TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup
2 March 2025: Fade to black, plus texts (but no tunes)
Dispassionate, adjective. Free from the influence of passion or strong emotion; calm, composed, cool; impartial. Said of persons, their faculties, and actions.
Emotion is not a tool of analysis. It aids neither in gathering and verifying data, nor in identifying the relationships of cause and effect that are at work in the world. While an understanding of emotion may help communicate the results of analysis, arguments that substitute emotion for reason have the ring of demagoguery.
But being a dispassionate analyst does not require being an inhuman one. Setting aside emotions for the purpose of analysis does not require setting aside values. In fact, setting aside values inevitably means setting aside analysis itself: it is our values that tell us what questions to ask, that drive us to seek answers through difficulty and obfuscation, and that require us to find answers that are true, regardless of whether they are convenient. We ask questions because we believe that the answers matter, and it is our values that make them matter.
And so, while I am compelled as an analyst to be dispassionate, to be impartial and to be non-partisan, I am not compelled to abandon my values. I value open societies over closed ones. I value equitable justice over utilitarian efficiency. Humanism over cynicism. Fairness over bigotry. I am open to the idea that I may be wrong about how best to achieve and even to define those values, but I will defend those values themselves against all comers.
As such, when my analysis tells me that one outcome is more likely than another, I will say that. When it tells me that one course of action is likely to be more effective than another, I’ll say that, too. And when it tells me that a particular course of action leads to perdition, I’m liable to say that, as well.
Oh, and an apology: Given everything else going on, I didn’t find myself in a musical mood this week, so no tunes this time around. Sorry.
What I’m thinking about
Um, is there anything else to think about?
After a disastrous ten days or so, beginning with the Munich Security Conference, things seemed to be getting a bit better this week—with fruitful visits by Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer to DC—until they got much, much worse. I summarized my reading of what transpired during Volodymyr Zelensky’s visit to the White House early Saturday, in a thread on X and Bluesky, in a nutshell as follows:
The Trump administration’s policy thrust since before inauguration should have made it abundantly clear that (a) transactional interests would outweigh any others, (b) the velocity of America’s mooted ‘exit’ from Ukraine is more important than the terms or quality of that exit, and (c) normalization with Russia is a priority.
Given those “principles”, it should have been equally clear to anyone paying attention that a White House pursing a rapid resolution would find that it had more leverage over Zelensky than over Putin, and thus it would Ukraine that would be asked to bear the brunt of the concessions required for a ceasefire.
European leaders, as a result, faced the same choice they had been facing before, but in even starker terms: Would they seek a seat at Trump’s table (so to speak), allowing him to dictate the general terms of European security, or would they seek to build a new table?
We will know more about how Europe is resolving that challenge later on Sunday, after a multilateral summit in London. Much as I might think the imperative of building a “Europe- and Ukraine-first” policy is clear, I can understand the reticence of European leaders to break entirely with Washington, or even to risk the US seeking to block European action in support of Ukraine, if Trump were to see such action as impeding his progress towards whatever deal he thinks will lead to normalization with Russia.
While we wait, though, it strikes me that we—by which I mean I, but really not only I—have been spending a bit too much time ignoring Russia itself in all of this. I wrote a few weeks ago about how the Kremlin was likely interpreting the early moves by the new Trump administration, with the upshot being that it was, in many ways (but maybe not all) making the Kremlin’s life considerably easier. But things have moved on since then, and I think it’s worth taking a quick look at how the Russian system is reacting to the events of recent weeks.
The Russian media machine has, unsurprisingly, been over the moon. Commentators on the main television news programs and talk shows have, since mid-February, been captivated by the notion that Trump would help them achieve what years of war could not: forcing Ukraine and Europe to capitulate. Even less surprisingly, the Oval Office lynching of Zelensky played swimmingly on Russian TV.
Against that backdrop, it’s notable that the Kremlin has played things significantly cooler. In fairness, that’s almost always the case: Putin and even his spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, are rarely glowing, and foreign policy spokesman Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov doesn’t have an effusive bone in his body. (Dmitry Medvedev doesn’t count.) But given how completely the Trump administration has seemed to be in Moscow’s corner, you might have expected one of those men at least to crack a smile; instead, we left to admire their stoicism.
In truth, I don’t mean to be flippant about this, because the curbed enthusiasm seems to serve a purpose—or maybe a couple of purposes. The first purpose is almost certainly aimed at Trump. Putin has pointedly refused, at least publicly, to acknowledge the timeline set out by the White House, saying that while he is pleased to be talking, there is still an awful lot to talk about. And, indeed, there is: at least up until the Oval Office auto-fiasco, the White House had been insisting on seeing European peacekeepers on the ground in Ukraine, something the Kremlin has categorically rejected on multiple occasions, to say nothing of the Kremlin’s stated desire for a Yalta 2.0 re-delineation of Europe. By pumping the breaks, the Kremlin may be genuinely signaling that it’s not that interested in a deal, but it may also be playing hard to get, betting that a smitten Trump will keep finding new things to sacrifice in order to get the Russians to the table.
