plebiscite on Vladimir Putin. The prospect of a military escalation is not dismissed in Russia. Both against Europe, which Moscow equates with Nazi Germany and which could be the excuse to involve Russian society even more in its war; and against Ukraine, which it still bombs with greater severity. The Russian leader says he trusts in “an imminent victory,” but the course of the war says otherwise. The decision is in his hands and he shows no signs of giving up any of his objectives.
The Ukrainian armed forces have also marred the start of one of the Kremlin’s most important events of the year, the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, which begins this Wednesday and will run until Saturday. A huge column of smoke rose over the city on this opening day in view of the thousands of visitors to the event, many of them foreigners.
Several people were injured in drone attacks against various energy and port infrastructures in the Kronstadt, Kirov, and Krasnoselsk districts, according to the city governor, Alexander Beglov. At least fifty drones were shot down and dozens of flights were canceled at the city’s International Airport due to the danger posed by the devices. Russian President Vladimir Putin will speak on Friday in an extensive talk where he will address the country’s internal situation and its war against Ukraine.
“It is not prudent to give a concrete deadline [for the end of the war] amid the fighting in Ukraine,” the Russian leader acknowledged on April 29, although he ventured to predict a quick victory. “The situation on the battlefield is developing in such a way that Russia can speak of the imminent end of the conflict (…), we are advancing on all fronts,” he forecasted.
This is the fifth year of the war. On February 24, 2022, Putin ordered his troops to depose the government of Volodymyr Zelensky and install a puppet regime in a disarmed Ukraine. But his forces are still entangled in the Donbas region in the east. The Kremlin’s main conquest, the territorial strip linking southern Russia with Crimea, is no longer safe for its convoys due to attacks with the latest generation Hornet drones, and Elon Musk took away the Russian army’s compass, the Starlink satellite network.
Meanwhile, officials from the Central Bank of Russia and the Ministry of Finance warn Putin that military spending, around 40% of the national budget, is becoming unsustainable, according to a document revealed by Bloomberg and verified by independent Russian media.
The Kremlin began its invasion as a “special military operation” that left its civilian population aside, but in September 2022 it had to carry out a forced mobilization of soldiers to stabilize the front. Since then, it has avoided repeating this traumatic experience by offering astronomical salaries for volunteering, but this reserve is not infinite. And there are not many prisoners left to recruit because it has already emptied 39% of the prison capacity.
The difference with 2022 is that the Kremlin has prepared all the levers for another possible mobilization over these years, including closing the border, and now it has ordered its security services to have ready a mechanism to cut off all internet to Russians without taking down the electronic administration starting July 1.
In this context, an escalation of the conflict could serve the Kremlin to forcibly mobilize Russian society. High-ranking officials and propaganda have intensified threats of an escalation, and in the State Duma some deputies like former General Andrei Guruliov openly call for a new mobilization in the face of Ukrainian technological superiority.
“Germany is once again leading the movement that supports Nazism in Europe. President Zelensky has been named its Führer. Under his mandate, a new unification of Europeans is being forged (…). All this is alarming and reminds us of history,” said Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov a few days ago.
“It’s not just Germany, 56 countries are fighting against us,” said Russian Security Council Chairman Sergey Shoigu when asked about a drone factory built on German territory together with Ukraine.
Former President Dmitry Medvedev said in April that all European military companies supplying weapons to Ukraine are “potential targets”; the Madrid-based Oesía is dedicated to dual-use technological engineering. Last week, after several injuries were reported in Romania, a NATO member country, due to the fall of a Russian drone, he threatened the Union with these words: “EU citizens should realize that their authorities have unilaterally started a war against Russia. So be alert and don’t be surprised by anything, your peaceful dream is over.”
Moscow has also spread several accusations to reinforce the idea of an escalation without providing evidence. The Federal Security Service (FSB) said its divers found several mines attached to a gas ship “in a NATO country,” pointing to Belgium. Meanwhile, the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) accused Kyiv of preparing a drone attack from Latvian soil, something Riga vehemently denies.
