Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

In his State of the Union speech, U.S. President Joe Biden said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine "has been a test for the ages" and suggested that the West had passed, at least for the time being.

The test will continue -- and it could get tougher.

Speaking almost a year after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the invasion on February 24, 2022, Biden said the "murderous assault" had raised a stark question: "Would we stand for the most basic of principles?" he asked, including "sovereignty," the "right of people to live free from tyranny," and "the defense of democracy."

"One year later, we know the answer," he said. "Yes, we would. And yes, we did."

Past tense. When it comes to the future, Biden provided fewer details, assuring Ukrainian Ambassador Oksana Markarova that "America is united in our support for your country. We will stand with you as long as it takes."

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It may take a long time.

Since the invasion, the United States and the West have shown substantial unity and, with increasing weapons supplies and other support, have helped Kyiv defend itself against an invasion that many officials and analysts initially believed would bring what Putin expected it to bring: the swift subjugation of Ukraine.

Instead, Russia has suffered numerous setbacks. Its forces retreated from areas in the north after their push toward Kyiv was stymied in early spring, and Ukraine regained swaths of land in counteroffensives in the east and south later in the year -- even recapturing Kherson, the only regional capital Russia had seized since the large-scale invasion began in February.

But amid extremely deadly fighting, particularly in the eastern region known as the Donbas, neither side has made major gains in several months. Ukraine's prospects for regaining large amounts of its territory on the mainland -- let alone the Crimean Peninsula, occupied by Russia since 2014 -- seem uncertain at the moment.

Meanwhile, talk of a major new Russian offensive has intensified, and there are signs it has already begun. And while Moscow's chances of taking more territory are also uncertain, any substantial setbacks for Ukraine could potentially shift the moods of some in the West, weakening support for Kyiv and amplifying calls for compromise with Russia despite the death and destruction it has wrought.

This is the main thing Putin is now counting on, analysts say, because while he may still harbor hopes of bringing Ukraine under Kremlin control through military force, that is now all but impossible. Instead, he seems likely to keep the grinding war going in hopes of wearing down the West.

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Off the battlefield, political seasons in Russia and the West may play a role. Even if Russia suffers further setbacks, losing more of the land it has occupied and baselessly claimed as its own, Putin seems unlikely to scale down his ambitions -- and particularly unlikely to do so before the presidential election, due in March 2024, in which he is widely expected to secure a new six-year term.

As he demonstrably has done in the past, Putin is almost certainly looking to the U.S. presidential election eight months later and hoping the result will advance his designs on Ukraine and beyond by sowing divisions in the West and decreasing its support for Kyiv.

For now, opinion poll results in the United States present a mixed picture, demonstrating strong and steady support for Ukraine's aim of pushing Russian forces out of the country but suggesting that when it comes to more concrete matters such as supplies of weapons and aid, the ground may be shakier.

A Gallup poll conducted in January and released on February 6 found that 65 percent of Americans would prefer the United States support Ukraine's regaining its territory, even if that means a prolonged conflict.

That was down just one percentage point from the number in August 2022 and included a small majority of Republicans -- 53 percent -- as well as 81 percent of Democrats.

The portion of Americans who would prefer the United States seek to end the conflict quickly, even if it means Russia keeps Ukrainian territory it has occupied, was unchanged from August to January at 31 percent.

At the same time, the poll found that while 39 percent of Americans believe the United States is offering Ukraine the right amount of support, nearly half of Republican respondents -- 47 percent -- said it is doing too much.

A poll conducted in January by the Pew Research Center, meanwhile, suggested that a growing number of Americans from both major parties feel that the United States should scale down its support for Ukraine.

Among Republicans and people leaning Republican, the share of respondents who said the United States is providing too much support rose from 9 percent in March 2022 to 40 percent in the January poll.

Among Democrats and people leaning Democratic, it tripled from 5 percent to 15 percent, and overall it increased from 7 percent to 26 percent, while 31 percent said the amount of support was about right and 20 percent said it was not enough.

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.

Seeking to subjugate Ukraine through brute force, Russian President Vladimir Putin turned to the historic Battle of Stalingrad in an attempt to justify a war that has killed tens of thousands of people, engendered countless accusations of atrocities by Moscow's forces, and clouded his own country's future.