The second aim, however, is likely domestic. All of this talk of a deal has awakened some of the animal spirits in Russia’s financial markets and even the upper-echelons of its political economy. The ruble, having gained 13% against the dollar since 1 January, is now the best-performing currency in the world. Russian equities are also sustaining a rally. The Russian Central Bank has weighed in, calling the ruble rally “a speculative euphoria” and seeking to dampen investors’ exuberance. Any positive rhetoric from the Kremlin itself would likely make the Bank’s job much harder. And the challenge goes beyond just the markets. As I noted last week, the Russian government is already scrambling to soothe the nerves of business elites who fear they’ll lose out when (not if) Western companies rush back into the market, even as others are licking their lips at the prospect of regaining lost advantages. The resulting intra- and inter-elite competition could be destabilizing, if the Kremlin does not manage things carefully.
The problem for Putin, however, is that the prospect of a deal may already be priced into the currency and other financial markets, meaning that the collapse of talks with Trump—such as they are—could come as a significant shock, driving up already high inflation, weakening investment, and putting even more strain on the budget. As a result, while I continue to believe that Putin is not interested in a lasting end to the war (unless its one that gives him reliable control over Kyiv), my sense is that he is increasingly locked into the process that Trump started and needs at least to appear to be making continual progress. And if I’m right about that, then the White House is seriously underestimating its leverage over Moscow.
And what about the public? The evidence, as always, is mixed. The Levada Center published a new round of polling on Friday, showing that approval for the war stood at 80 percent, its highest level since March 2022, with only 13 percent opposed (the lowest ever number). The percentage of respondents who think the war is going well—standing at 72 percent—is similarly at an all-time high. But at the same time, the number of respondents who think that Russia should keep fighting, rather than negotiate, remains for the second straight month at an all-time low of 31 percent.
As is often the case, Levada’s numbers are at odds with polling from the Chronicles project, which released its latest data on Tuesday. They found, using their ‘patented’ formula of overlapping questions designed to elicit true support and opposition to the war (and about which I remain methodologically skeptical, but still curious), that only 18 percent of respondents were genuinely in support of the war, while 21 percent were genuinely in support of peace. Somewhat more interestingly, though, they also found that the number of respondents reporting that the war had negatively impacted their lives hit an all-time high of 54 percent, while 36 percent—also an all-time high—said it had negatively impacted their material welfare.
With both of these polls, I would revert back to my usual methodological refrain: all they tell us is that the number of people who decided to tell pollsters that they approve or disapprove of the war, or that the war has negatively affected them, has shifted. We don’t know whether the actual sentiments and experiences ostensibly underpinning these responses have themselves changed. Given that nothing in the material situation in Russia has changed dramatically, however, my hunch is that what’s moving are the social dynamics that govern what people will and will not say out loud. And in that regard, while people may feel more able to complain about the conditions of their lives, they do not appear to feel empowered to speak about the chief cause of those conditions, i.e. the war.
As such, while the Russian public is not going to be the constituency that pushes the Kremlin towards peace, it will also not be a brake on a negotiating process if one genuinely emerges; indeed, it appears to be available for just about any decision the Kremlin could make. The bigger question is, if and when the US-Russia negotiations collapse, who will the Russian public blame for the resultant cost-of-living spike. The fact that the Kremlin is trying hard to spin this process into something intriguing but likely innocuous would suggest that they may see the same problem I do.
What I’m reading
Most of what I read this week was news bulletins from Washington, I’m afraid, so there’s not as much to share here as there usually is. Here are a few things that may be worth your attention, though (in addition to the Levada and Chronicles polls cited and linked to above):
On Monday, Meduza and Mediazona published a joint report documenting some 160,000 military fatalities on the Russian side, which is reportedly losing hundreds of men a day (not counting injuries, just fatalities). Again speaking to the fact that Putin does not have unlimited time is the report that this war is getting progressively more lethal as it goes.
On Tuesday, the Financial Times continued the focus on Russian fatalities and military recruitment, running an interesting piece on the increasing number of men in their 50s and 60s volunteering (or otherwise being recruited) to fight in Ukraine.
Also on Tuesday, Novaya Gazeta Europe covered a visit by a group of Russian human rights defenders to Ukraine. While the trip itself is noteworthy, I was most struck by the consistent insistence by Russian activists that the only route to democracy for Russia was for it to lose the war in Ukraine.
On Saturday, Holod and a range of other publications—including a bunch of Telegram channels—were abuzz with speculation as Alexander Khinshtein, the pro-Putin politician appointed to oversee Kursk Oblast during the occupation, declined to acquiesce to public demands for the removal of local officials because, in his words, “it’s beginning to smell like a Maidan.”
Finally, Levada Center director Denis Volkov weighed into the debate launched last year around a paper published by Maria Snegovaya (see my note on the subject from January) with a long-read in the semi-academic journal Gorby defending the utility of opinion polling in Russia.
Thank you for the great analysis, especially the bits about how the Kremlin might be evaluating the situation and deciding its next moves. All things I highly doubt the Trump admin. has given a minute's thought to. Their amateur (at best) skills are shining brightly.
You mention the US might block Europe's attempts to support Ukraine---how would that look? It's not something I've seen discussed or something I've thought about.
Superb essay, and right (in my view), but incomplete? What happens next?