Ukraine War: Internal Divisions in Russia

As Putin’s war in Ukraine extends into its second year, there are few signs the conflict will be winding down in the near future. What Russian leaders once thought would be a fast operation taking only a few weeks, has left Moscow with few safe avenues for egress. Lev Gukov, former head of the leading Levada Center polling organization, says that unless the average Russian citizen learns of the true level of defeats on the front, the Russian people will continue to support the war. The regime retains support by tightly controlling information to maintain a positive image of the war effort. Putin ordered more than 600,000 Internet pages blocked and closed dozens if not hundreds of print outlets.

Despite this censorship, overall domestic support for Putin’s war has declined. Radio Svoboda, in Spring 2019, reported support for the Russian president personally was in a multi-year decline. Since the invasion of Ukraine about 70% of the population believe in the war and by extension their leader; although simultaneously 50% of the same respondents want it to end. Gudkov points out that public support is “not very clearly expressed, but quite tangible for the authorities and the war itself in society.” Paul Goble, writing in Eurasia Review this week, says this duality is partly due to the fact that “many Russians are deeply aware of the war’s criminal nature but prefer to isolate themselves from the unpleasant truth and avoid receiving objective information.”

Last fall the Russian publication Readovka News suggested that there is an additional factor that ensures passive support for the war, “…the constant stream of propaganda that paints a harrowing future in the case of Russia’s defeat.” Although the human cost of the extended war has a negative impact on the population, the desire to trust those inside the Kremlin to maintain stability remains and “does not affect the ratings of trust in the country’s leadership, since the prolongation of the special military operation means the prolongation of the effects of the consolidation of society and power.” One consequence of this view is that Putin appears content to drag out the war and pull in the country’s population to support it. Goble says that, at the regional level, the government has created volunteer organizations to help those mobilized obtain supplies, including forcing participation by schoolchildren.

Despite government attempts to coerce workers and students to help, there is a steadily declining level of involvement, according to the publication Russica2. A Levada Center study recently confirmed that the population is no longer following news of military operations in Ukraine at the previous levels. There is, however, a small and important radicalized group of Russians who, together with those in the general population who succumb to the massive pro-war propaganda effort, that are emerging as the new supporters Putin needs to continue the war. These new “national patriots” are the second reason why Putin cannot and will not end the war, according to analysts studying the situation.

Growth in the number of beneficiaries, if not of the war itself, is the third reason the war will continue, according to Goble. Today, he says, “the public ratings of not only federal but also regional as well as local authorities depend on their degree of involvement in the war.” Internal politics is transferred from internal socioeconomic problems to the level of international politics. The impression left is that the war is protecting the national interests of Russia. Political support at the local level helps guarantee votes in elections and the popularity of patriotic governors who support the war effort. News reports out of Russia indicate that politicians are attempting to outdo each other in attempts to be seen as the strongest of patriots. “Some Russian State Duma deputies propose involving these officials in teaching at schools in the occupied territories and promise to support them when they are nominated for elections,” adds Goble.

A fourth reason for the unlikelihood of ending the war soon is a result of the expanding number of radicalized patriots across the country. They have increased influence in Russian society. This propaganda cult is demanding a lot from the non-radicalized portion of the population. It may at some point create further domestic schisms between apolitical segments of Russian society and the more radicalized Putin supporters returning from military service in Ukraine. Many political analysts see the only viable solution for Putin as one that delays the impending social upheaval by prolonging the war, with the goal of smoothing out external manifestations of the social conflicts. Goble suggests this will only exacerbate the causes of social conflict and that at some point the Russian people will learn the truth about Kremlin politics. When that occurs, the world could be witness to an implosion of the Russian Federation.

Daria Novak served in the U.S. State Dept.

