Putin Plays Tough, but Cracks Appear

As gasoline rationing spread yesterday to Moscow and St. Petersburg, President Zelensky warned President Putin: “When Russia tires, changes take place.” To end the war, he proposed the two leaders freeze battle lines, meet in Switzerland or Turkey, and work out a peace deal.Mr. Putin gave a hardline response, drawing on a Stalinist slogan to assure Western reporters in St. Petersburg: “Russian troops are advancing along the entire front.” He claimed the Russian soldiers “recently” conquered 1,500 square miles of Ukraine. In contrast, Western calculations for Russia’s advance in May range from 32 square miles to five.Kremlin aides say the Ukrainian leader is welcome to fly to Moscow to talk peace. Ukrainians demur, citing a recent report by Russian magazine ‘Top Secret.” Under the headline “They Came to the Soviet Union, and Then They Died,” the article chronicles the cases of 15 foreign Communist leaders between 1949 and 1979 who flew to Moscow for meetings in the Kremlin. They died before they could fly home.While Russia’s Soviet-trained leader plays tough, his regime is starting to show cracks. Strict censorship no longer covers everything up. On Wednesday morning thick columns of black smoke rose in the air as thousands of delegates converged on a St. Petersburg convention center for an annual International Economic Forum. Ukrainian long range drones had flown hundreds of miles to mar the opening by burning a nearby oil tank farm and a navy corvette.Designed to be Russia’s foreign investment kermesse of the year, the forum used to draw CEOs from America and Europe. This year, it attracts notables who have nothing to invest: American conspiracy podcaster Candace Owens, the overseer of President Trump’s ballroom project Rodney Mims Cook Jr., and the President of Tanzania, Samia Suluhu Hassan.The difference is Mr. Putin’s full-fledged assault on Ukraine, a war that now drags on longer than the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazi Germany. Over the last four years, nationalizations and forced sales cost foreign investors $167 billion in Russia, according to research by the Kyiv School of Economics. In current dollars, this is the equivalent of all the foreign debt the Bolsheviks repudiated in 1918.Foreign investors also are turned off by the state of Russia’s war economy. This year, economic growth is to be near zero. With the deficit ballooning, the Kremlin has drawn down its sovereign wealth fund by $60 billion. Inflation fears prompt some members of Russia’s long tame Duma, or parliament, to find their voices.“Forty per cent of the federal budget is being spent on defense and security. What development, investment or capital spending can we talk about in these circumstances?” Communist Deputy Renat Suleymanov told a regional outlet Kontinent-Sibir. Demanding “the swiftest possible end” to the war, he said: “It is absolutely obvious that the economy will not withstand a prolonged continuation of the special military operation.” On the floor of the Duma, pro-Kremlin deputy Valery Gartung swore and shouted last week when he talked about the nation’s yawning budget hole of $150 billion. Recalling the economic nightmare of the post-Soviet years, he screamed: “What are we going to do about this? Print money? Is it going to be as it was in 1992 when every week prices grew 30 percent?”“Putin is losing his magic,” exiled analyst Alexander Baunov wrote from Berlin. In an essay for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he wrote: “’Victors are not judged,’ the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin liked to say. But non-victors can be — and people are beginning to judge Putin.”Mr. Baunov, who worked as a journalist in Moscow for almost 20 years, sees cracks in Russia’s tightly controlled press. Last month, the mass circulation newspaper Moskovskij Komsomolets published an article detailing how Russia’s past military defeats — the Crimean War, the 1905 Russo-Japanese War, and World War I — prompted political and economic liberalization, albeit sometimes short lived. After this history lesson drew too much attention, it was removed from the website.Catering to a more rarefied audience, Russia in Global Affairs magazine posted an article by academic Vasily Kashin arguing that America’s experience in Iran indicates that a Russian assassination of Mr. Zelensky could backfire. He wrote: “Liquidating the anti-Russian regime is principally unattainable without a total military occupation of the entire country over a long period. For Russia, this is technically impossible.”Bearing bad tidings to Russia’s armchair hawks, he continued: “The war is going on between comparably equal opponents. Historically, such wars have only extremely rarely led to the total destruction of one of the sides.”For the first four years of the war, the Kremlin had a deal with residents of Russia’s 16 “millioniki” — cities with populations over one million. We wage our war. You live your life unaffected.Now Ukrainian long range drones are penetrating Russia’s weak air defenses. Attacks on oil refineries, tanker trains and pipelines are causing gasoline shortages. Rationing ranges from a generous 26 gallons in Moscow to sales restricted in Crimea to the military and bus companies.At the same time, the human cost of the war is penetrating. Due to drones blanketing the battlefield, Russia now loses two dead soldiers for each one wounded, an unthinkable ratio in modern warfare. So far this year, Russia is losing 20,000 dead soldiers a month. During the Soviet decade in Afghanistan — 1979 to 1989 — the Soviet Union lost 14,453 soldiers killed. The Soviet Union’s population was 280 million, about double Russia’s today.Today’s horror does not seem to penetrate the sleek walls of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. The war in Ukraine “will end either with Russia’s victory or it will never end,” said Alexander Dugin, a prominent ultra-nationalist with an Old Testament beard. “We need to gather all our strength, gather all of our will, and stop pretending that we are a peaceful country that goes off to barbecues or summer vacations.” Asked to sum up Russia’s future relations with the West, he replied: “War.”Exiled Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov dismissed this as denial of reality. “Is this the St. Petersburg Comedy Forum? Imagine saying this while Ukrainian drones & missiles take out military sites and oil refineries a few miles away,” he posted on X. “Russia will struggle to survive 2026. By 2036 it will either be a Chinese province or a collection of humbled fiefdoms.”

Putin Plays Tough, but Cracks Appear

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