Russia’s grieving mothers and hawkish generals unite as Putin’s failures turn allies into enemies

Fears of a Russian attack prompted Ukraine to curtail public celebrations of its Independence Day last week.

But when a missile struck a railway station full of civilians some Russian nationalists were underwhelmed. They had been whipped into an expectation of retaliation for the murder three days earlier in Moscow of Darya Dugina, the daughter of a nationalist ideologue, which the authorities had blamed with barely plausible haste on a supposed Ukrainian assassin.

“Is that it?” asked one on social media after the atrocity, which killed at least 22 people. “Is this all the promised revenge for Darya? Have we become so enfeebled, so helpless?”

They were disappointed, and in their disappointment they echo many other constituencies in Russia. Beneath the surface, dissatisfaction is growing. In some cases it is about the war, but more broadly it reflects a disenchantment with a regime that ultimately promised to be competent, to — in President Vladimir Putin’s own words — “fulfil the tasks set by the times”.

There are the soldiers, like Pavel Filatyev, who posted his memoir ZOV, a scathing, 141-page paratrooper’s-eye account of the war, on social media. From his day-by-day account of corruption, incompetence, fury and despair emerges a picture of soldiers let down by their commanders and betrayed by their nation. As he notes, “most people in the army are unhappy about what’s going on there, they’re unhappy about the government and their commanders, they’re unhappy with Putin and his politics”.

The military machine which so effortlessly took Crimea in 2014 has come unstuck in Ukraine. One can debate how far this was down to failures of military reform, Putin’s ill-conceived initial strategy or other factors — but from the trenches, none of that matters.

For soldiers like Filatyev, the question is one of honour and competence — why can the Kremlin not fulfil its commitments to its own? Why is a military that boasts hypersonic missiles not feeding its own men, arming them properly, and paying them on time?

Distressed mothers

There are the mothers, worrying about serving sons or grieving for ones who will never come home, who feel betrayed by a regime that has systematically lied to them. The refusal to acknowledge that their boys were in Ukraine, the pretence that they died in accidents rather than battle, the failure to treat the wounded properly: these are bad enough but they are compounded by the painful realisation that this is nothing new.

The Council of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia was formed during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, precisely out of a realisation that the state treated its soldiers like disposable ammunition. It campaigned for the rights of service personnel and supported their families. The council then found a renewed purpose during the Chechen war — and is doing the same job again now. As one of its organisers in St Petersburg said: “The battlefields change, the governments change, but it’s still the same problem.”

One mother told the BBC: “If the mothers of all the soldiers who are fighting there and the ones who’ve lost sons, if they all rose up, can you imagine how big that army would be? And they will. Their nerves will snap.”

For these mothers the question is one of humanity: why can the Kremlin not look after its own and treat Russian citizens (and Ukrainians, too) with at least a modicum of decency?

Disgruntled hawks

There are the hawks, like Igor Girkin, who, under the nom de guerre “Strelkov”, was the former defence minister of the rebellious Donbas pseudo-states. He has become one of the most trenchant critics of Putin and Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, whom he sarcastically calls “Unique Strategic Advantage” and the “plywood marshal”, nicknames that have begun to go viral in nationalist social media.

The hawks believe in Moscow’s right to a sphere of influence, and that Ukraine had become little more than a Nato puppet state. To them, the Kremlin’s sin is not that it invaded — but rather that it has done it so badly, with a combination of amateurism, incompetence and corruption that is making Russia look weak and foolish.

On Wednesday Girkin, tongue firmly in cheek, “congratulated” the Kremlin for its prosecution of a war whose “inimitable success, outstanding military leadership [and] perfect strategic decisions” make it comparable to, of all things, Mussolini’s ill-fated invasion of Greece in 1940, a military debacle from which he had to be rescued by German intervention.

For Girkin and the other hawkish critics of the regime, it is a question of management — why can the Kremlin not just do its job?

