Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.

Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect the key developments in Russian politics and society over the previous week and look at what's ahead. To receive The Week In Russia newsletter in your inbox, click here.

With tens of thousands of soldiers killed or wounded and internal tensions rising following a year of battlefield struggles and setbacks, President Vladimir Putin reshuffles the military command for Russia’s war on Ukraine. At home, his imprisoned opponents remain defiant as the oppression persists.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

War Is Not Over

By tradition and by the calendar that was used until 1918, tomorrow is New Year’s Day in Russia -- known now as the Old New Year. And while Russians rang in the New Year along with the rest of the world on January 1, there’s a sense that it doesn’t really begin until January 14.

What 2023 will bring for Russia and its people may be less clear than at any time since around 1918, or World War II, or the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. By ordering a large-scale invasion of Ukraine last February, Putin cast dark clouds over Russia’s future, short-term and long.

For now, of course, Russia's unprovoked invasion has had a far more momentous effect on Ukraine, destroying cities and towns, killing tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians, torturing, raping, and abusing peaceful citizens of all ages, and driving millions of people from their homes -- some of them, including children, taken to Russia against their will. It has also strengthened the unity and national identity of Ukrainians -- clearly an undesired effect for Putin, who has repeatedly and groundlessly suggested that Ukraine is not a real country, and who launched the assault to subjugate it.

For both countries, one thing seems grimly certain: The war will continue well into 2023 and possibly into 2024, or longer. There is no sign that it will end soon, as a result of either negotiations or battlefield victories -- and Putin’s shake-up of the military command this week, while it may seem aimed to bring Russia a breakthrough after numerous setbacks in 2022, is further evidence that the war will persist for the foreseeable future.

In what U.S.-based military analyst Dara Massicot called “a story that has it all: infighting, power struggles, jealousy,” the longtime chief of the Russian Armed Forces’ General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, was named to replace General Sergei Surovikin, who had been overall commander for what Moscow calls the “special military operation” in Ukraine for just over three months.

Surovikin -- whose appointment in September had been seen as both an effort by Putin to turn the tide after a series of setbacks and to assign responsibility for the imminent Russian retreat from the southern city of Kherson squarely on his shoulders -- becomes one of three deputies to Gerasimov, who will be under pressure to produce results.

A 'Creeping' Loss

A big part of Putin’s strategy, Russia analyst Mark Galeotti suggested, is “demonstrating to the West that Russia is in this for the long haul, and hoping that we will lose the will and unity to continue to support Kyiv.”

“I think Putin will be disappointed, but he has to believe this -- it's his only real shot at some kind of victory,” he wrote on Twitter shortly after the shake-up was announced on January 11.

Galeotti wrote that the reshuffle provided “confirmation, if we needed it, that there will be serious offensives coming,” and that he suspects “Putin has unrealistic expectations again” about what Russia can achieve in the war -- in which he is widely believed to have expected to bring Kyiv to heel within days of the February 24 invasion.

“With Gerasimov in charge, if this is indeed permanent, I think the possibility of the Russians asking their tired force to do something that it cannot handle rises exponentially,” Massicot, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, wrote in a thread on January 11.

And Russian political expert Tatyana Stanovaya also indicated that the shake-up is unlikely to produce the results Putin would like to see.

“The conclusion is that Putin is looking for effective tactics in the conditions of a ‘creeping’ loss,” R.Politik, the analysis firm Stanovaya founded and heads, wrote on Twitter following the Russian Defense Ministry announcement.

“He is trying to reshuffle the pieces and is therefore giving chances to those who he finds persuasive. Today, Gerasimov turned out to be persuasive. Tomorrow it could be anybody else,” R.Politik wrote. “But in reality, the problem is not with the people, but with the tasks at hand.”

Russia Behind Bars

If the war in Ukraine seems certain to persist for months or more, so does the oppression inside Russia, where a clampdown that can be traced back at least 12 years was ramped up early in 2021 and again last February, when Putin ordered the large-scale invasion and moved to further crush dissent.

With the next presidential election due to be held in March 2024, Putin will want to maintain as much control as he possibly can, whether he runs for a fifth term -- as is widely expected, barring changes even bigger than those the war has brought -- or not.

On January 11, associates of Aleksei Navalny, whose return to Russia two years ago following treatment for a nerve-agent poisoning he blames on Putin precipitated a further tightening of the screws, said that prison authorities have refused to transfer the opposition leader from punitive confinement to a prison infirmary despite flu symptoms.

A day earlier, dozens of Russian physicians published an open letter urging Putin to “stop torturing” Navalny, who is serving sentences of nine years and 2 1/2 years following convictions at trials he contends were politically motivated.

