Over the past few months, Ukraine has taken the war to Russia.
Hundreds of drones and missiles are now regularly flying into Russian territory, sometimes causing chaos. (Footage of one recent attack showed the whole roof of an oil refinery in Moscow being catapulted into the sky as onlookers gasped.) Ukraine has been attacking Crimea — which was illegally annexed by Russia in 2014 — to the point that the authorities on the peninsula have declared a state of emergency.
Four and a half years after Russia invaded, something qualitative seems to have shifted in this long, grinding war. Today my colleague Paul Sonne, our Moscow bureau chief, writes about whether it’s enough to force President Vladimir Putin to end it. (Spoiler alert: Not yet.)
Vladimir Putin wasn’t having a very good year.
Russians were already grumbling about the tax hikes they faced in order to pay for the war against Ukraine, the unpopular internet restrictions that the Kremlin blamed on wartime security precautions and their country’s broader economic woes.
Then Ukraine made it worse.
An attack that sent 419 drones into Russia this week, including more than 60 toward Moscow, was the latest in Kyiv’s escalating campaign in recent months to bring the war home for more Russians and usher in a new stage of the conflict.
Some of these attacks, which are targeting refineries and other infrastructure, have led to dramatic scenes. Putin had to kick off his signature economic conference in his hometown, St. Petersburg, on June 3 under smoke-filled skies — the result of a nearby Ukrainian strike. On June 18, Ukraine pulled off its biggest attack on Moscow since the start of the war, covering the Russian capital’s sky with black plumes from explosions at an oil refinery.
The campaign has prompted fuel shortages across the country. Gas stations have introduced rationing, and some drivers are lining up for hours to fill their tanks. Despite being one of the world’s largest oil producers, Russia is turning to other nations to import emergency supplies of fuel.
In Crimea, the peninsula Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 that has recently become a particular focus of Kyiv, there are regular blackouts. Gas is practically nowhere to be found. Water pumps that run on electricity aren’t working.
Ukraine’s aim is simple: Put enough pressure on Putin on the home front that he ultimately agrees to end the war. But so far he has shown nothing but defiance. Even as life grows worse for Russians as a result of the conflict, it’s far from clear that the one man who matters will be sufficiently moved.
Putin’s pain threshold
One of the enduring surprises of the war has been how much pain Putin has been willing to tolerate at home to pursue his war aims.
When his Ukraine invasion boomeranged back into the Russian region of Belgorod, little changed. When Ukrainian drones exploded over the Kremlin, the conflict continued. When Ukraine occupied a piece of Russian territory in Kursk, he stayed the course (and Ukraine eventually withdrew).
It’s always possible this time will be different. Putin’s popularity has sagged in polls. Russians are indeed feeling the worsening economic situation and noticing the increased disruption to their lives. In a poll conducted by Gallup between March and May, 60 percent of Russians said the economic situation in their city or region was getting worse.
But popular opinion matters only so much in a nation without democratic freedoms, or even political alternatives.
Will this time be different?
As my colleague Valerie Hopkins noted, Putin was initially silent in the face of Ukraine’s stepped-up attacks, in keeping with the broader effort to isolate much of Russian society from the war. Officials have euphemisms like “unscheduled maintenance” for the Ukrainian strikes on Russian fuel facilities, and have even avoided disclosing the locations of bomb shelters or using sirens when Russian cities come under attack — after all, this isn’t war, just a “special military operation.”
But perhaps the gap between the language the government was using and the reality many Russians were seeing eventually became too wide. Because, this weekend, Putin finally sat down with his chosen state news reporter to give a formal response.
He tried to thread the needle, on the one hand showing Russians his government was responding to their needs, but on the other downplaying the severity of the situation.
He said attacks on Russian infrastructure were indeed “creating problems” and resulting in “a certain shortage,” but called the situation “not critical.”
The Ukrainian attacks were psychological warfare “with the goal of making us feel insecure about ourselves and our own strength,” dividing Russian society and “forcing Russia to suspend, at least for a short time, our troops’ offensive on the front line.”
“We won’t give them that chance,” Putin said. He then spent much of the interview going through, in extreme detail, how far Russian troops were from taking various Ukrainian cities on the front — an exercise that one Russian military analyst noted employed “interesting math,” repeatedly halving the real distances between Russian forces and the Ukrainian cities.
Ukraine’s new approach is succeeding on one level. It’s projecting power onto Russian territory. Russians have taken notice, and don’t like it. Even Putin has acknowledged their unhappiness.
But for a leader who has sent an estimated 350,000 to 450,000 Russians to their deaths on the front lines yet suffered minimal backlash — thanks in part to wartime repression — eye-catching explosions and fuel shortages may not change things as much as Kyiv hopes. There is even the chance that Putin responds not only with defiance but with escalation, as Ukrainian military officials warned could happen very soon.
That leaves two big questions: How much farther can Ukraine go with its campaign? And how long can Putin hold out? For now, the Russian leader is digging in.
Related: More than two million troops have been killed or wounded in the four years that Russia and Ukraine have been at war, a new study found.
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