A forever war, more repression, Putin for life? Russia’s bleak post-election outlook

For a few weeks in 2022, Vladimir Putin’s world was unravelling fast. Russian troops had failed to take Kyiv and the west was coalescing around Volodymyr Zelenskiy, freezing Russian assets abroad and imposing unprecedented sanctions. Putin himself appeared unhinged, railing against Lenin or appealing to Ukrainians to overthrow their “gang of drug addicts and neo-Nazis”.

As Russians go to the polls on Friday in an election with only one possible result, the Kremlin will claim a mandate for that war, enshrining Putin’s bloodiest gamble as the country’s finest moment. The Russian leader has often succeeded by presenting his opponents with only bad and worse options; these elections are no different. Now convinced that he can outlast the west, Putin is seeking to wed Russia’s future, including an elite and a society that appear resigned to his lifelong rule, to the fate of his long war in Ukraine.

“You are dealing with the person who started this war; he’s already made a mistake of such a scale that he can’t ever admit it to himself,” a former senior Russian official told the Guardian. “And he can’t lose that war either. For him that would be the end of the world.

“We all – thanks to Putin – have been led into such a shitshow that there is no good outcome. The only options go from very bad to catastrophic,” he added. And if Putin begins to lose, the person added, then “we may all see the stars in the sky” – suggesting a potential nuclear war.

Putin’s re-election campaign, which has included a more than £1bn propaganda push, according to leaked documents obtained by the Estonian outlet Delfi and reviewed by the Guardian, has put the war front and centre, as he envisages a militarised society stripped of its liberal trimmings.

Insiders said that while his team had insisted that he focus on a positive agenda of social spending or cultural achievements he instead chose to declare his candidacy while speaking with veterans of the war, whom he has said should help form a new “management class” to replace the old, disgraced elite.

And he has appeared confident on TV as he suggests he is ready to continue fighting until victory.

“It would be ridiculous for us to start negotiating with Ukraine just because it’s running out of ammunition,” Putin said in an interview this week with the propagandist Dmitry Kiselev.

One of Putin’s goals in these elections is to “deprive most Russians of the ability to imagine a future without him”, wrote Michael Kimmage and Maria Lipman in Foreign Affairs. And the prospects for his next term, or even two terms until 2036, appear clear: a forever war, an increasingly militarised society, and an economy dominated by the state and military spending.

Consolidated elite

In May 2022, Boris Bondarev, a counsellor at the Russian mission to the United Nations Office in Geneva, resigned in protest against the war. At the time, he accused the foreign ministry of “warmongering, lies and hatred” and wrote: “never have I been so ashamed of my country”.

Two years later, Bondarev remains the only Russian diplomat to have publicly defected to the west since February 2022. Asked why, he said: “Because I am the only one maybe without a sound mind,” adding: “All the others are sitting at home, probably feeling pretty good, even better now. They are getting their salaries, can still travel and are not mobilised for the war. They now think, soon we will win and we will be able to travel to the west again once sanctions are lifted.” He said he had been looking for a job since defecting.

Only a handful of top businessmen, including the billionaire banker Oleg Tinkov and Yandex’s Arkady Volozh, have spoken out against the war, and they have done so from relative safety outside the country. Both no longer have businesses in Russia.

There was a moment when others could have been peeled away from the Kremlin, observers believe. But as Russia has stabilised its battlefield position and its economy, and western support for Ukraine has become mired in political infighting, the shifting balance of power has discouraged further defections.

“I don’t talk with people still in Russia about their futures,” one major businessman who has had sanctions imposed on him told the Guardian. “That is a stupid question. Everyone has already made their choice.”

At the same time, the death of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and the crackdown on all opposition politics in the country have raised the stakes for any perceived opposition to Putin.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the ex-oligarch who was imprisoned under Putin and is now a member of the exiled opposition, said that the moment for a schism among the elite “has been missed.”

“Without suffering an obvious military defeat,” he said, conflicts among the elite would not provoke “serious change, at least while Putin is alive”.

Increasingly, Russia has sought to lure back the more than half-a-million people who fled the country after the war began, including some of its most educated and wealthiest citizens.

“I don’t believe there will be any public defections,” said the businessman who has received sanctions. “And what for? Clearly, it hasn’t worked out very well for those who left. Those who say it should be easy to speak out [against the war] don’t understand the realities and the consequences.”

Forever war footing

Although Putin’s war planners envisaged a lightning attack that would take Kyiv in a matter of days, diplomats, insiders, observers and activists largely believe that Putin is now ready for a far longer conflict that could take years, if not decades.