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

Another Time, Another War

As Russia marked 80 years since the end of the Battle of Stalingrad with gestures that seemed to focus more on the Soviet dictator than on the monthslong bloodbath in the city that bore his name -- putting up a bust, changing road signs, and invoking him in TV reports -- the Kremlin tried to turn a pivotal event long past into an analogy for its ongoing war on Ukraine.

In a February 2 visit to Volgograd, symbolically renamed Stalingrad again for the duration of the ceremonies, Putin predictably said that Nazism "in its modern form" poses a "direct" danger to Russia -- and just as predictably, but wrongly, suggested without evidence that the sources of this threat are "the collective West" and Ukraine.

But beyond death and destruction, the 1942-43 battle and the war Russia is now waging against Ukraine have little in common, and the attempt to draw parallels is riddled with obvious flaws.

The biggest: In Ukraine, Russia is on the offensive. That alone ruins the analogy, because at Stalingrad the Red Army was defending the country, trying to stop Nazi leader Adolf Hitler's forces from driving deeper into Soviet territory. The Soviet troops succeeded, and the tide of World War II was turned.

'War Crimes Literally From Day One'

By contrast, the large-scale invasion of Ukraine that Putin launched almost a year ago was unprovoked, and the fact that Moscow is on the offensive has stood out in horrific relief from the start.

"Russian war crimes began literally from day one of Putin's renewed invasion. [Human Rights Watch] documented the use of cluster munitions that hit a hospital and a preschool on February 24," Andrew Stroehlein, European media and editorial director at Human Rights Watch, wrote in a Twitter thread on the group's work on the war since that day.

Stroehlein subsequently pointed out that the thread, which linked to dozens of HRW reports containing evidence of atrocities in both individual incidents of and broader trends, was not comprehensive.

"Russia has committed more atrocities than all the human rights groups in all the world could ever have the capacity to investigate," he wrote on February 1. "This is only a sample of the horror of Putin's invasion."

Of course, investigators and journalists are also documenting evidence of atrocities in what historian Sergey Radchenko called Russia's "stupid, criminal war."

Cities Destroyed

Russian attacks are killing civilians on a daily basis. On January 14, a missile struck an apartment building in Dnipro, killing at least 46 people. On January 29, at least one civilian was killed in strikes on Kharkiv, Ukraine's second-largest city, which has been pounded repeatedly since the invasion began. And on February 1, a Russian missile killed at least three people in Kramatorsk, a city in the Donetsk region.

The hospital that Human Rights Watch said was hit by cluster munitions on February 24, part of an attack that it said killed four civilians, is in Vuhledar, a coal town southwest of the city of Donetsk.

Nearly a year later, fighting there is fierce -- as it is in Bakhmut, a city that Russian forces have been pressing hard to take for months as they attempt to control the whole of the Donbas -- the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

A Familiar Narrative

Bakhmut and other cities and towns in the Donbas are the stuff of images that evoke the Battle of Stalingrad: Jagged ruins jutting from rows of razed buildings.

Not to mention images that hark back more than 100 years, to the trenches of World War I.

Putin's claim that the Soviet Union's World War II allies are now sources of Nazi-style threats to Russia may sound bizarre, but it's not new: for years, he has been making similar assertions in speeches at the annual Red Square military parade marking the anniversary of the Allied victory over Hitler's Germany in 1945.

Now, with the war in Ukraine, he and other Russian officials are making these suggestions more directly, simply fitting the false claim that Ukraine is run by neo-Nazis into the long-standing narrative -- repeated with increasing frequency as the Kremlin tries to portray Moscow as the victim of an existential war launched by NATO, rather than an aggressor seeking to subjugate Ukraine -- that the United States and the West are bent on tearing Russia apart.

The fact that Russia is on the offensive in the war against Ukraine also means Putin's claim in his Volgograd speech that Russia is "once again being threatened by German tanks" is inaccurate: Contrary to what the Kremlin tells Russians regularly, Western governments have made no threats to attack Russian territory or to help Kyiv do so.

Michael McFaul, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow in 2012-14, wrote that "Putin's comparison of the Battle of Stalingrad with his current invasion of Ukraine is disgusting."

"What an insult to the Russians, Ukrainians, and other soldiers of the USSR who died to defeat actual Nazis in Stalingrad in 1943," McFaul wrote on Twitter.

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.