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.

Amid a slew of developments from a military shakeup to tactical-nuclear arms drills and rumblings about changing maritime borders in the Baltic, images of Kharkiv region frontier towns targeted in a new Russian offensive are a stark reminder of the effects of Moscow’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

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

Analyze This

For journalists, analysts, and pretty much anyone paying attention to the war in Ukraine, there’s always a lot to consider -- a wheeling constellation of developments that could hold clues to what the future may bring.

There’s the battlefield situation, weapons supplies, diplomacy, and frequent talk of the possibility of a truce – despite the fact that a cease-fire or negotiated solution seems far off at this point.

Sometimes, though, some detail -- a photo, a video, an anecdote -- brings one central fact into focus: Russia’s unprovoked invasion has killed and wounded hundreds of thousands of people.

This month, footage from Vovchansk, a town targeted in a new Russian offensive in the Kharkiv region, provided a stark picture of what’s happening: Death and destruction in an unprovoked war.

A short video posted on social media shows what appear to be three dead bodies lying on the ground -- two of them together and a third in a separate location, lying next to a bicycle.

The clip also shows broader views of Vovchansk, with smoke rising from ruins in a town that was intact two weeks ago but now looks like Bakhmut, Avdiyivka, and other cities Russian forces have destroyed since they launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

The result of the Russian offensive north of Kharkiv remains to be seen. Ukraine’s military asserted on May 24 that its forces had halted Russian advances there and were counterattacking -- but that the situation on other parts of the more than 1,000-kilometer front line was volatile.

Relentless

Russian is also hammering the city of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s largest after Kyiv and a symbol of resistance against Moscow since it avoided takeover by Russia-backed forces at the start of the war in the Donbas, further south, in 2014.

At least seven people were killed when a Russian missile strike hit a prominent printing press in Kharkiv on May 23, part of a wave of attacks that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy called “extremely brutal.”

Meanwhile, Russia has been taking steps to maintain pressure on the West as well as on Kyiv -- and to keep the world guessing about its intentions. And there are plenty of signs that the Kremlin is preparing for a long war as Putin’s new six-year presidential term gets under way.

One of them is his shake-up of the military leadership -- which is beginning to look more like a purge.

It seems to have several aims: To keep the war economy going, reduce corruption and ensure loyalty among the military brass, and deflect blame for setbacks in the war while showing the West that Putin has no intention of abandoning his effort to subjugate Ukraine and challenge the United States and Europe.

'Very Beneficial'

The Kremlin’s efforts to throw the West off balance go beyond Ukraine, of course, and include constant signaling and scare tactics. Two fresh examples: Russia’s most recent nuclear saber-rattling, with what it says are tactical nuclear weapons drills; and an elaborate warning that Moscow wants to redraw maritime borders in the Baltic.

Meanwhile, a Reuters report that cited unnamed Russian sources and said Putin “is ready to halt the war in Ukraine with a negotiated cease-fire that recognizes the current battlefield lines” was seen as the result of a Kremlin bid to paint Kyiv as recalcitrant and weaken Western support for Ukraine.

“Russia's minimum goal is to capture the rest of the Donbas, and I'm skeptical that Russia would pursue a cease-fire this year as long as it believes it can make further gains on the battlefield,” Rob Lee, a military analyst and senior fellow at the U.S.-based Foreign Policy Research Institute, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

Putin’s “unchanging idea is that Ukraine must stop resisting and start discussing the terms of its capitulation,” political analyst Tatyana Stanovaya, an expert on the Kremlin and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote on X.

A cease-fire would be “very beneficial for Putin: it allows him to keep what he has already taken, politically weakens the Ukrainian leadership, demotivates the West from supplying arms, and makes troop deployment useless,” Stanovaya wrote. “That’s how Putin intends to win the war.”

In December, Sam Greene, a political analyst and professor at the Kings Russia Institute, issued a similar warning after a previous instance in which the Kremlin appeared to be sending signals through the Western media that Putin was ready for talks on a cease-fire.

“Drawing the West into a negotiating process…serves an obvious purpose: it reduces the Western appetite for fighting and puts the Kremlin in control of escalation,” Greene wrote.

“If negotiations -- or even discussions about negotiations -- even temporarily slow the pace of Western financial, military and diplomatic support for Ukraine's war effort, they will achieve most of what Putin needs them to,” he wrote.

“The problem is this: For the West, negotiations are a means of ending the war. For Russia, they are a means of winning it.”

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

P.S.: Consider forwarding this newsletter to colleagues who might find this of interest. Send feedback and tips to newsletters@rferl.org.

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.

Over a two-week period that has encompassed an inauguration, a military shake-up, a new offensive in Ukraine, and a trip to China, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s words and actions underscore the extent to which the war he started will be Russia’s main focus for years to come.