Worried loyalists

Then there are the loyalists such as Sergei Markov, the think tank director and former parliamentarian, who have continued to tow the official line but are troubled by its implications. The Kremlin is projecting incompetence and neglect in its efforts to explain away recent reversals. The explosions of strategic supply dumps in Crimea were not down to Ukrainian attacks but incautious cigarettes. The Black Sea Fleet flagship was not sunk by Ukrainian missiles but by an accident and bad weather.

Now the claim is that Dugina was killed by a Ukrainian who crossed a closed border, spent a month in Moscow — a city bristling with cameras linked to facial-recognition software — without being identified, committed the murder and then, a day later, drove the 760km to Estonia and across another border, unhindered. And did so with her 12-year-old daughter and cat.

Accept all this, and it is hard to feel much confidence in the Russian security state. As Markov posted online: “Rublyovka [the upmarket Moscow suburb where many top officials live] is shivering . . . This act of terror is a message for them: be afraid, you could be next.”

For the worried loyalists, it is a question of expedience: are they sure they are on the winning side?

Strange convergence

The Soviet Union was ultimately brought down because the regime had become delegitimised by its own failures. A strange convergence of forces occurred. Nationalists who wanted freedom from Moscow, liberals who sought an end to the party’s monopoly of power, hard-liners who felt that Mikhail Gorbachev’s reformism had gone too far: they may have agreed on nothing else, but none were willing to preserve the status quo.

The threat to the Kremlin today is that once again a variety of communities, holding often radically different views, are finding themselves converging on a shared belief that the current regime is simply not up to the job.

Liberals and technocrats have long felt that Putin was taking their country down the wrong path. Now, for different reasons, even hawks are entertaining the same thoughts. As one unnamed poster on a nationalist forum put it, “if it is the Kremlin that is leading our nation to embarrassment and defeat, isn’t it patriotic to be against it?”

Balancing act

The current regime is not under any obvious imminent threat but the growing disenchantment is clearly a concern.

This helps to explain Putin’s desperate balancing act. The war has reached a stalemate and there is little chance that Russia will be able to launch another big offensive this year. With no prospect of a breakthrough that would allow him to declare victory, Putin is a prisoner of his own bluster. He cannot admit that the war is not going to plan but nor is he having much luck spinning the present situation as a success.

We have begun to see a delicate reframing of the war’s goals which could perhaps ease negotiations in the future. Where once the official media spoke of the “liberation” of the Russian-speakers of the Donbas, increasingly this is simply presented as their “protection”. This could conceivably be arranged through guarantees from Kyiv rather than direct control from Moscow.

We are a long way from any serious negotiations, though. Ukraine is showing no signs of being willing to make concessions — indeed, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s recent demand that Crimea would have to be regained represents a hardening of his position — and Putin would rather win something that looks like a victory on the battlefield to justify the cost in blood and treasure.

That leaves him stranded between his own rhetoric, growing disenchantment across society and the realities on the ground.

Empty edicts

This is especially evident in the struggle to find new soldiers. Despite mounting pressure from Russia’s high command to admit reality and recognise the “special military operation” as the war that it is, Putin is reluctant to invoke a full national mobilisation of the army. Instead, the Kremlin is recruiting in schools and prisons, demanding that local governors assemble “volunteer battalions” by whatever means necessary. None of this is useless, but none of it is enough.

On Thursday Putin issued a decree increasing the strength of the Russian armed forces by 137,000 soldiers. Even rolling in volunteer battalions and the like, there is no way these forces can be recruited. Even before the start of the war, the military was 15 per cent under-manned and soldiers are dying and leaving the forces.

In many ways, this is a metaphor, an example of a leadership unable to meet the challenges of the day, responding with empty edicts rather than practical policies. Without new ideas, unable to reconcile disparate factions within the government and trapped within a war of its own making, Putin’s Kremlin is becoming less and less credible.