“Putin appears to have dug in; he will not stop the war unless he is forced to do it,” said a senior western diplomat in Moscow. “We do not believe he is serious about any peace talks and it would be up to Ukraine anyway to decide them. From my rare meetings with Russian diplomats, I get a sense that they are feeling more self-assured than after the start of the war.”

Russia is devoting an estimated 7.5% of its GDP to military spending, the highest proportion since the cold war, and the government’s lavish spending has meant that factories making weapons, ammunition and military equipment are working double or triple-shift patterns, and welders collecting overtime can make as much as white-collar workers. A defence insider predicted that levels of spending would only continue to increase, he said, calling the change a “new permanent phase” that could last “many years”.

On the home front, restaurants in Moscow and St Petersburg remain full, projecting an image of normality, “parallel imports” – importing of western goods via third countries – and other new schemes have sought to prevent Russians from noticing a loss of creature comforts and luxury products.

“The Kremlin wants to cosplay the Soviet Union but without the food and product deficits,” said a well-connected source in Moscow media circles. “Their generation remembers the consumer goods deficits really well and wants to prevent them at all costs.”

Publicly, Putin has played down the potential for an all-out war with the west, saying this week he did not believe that the United States was planning on nuclear war by modernising its strategic forces. But, he added, “If they want to, what is there to do? We are ready.”

And while Putin claimed he is “ready to negotiate” with Ukraine this week, he also dismissed “wishful thinking” and smeared Zelenskiy as a drug user. “I don’t want to say this, but I don’t trust anyone,” he told Kiselev of potential security guarantees from the west.

“I believe any signals that Putin might be sending about wanting peace are just a way for him to delay western weapon deliveries to Ukraine,” said Bondarev.

Even anti-war Russians regularly parrot views that the west bears some culpability for propping up the Ukrainian side, either by deterring possible moments to conclude a peace or prolonging a conflict that they believe Putin will never allow himself to lose.

“It’s clear that this war isn’t going to end with a victory for either of the sides,” said the former senior Russian official. “It won’t end. It will end as a frozen conflict. And that frozen conflict is going to continue for 100 years.”

If Donald Trump is re-elected US president in November, it will put pressure on Ukraine to concede territory as he has vowed to end the war “in one day”.

Societal transformation

Speaking before Russia’s legislature last month, Putin announced an initiative called the Time of Heroes, a programme meant to bring veterans of the invasion of Ukraine into the upper ranks of government.

But the announcement was also clearly targeted at Russia’s liberal elite, whom Putin said had disgraced themselves through insufficient patriotism since the outbreak of the war.

“You know that the word ‘elite’ has lost much of its credibility,” he said. “Those who have done nothing for society and consider themselves a caste endowed with special rights and privileges – especially those who took advantage of all kinds of economic processes in the 1990s to line their pockets – are definitely not the elite.”

Even senior members of the pro-Kremlin cultural elite, who often mingle with senior Russian officials and meet Putin, now find their positions are no longer secure.

In a crackdown that highlighted Russia’s conservative shift, household names like pop icon Philipp Kirkorov were forced to make tearful apologises after footage spread of them attending a raunchy “almost naked” celebrity party in Moscow.

“For many of the elites, the naked scandal backlash was the most alarming event of the year; it shook them even more than Prigozhin’s rebellion,” said the Moscow media source. “Many realised that their private lives would no longer be off-limits.”

Putin’s recent rhetoric could summon images of a Mao Zedong-style restructuring of Russian society reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, although most observers played down that comparison.

“The government is clearly worried about the loyalty and morale of the military, and the defence industry,” said the person close to that industry. “They know that they need to at least choose some examples of people who fought in the war who are now in positions of power.”

But the programme is part of a larger issue that will trouble the Russian state for coming years and has been lobbied for by the country’s loudest war hawks: how to manage the influx and return of tens of thousands of soldiers, many with serious injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, thousands of whom were recruited from Russian prisons.

“Now our guys, fighters, are returning from their training, many of them are very smart people with education and experience, of course, they should get their place in the management apparatus,” Anastasia Kashevarova, a former assistant to State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin and one of the most vocal pro-war bloggers, told the Guardian.

Under constitutional changes he orchestrated in 2020, Putin could remain in power until 2036, when he will be 83 years old.

For young Russians, often referred to as Generation Putin, another decade looms under the increasingly authoritarian rule of the only president they have ever known.

“I am pessimistic about the long-term prospects of Russia,” said the businessman living under sanctions. “I would advise young people with a good education to leave and build a new future abroad. Russia is not going to run out of money … It will just be a stagnant, militaristic nation.”