The doctors who signed the letter wrote that Navalny’s state of health is worsening and that the refusal of prison authorities to pass medicine along to him is threatening his life.

Meanwhile, Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Kremlin opponent and critic of Russia’s war on Ukraine, has been jailed since April and could be sentenced to more than 20 years in prison if convicted of treason, one of several charges that he dismisses as politically motivated.

In a January 11 announcement of an initiative titled Without Just Cause, aimed at raising international awareness and to advocate for the release of people worldwide who are detained unfairly, the U.S. State Department called on Moscow to free Kara-Murza and “more than 500 other political prisoners in Russia.”

A day earlier, Human Rights First and other groups urged U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration to impose sanctions on people involved in Kara-Murza’s detention.

Kara-Murza “has been unjustly detained for nine months and faces a growing list of unfounded charges for his courageous advocacy and criticism of the Putin regime’s war of aggression in Ukraine and its utter disregard for human rights,” Human Rights First President and CEO Mike Breen said in a statement.

Ilya Yashin, an opposition politician who was sentenced to 8 1/2 years in prison in early December for remarks on what he has called Russia’s “monstrous” war in Ukraine, was sent by train from Moscow to a jail in Udmurtia, a region known for bleak, tough prisons, shortly before the New Year.

In a Telegram post on December 30, Yashin said he’s doing fine and made clear he hasn’t changed his views.

“I’d like to remind you that the criminal war with Ukraine must be stopped, Putin must go, and Russia must be free and happy,” he wrote.

That's it from me this week. If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).

Yours,

Steve Gutterman

RFE/RL intern Ella Jaffe contributed to this report.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy went to Washington, Russian President Vladimir Putin went to Minsk, and Moscow's war against Ukraine went on with no end in sight 10 months after the February invasion. And as Moscow's forces erase potential evidence of war crimes in Mariupol, images of the now-destroyed city lit up for the holidays a year ago evoke a world that is gone forever.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

Russia launched its large-scale invasion of Ukraine 10 months ago tomorrow, on February 24. Since then, President Vladimir Putin's effort to subjugate the neighboring country has produced a relentless series of horrific stories, photos, and video.

In a way, though, some of the most heart-rending images come from several weeks before that date: Photos of the Azov Sea coastal city of Mariupol around Christmastime, lit up with holiday decorations.

At the time, the Kremlin had already delivered over-the-top ultimatums to the United States and NATO about Ukraine's future, among other things, and U.S. President Joe Biden's administration was warning that the growing Russian military force gathered at Ukraine's borders could be about to invade. But to many it still seemed unlikely, almost unthinkable: an eight-year-old war was simmering in the Donbas, where Mariupol is located and had escaped capture by Russian-backed forces throughout the conflict, but Kyiv had done nothing to provoke an escalation.

Some of the images and drone footage show Mariupol's drama theater, a large central landmark and cultural hub in what was then a city of nearly half a million, with residents milling around a big fir tree on the square before the colonnaded facade.

The holiday season passed without an invasion, but on February 24, Russian forces rolled in -- or, in the case of the Donbas, rolled forward. And on March 16, a Russian air strike hit the theater, where hundreds of people had sought refuge and the word "children" was painted in block letters, in Russian, on the ground at both ends of the building.

Theater Attack

In a journalistic investigation published on May 4, the Associated Press reported that evidence suggested about 600 people were killed. Russia captured Mariupol later in May, after a weekslong siege of a steel plant where Ukrainian forces were holed up along with civilians.

And this week, Russia began demolishing the bombed-out theater and clearing the ruins -- or at least part of them -- in what Ukrainian official Petro Andryushchenko said was "clearly an attempt to hide, forever, the physical evidence of the...premeditated murder of Ukrainians."

He said the Russian occupation authorities planned to remove the central and rear portions of the theater but leave the façade in place.

"Eight months after Mariupol fell into Russian hands, Russia is eradicating all vestiges of Ukraine from it -- along with the evidence of war crimes buried in its buildings," the AP said in a new report on December 23.

The AP investigation published in May noted that "the Russian bombing of the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol on March 16 stands out as the single deadliest known attack against civilians to date."

That is still the case. But there have been countless Russian bombardments that have killed smaller numbers of civilians old, young, and in-between -- and, since October, a series of attacks targeting energy and other infrastructure in what Kyiv, rights groups, and Western organizations say is terrorism.

There is no sign that it will end anytime soon. Neither side has signaled any interest whatsoever in negotiations toward an agreement that would leave the current front lines in place, with Russia controlling not just Crimea, which it occupied in 2014, but also parts of four regions in mainland Ukraine: Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhya, and Kherson.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy wants to regain all the Ukrainian territory that Russia now holds, restoring control over the entire country, whose borders were set with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and formally accepted by Moscow at the time. Putin's territorial goals may be less clear, in part because he may be adjusting them based on the course of the war, in which Russian forces have suffered numerous setbacks on the battlefield.

