Russia in 2024: Same president, same war

By Juri Rescheto

MOSCOW: Looking ahead to the new year, an optimistic President Vladimir Putin said at December’s United Russia party conference that “our tasks are growing like a snowball, but we are Russia, we are a winter country, we love snow — look at how much has already fallen.” Indeed, the biggest event of the year in Russian politics will be the presidential election in mid-March, and the outcome is already clear. Putin faces no competition in his campaign for a fifth term despite major losses over two years of waging war in Ukraine.

“People are dissatisfied with a lot of things,” the political scientist Aleksandr Kynev told DW. “But the political field has been cleared. The country is huge, and nobody would have the resources to fight for the presidency.”

The most important challenge for Putin will be securing a voter turnout high enough to give his re-election a veneer of legitimacy. “Putin’s main task is not to upset people too much,” Kynev said. Most Russians, Kynev said, are apolitical and afraid of change. However, he said, people are tired of the so-called special military operation, as the war in Ukraine is officially called in Russia, and “want it to be over as soon as possible.”

The mood in Russia is much more confident now than it was at the beginning of the war in February 2022, said Denis Volkov, a sociologist and the director of the Levada Center, an independent opinion research institute in Moscow. The number of Russians who believe that their situation is worsening has halved compared to last year, he added. Volkov thinks that this optimism will continue, especially as the banking system has stabilised despite Western sanctions. The economy will not collapse in 2024, the Moscow-based economist Natalya Zubarevich told DW. “The Russian economy is robust,” she said. “EU sanctions will have no different effect than before.” Such punitive measures have been ineffective, she said, because “there are many other supply routes for sanctioned goods outside the EU.” Indeed, exports from Russia are now increasingly going to China, India and the Middle East.

Zubarevich said she expected Russia to generate reasonable revenue through oil exports in 2024. This would enable the Kremlin to increase spending “to support the special military operation” in Ukraine.

The largely unsuccessful counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces has dispelled fears of military defeat and contributed to improving the overall mood in Russia, Volkov said. He added that initial concerns about what Western military aid to Ukraine might mean for the war have also disappeared. The number of people who believe that Russia’s campaign is successful has increased, he said. The war has been normalised, he said, meaning that people have become accustomed to it and most are not directly affected by it. The feeling is that “yes, the war is being waged, but somewhere far off.” After the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russians fled abroad to protest Putin’s politics or out of fear of being conscripted into the armed forces. Russia’s leadership could have been swept from power in the early days of the war, Kynev said, if “all those who organised protests had taken to the streets in large numbers, instead of leaving the country in droves.”

Irina Sherbakova, a historian who lives in exile, told DW that most Russians are not content with the situation. Sherbakova, who co-founded the renowned human rights organisation Memorial — which was banned by the Kremlin in 2021 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a year later — said Russia was gripped by a prevailing sense of fear.