Photo: Pixabay

Quick Analysis

Long Term Effects of Putin’s Ukraine War

“The war in Ukraine is leading both Moscow and Kyiv to engage in increased cyberattacks that are destructive to both infrastructure and civilian lives from meddling with energy networks to manipulating people into committing violent acts,” according to Luke Rodeheffer of the Jamestown Foundation. Both sides are engaging in activities that will leave their mark on the world for years to come as the war has increasingly blurred the lines of official state actions and those of non-state cyber actors. Criminal hacking groups and official intelligence organizations are developing working relationships that offer attractive opportunities to collaborate with good pay. As the kinetic war drifts into the cyberspace domain, some members of government agencies are moonlighting as hackers and coordinating their activities over the Internet. Early on in the war Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Minister of Digital Transformation, announced that the country needed a volunteer Information Technology (IT) Army capable of coordinating activities against Russian targets using Telegram. Today that IT Army distributes free hacking tools to its volunteers for conducting cyberattacks on the Russian infrastructure and companies. Using tens of thousands of network devices, Ukraine’s volunteers have had success in performing distributed-denial-of-service attacks. “Ukraine has conducted a large-scale call center fraud operation targeting Russia, particularly older and more gullible Russian citizens, which is forcing the Russian state to increase surveillance on communication networks,” says Rodeheffer. In late June the IT Army overwhelmed Russian target Internet infrastructure with “connection requests” that ultimately led to interruptions in Mir, Russia’s national payment card system, according to Lizzie Simpson writing for Habr. She quotes a Forbes interlocutor in the Russian information security industry as saying: “The attack is 100%, and this is the work of the IT army of Ukraine.” Confirmed attacks such as the Mir incident are changing the character of warfare and are challenging for international security networks to control. The intensity and breadth of the attacks continues to increase on both sides of the conflict, however, it started long before the invasion. As early as 2010, there are indications Russia engaged in destructive cyberattacks against Ukraine. One of the most egregious strikes occurred in the winter of 2015 against the country’s power grid. Years before the invasion of Ukraine, Russia used hacks to shut down the computer infrastructure of TV channels in the country, according to an expert involved in the investigation of one of the episodes. Russia carried it out in a “multi-stage secret infection of information networks,” says Vsevolod Nekrasov of Epravda. Russia often employs these weapons against Ukraine in its current war effort against the civilian infrastructure. Using malware capable of permanently erasing data, Russia is seen as the likely sponsor of last December’s attack on Kyivstar, Ukraine’s largest telecommunications company. It resulted in extensive interruptions in telephone and Internet services that disabled the country for weeks. Kyivstar called it “catastrophic” at the time. In April, a response by a Ukrainian security services linked group called “Ukrainian Blackjack,” responded in kind by targeting a Russian data center utilized by several Large Russian companies and defense-related conglomerates. NV.ua reports that the group destroyed 300 terabytes (TB) of data. A DVD-R holds 4.7 GB. One would need 63,830 DVD’s to hold 300 TB of data! Ukraine has also targeted public figures in Russia linked to the war including high-ranking Duma members and policymakers focusing on the Middle East and Central Asia. Two of those, Alexander Babakov and Semyon Bagdasarov were close confidants of Putin. Their emails exposed sensitive detailed plans on how Russia planned to work with Iran to avoid sanctions. Simultaneously with the increase in cyberattacks, is a corresponding rise in cybercrime aimed at the Russian citizenry. Many of these incidents were in the form of fraud calls tricking Russians into transferring money out of the country or revealing personal information, according to RIA Novosti. “The scale of Ukrainian cybercrime has provided Moscow with additional justification to bolster its internal communications surveillance systems, under the auspices of detecting fraudulent phone calls,” says Rodeheffer. Radio Svoboda is reporting that it is also being used as an excuse to rush the integration of the occupied regions of Ukraine into Russia’s telecommunications systems and SORM, the communications surveillance system. What is most problematic is that the criminal elements involved may make it difficult to dismantle this “underground” after the war ends, says Rodeheffer. What is tolerated during a war, including the need for questionable characters with technical expertise, may lead to a new type of 21-century warfare that extends beyond the current geography of the Russia-Ukraine conflict. It could end up as a battle for the survival of both Western military and civilian infrastructures.