But his overall goal of subjugating Ukraine hasn't changed a bit, analysts say.

"It's not our assessment that the Russians are serious at this point about a real negotiation," was how CIA Director William Burns, who met in Turkey last month with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) chief Sergei Naryshkin, put it on December 16 when asked whether winter weather might slow fighting and open up the possibility of talks.

Others have used stronger wording.

"Every single official statement of the last couple of weeks indicates the following: Russia will be investing 'as much as needed' in the war for as long as capacities allow it: productions, imports, recruitment," Anton Barbashin, editorial director of the media outlet Riddle Russia, wrote on Twitter on December 22.

As each of them struggles to get the upper hand over the winter, both Putin and Zelenskiy travelled abroad this week to secure support that could potentially help them prevail -- with results that appeared substantially different.

Putin made his first visit to Belarus in more than three years and met with its autocratic leader, Alyaksandr Lukashenka, who is the closest thing he has to an ally even though the two men's ties are perennially strained, with the Belarusian strongman wanting to get the most out of Moscow but wary of becoming a mere provincial leader if the two countries merge into one.

They Won't Go

Putin and Lukashenka have met repeatedly in the last three years -- but until December 19, always in Russia or third countries. The fact that Putin came to Lukashenka this time was seen by analysts as evidence that he wanted something pretty badly.

If what he wanted was for Lukashenka to send Belarusian troops into Ukraine to fight alongside Russian forces, all signs suggest he didn't get it. At a joint news conference, the pair made vague remarks about continuing military cooperation and reinforcing joint efforts "in all areas," as Putin put it.

Russia used Belarus as a staging area for part of the force that crossed into Ukraine from the north in February and drove toward Kyiv but faced staunch resistance and withdrew within weeks -- leaving a trail of destruction, death, and alleged atrocities behind them.

Retreating Russian forces also received medical care in Belarus, and Russian forces are training there. But so far, Lukashenka has not sent Belarusian forces to fight in Ukraine.

In power since 1994, one of Lukashenka's biggest sources of support from Belarusians early in his rule was that the country's young men -- unlike Russians sent to battle separatists in Chechnya -- were not being dispatched to combat zones.

More recently, Lukashenka may have calculated that doing so would still be too risky for him, even given the stepped-up clampdown since 2020 that has put many opponents in prison and prompted many others to flee the country.

The Patriot

Zelenskiy, for his part, left Ukraine for the first time since the Russian invasion in February, making a one-day visit to Washington, D.C., in which he met with Biden and addressed the U.S. Congress at a time when continued Western support is crucial for Kyiv.

From Biden, Zelenskiy got a $1.85 billion security assistance package for Ukraine -- including a Patriot air-defense battery -- and an assurance that the United States is "committed to ensuring that the brave Ukrainian people can continue...to defend their country against Russian aggression as long as it takes."

He faced little public pressure to seek negotiations with Russia, with Biden asserting that Zelenskiy is "open to pursuing a just peace" but suggesting it is a moot point at the moment because "Putin has no intention...of stopping this cruel war."

Pressed by a Ukrainian reporter on what he sees as a "fair way to end this war," Zelenskiy replied: "What do you want me to say? .... I don't know what [a] 'just peace' is. It's a very philosophical description."

"For me, as the president, [a] just peace [means] no compromises as to the sovereignty, freedom, and territorial integrity of my country, [and] payback for all the damages inflicted by Russian aggression," he said.

'Murderers, You Bombed It To Rubble'

In Russia, meanwhile, the clampdown on dissent, free speech, and civil society reached a new landmark: The Justice Ministry asked a court to order the closure of the country's oldest human rights watchdog, the Moscow Helsinki Group, and outlaw it.

First established in 1976, the Moscow Helsinki Group fought for rights in the Soviet era and in post-Soviet Russia, where Putin has rolled back democracy and freedoms in over 23 years as president or prime minister.

Lyudmila Alekseyeva, a founding member of the organization, led it from 1996 until her death in 2018.

The Moscow Helsinki Group's mission statement includes these words: "We are convinced that Russia will be a democratic state in which laws are respected and the person, his rights, and his dignity are the highest value."

And in St. Petersburg, a 17-year-old girl was charged with discrediting the armed forces after allegedly scrawling this rebuke on an art installation in the central Palace Square symbolizing the city's "friendship" with Mariupol: "Murderers, you bombed it to rubble yourselves!"

RFE/RL intern Ella Jaffe contributed to this report.