“All places from which a direct military threat against Russia comes are legitimate targets,” Putin warned last Friday when commenting on this accusation.
Moscow has also brought out the old argumentation of its war against Ukraine, such as the existence of a network of US “biolaboratories” developing viruses that only attack Slavs [the only thing that exists is a public international network for pandemic prevention], and claims of an alleged “genocide by the Kyiv regime” after a Ukrainian bombing error killed 21 young people in the occupied village of Starobilsk. A tragedy in a war that has claimed thousands of other civilian victims, although this has served the Russian government to threaten to redouble “systematic attacks” against Kyiv.
Furthermore, the Kremlin’s messages to calm tensions are contradictory. “European weapons are shooting at us directly (…). Europe cannot act as a mediator,” Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said last Friday, while at the same time assuring that “the greatest European stupidity” is not negotiating. “It is impossible to solve problems without dialogue,” he added.
A renowned Russian expert, former director of the Carnegie Moscow Center Dmitry Trenin, blames Europe for the wear and tear Russia suffers in Ukraine. According to Trenin, the Old Continent does not seek “a Russian invasion like Hitler and Napoleon,” but “to exhaust Russian resources through its support for the Kyiv regime and keep the forces immobilized.”
Instead of stopping the war, Trenin advocates “launching powerful attacks, ultimately nuclear, against logistical, industrial, and political-military targets of the [European] enemy.” “It would be useful to show Europe with facts that we are serious,” he added in an article.
Another column published in the magazine Global Affairs, linked to the Kremlin, has heated the debate in Russia. Its author, Vasily Kashin, emphasizes that “the goal of liquidating the anti-Russian regime in Ukraine is unattainable without a complete and prolonged occupation of the entire country, and this is technically impossible for Russia with the current special military operation.”
Unlike other experts who bet on escalation, Kashin proposes settling for agreeing on “the protection of Russian territory, the prohibition of Ukraine joining military blocs, and certain restrictions on its armed forces.”
Other military experts think the Russian leader will make no concessions. “Putin’s unconditional goal is the total conquest and subjugation of Ukraine,” says Ruslan Pukhov, director of the Russian Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies (CAST), by phone. “This war is Putin’s life’s work, and he will fight it as long as he lives and remains in power. Any minimal concession is unacceptable; it would leave the image of a man who ended his political career with a failure.”
“Since the options for a moderate war are practically exhausted for Russia, it seems likely that the focus will be on increasing the mobilization of human and economic resources,” adds Pukhov. According to the analyst, Western technological support has been “decisive” for Kyiv and “continues to increase the cost of the war for Russia.”
For Pukhov, this tension comes from Putin’s disappointment with Trump, “whom he thought shared similar ideas.” “The dream of Russian diplomacy was a pact that divided Europe between the United States and Russia,” the analyst points out, “but Trump was only willing to a peace with compromises, not for Russia to annex Ukraine.”
Trump, focused on Latin America and Iran, stopped supplying weapons to Kyiv and demands that Europe buy them from Washington. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has denounced that “only six or seven countries are sharing this heavy burden.”
Sergey Poletayev, co-founder of the Russian analysis center Vatfor, emphasizes by phone that “dialogue could only happen if Europe changes its approach, at least like Trump’s,” he adds.
The analyst says he sees no personnel shortage problems in the Russian forces and asserts that the Kremlin is waiting for Ukraine’s collapse by attrition: “In thousands of years of military history, no war has ever been won with a defensive army. They are gradually losing their ability to carry out counterattacks, and when they lose it completely and we maintain offensive operations of the same magnitude, then they will fall like dominoes.”
Ivan Timofeyev, program director of the Kremlin’s major think tank, the Valdai Club, breaks down three possible medium-term scenarios.
For the analyst, war with Europe is feasible, although the possibility is “low” because “the risks are too great, including the use of nuclear weapons.” The expert assumes that the Ukraine conflict will remain entrenched and sanctions on Russia will gradually increase. In his most optimistic scenario, there will be a truce, but he doubts its sustainability over time. In all three cases, the threat of war will hover over Europe in the coming years.
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