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

'Putin's Priority'

Issue a nuclear threat. Start a new Kremlin term. Celebrate a victory won 79 years ago. Shake up Russia’s military leadership, open a new front in the invasion of Ukraine, and travel to China.

Putin did all those things over the past two weeks, and the main takeaway can be boiled down to this: He is intent on continuing the war in Ukraine, and Moscow’s confrontation with the West, for the foreseeable future.

In a busy period that began with an announcement that Russia would hold military exercises to ensure its readiness to use tactical nuclear weapons, there were few surprises and a lot of same-old, same-old.

Putin has reminded the West and the world of Russia’s nuclear arsenal in saber-rattling remarks many times before, both before and since he launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

He has lashed out at the United States and the European Union countless times, of course, including during celebrations of the greatest feat of cooperation between Moscow and the West: The Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II.

No Partnership For Peace

And Putin has been cozying up to China since he came to power a quarter-century ago. It’s just that, because of its war on Ukraine and confrontation with the West, the stakes are higher than ever for Russia -- and so are the risks run by the junior member of what Moscow and Beijing call their “no-limits” partnership.

Following talk of a possibly sizable cabinet shake-up ahead of Putin’s inauguration to a new term on May 7, he made few major changes, leaving Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin and several others in place.

While there have been signs that long-time Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu could be ousted since an embarrassing mutiny by Wagner mercenary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin last June -- followed by his death in a plane crash that is widely believed to have been the Kremlin’s doing – Putin’s choice of a replacement, Andrei Belousov, an economist who has worked in the Kremlin or the government for years, was unexpected.

But many observers said that it made sense – and that it underscored the preeminence of the war in Putin’s plans for his new six-year term.

“Putin's priority is war,” Aleksandra Prokopenko, a former Russian central bank analyst and now a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. She added that a “war of attrition is won by economics. Belousov is in favor of stimulating demand from the budget, which means that military spending will at least not decrease but rather increase.”

Digging In

“Putin's primary objective is to enhance the state's capacity to support military needs more effectively,” Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the same think tank, wrote on X.

Belousov’s appointment “very much speaks to the fact that Putin is aware that this war is not likely to be going anywhere anytime soon,” author and analyst Mark Galeotti told RFE/RL. “As he digs in for the long term -- and we see this in his rhetoric, but also we're now seeing it within the government apparatus -- from his point of view, this is a war that is going to be one to a large extent on industrial production.”

Exiled Kremlin opponent and former oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky echoed that assessment, saying the appointment “shows that Putin views winning the arms manufacturing race with the West as crucial for success in Ukraine.”

“By installing an economist at the helm of the military, Putin is signaling his readiness for a protracted war of attrition, betting that Russia's economic resilience will outlast the West's resolve to support Kyiv,” Khodorkovsky wrote.

Whether Belousov will succeed is another matter. Officials on both sides in Russia’s war on Ukraine have spoken of the need for technological advances, but the hurdles – including corruption and entrenched bureaucracy within the Russian military – are high.

Shoigu’s 'High Bar'

Belousov’s appointment “suggests that the Kremlin wants more where this came from and is focused on modernizing the military with more hi-tech equipment such as unmanned vehicles, AI, and advanced intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance systems,” Kirill Shamiev, a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations,” wrote in a May 14 article.

“But technical modernization will be meaningless without improving the skills of Russian officers and the command-and-control system,” Shamiev wrote. “For that, Belousov, an outsider to the military world, needs allies within the army’s general staff to implement and enforce his reforms.”

So far, the chief of the armed forces' General Staff, General Valery Gerasimov, who Galeotti said is “even more despised amongst his own men than Shoigu was, which is quite a high bar to vault,” remains in place.

And Shoigu has not gone very far: Putin made him secretary of the presidential Security Council, and he was at the president’s side on the visit to China this week. Belousov was not -- and has not been named to the Security Council despite his new role as defense chief.

The person Shoigu replaced didn’t go far, either: Nikolai Patrushev -- the close Putin ally, former Federal Security Service (FSB) chief, and anti-Western conspiracy enthusiast who had headed the Security Council since 2008 -- is now an aide to Putin, a demotion for sure but one whose effects are not yet clear.

How much Putin’s personnel moves will matter is just one of many factors that will affect the course of the war in Ukraine, which is still raging more than two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion.

Other factors include efforts to boost manpower in both countries, how quickly Ukraine’s forces can benefit from the adoption a long-delayed $61 billion U.S. aid package – the bulk of it for weapons, and the outcome of Russia’s new offensive in the Kharkiv region.

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

P.S.: Consider forwarding this newsletter to colleagues who might find this of interest. Send feedback and tips to newsletters@rferl.org.