TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

1 October 2023: Misses and hits, plus texts and tunes

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden | © CNBC

As I put this issue of the newsletter to bed, Americans may have been breathing a little easier. Slovaks and their European neighbors, by contrast, were not — and Americans should be paying attention.

What I’m thinking about

I mentioned in passing last week that I was growing increasingly uneasy about the failure of American leaders to speak forcefully about the hard, national-interest reasons to support Ukraine. This week, that unease has grown into seething agitation.

On Saturday, in a last-ditch effort to look vaguely responsible, Speaker Kevin McCarthy brought to the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives a continuing resolution to fund the federal government for 45 days. Notably absent from the resolution, which passed only thanks to Democratic votes, was the originally proposed support for Ukraine. At the end of the day, that was the piece of red meat McCarthy chose to throw to the radicals in his party, in the evident hope that they would let him stay on as speaker in return. It begs the question of exactly how many Ukrainian lives McCarthy thinks his gavel is worth.

In the Senate, bi-partisan support for Ukraine is strong, and Capitol Hill staffers in both parties and chambers are quietly confident that Ukraine will eventually get the funding it needs; indeed, Senator Michael Bennett (Democrat of Colorado) temporarily blocked Senate consideration of the CR on Saturday evening, seeking assurances that Ukraine support would follow in short order. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer gave that assurance, and the CR passed the Senate with only nine votes against (all of them Republican).

Even if a couple of bullets are dodged in this case, Ukraine’s American supporters are overdue a reckoning. That the MAGA/Freedom Caucus wing of the Republican Party was dead-set on zeroing out support for Ukraine is a surprise to no one. The sense that the core of the GOP supports Ukraine, however, has lulled the Biden Administration and the Democratic Party into a false sense of security. The Republicans as a whole have concluded either that there is political hay to be made by attacking Biden on Ukraine, or that they will not pay a political price for undercutting that support.

It is now open season in Washington on support for Ukraine. Earlier in the week, Marjorie Taylor Greene (no relation) posted a slickly produced video repeating the standard Maria Zakharova-Tucker Carlson talking points — think corruption, Nazis and NATO — picking up on the debacle in Ottawa only a day or so earlier. I don’t fundamentally care who’s funding the kind of thing, but the reality is that someone is, and we can expect to see more and more of it as we get closer to the presidential election.

It is a truism of American politics that presidential elections are not won or lost on foreign policy, and the Biden Administration is operating on that assumption. And they may turn out to be correct that the GOP’s weaponization of Ukraine will not appreciably alter the outcome of the election. They are almost certainly correct that, if Biden doesn’t win the election, all of this will be moot. But the Republicans’ tack is making it increasingly likely that the volume and consistency of American support for Ukraine will fall victim to the campaign.

Let me be clear: I have no doubts whatsoever about the administration’s commitment to Ukraine. That’s not an ideological or a partisan statement: I’m privileged to have the opportunity to talk to these people regularly, sometimes several times a week. I can see the degree of commitment. But I can also see the growing frustration with the state of the debate — and with President Biden’s absence from that debate. It is one thing for members of Congress or the Secretary of State to carry the flag. It is quite another for the President to do so. Yes, Biden is unlikely to win over die-hard Republican voters, but the evidence is that independent voters and maybe even some Democrats are beginning to waver.

The message, I think, needs to be two-fold. The first part is to make the national-interest case. As I’ve been trying to argue since June 2022, that case is clear. A world in which Ukraine loses this war is not just one in which big powers can invade their neighbors with impunity: it is also one in which smaller powers will feel increasingly insecure, sparking arms races and militarized competition around the globe. It will be a world of more war and more forced migration, less trade and less prosperity. Only by making that clear — by hammering home the message that Republicans are willing to trade away American security and prosperity to score political points — can Biden and Ukraine’s supporters ensure that the likes of McCarthy, Greene and Matt Gaetz pay a price for their fecklessness.

That, though, is only part of the message — because the MAGA attack on Ukraine is not the only bullet we’re trying to dodge this weekend. The other is in Slovakia, where a handful of liberal parties were, as I wrote this, appear to have failed to prevent the return of populist strongman Robert Fico. Fico, who was forced to resign in 2018 after he was linked to the murder of journalist Ján Kuciak, is an ally of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and, like Orbán, campaigns against European support for Ukraine. Giving Orbán an ally will make it significantly harder to hold the line on Ukraine in Europe and will energize other populists ahead of the European Parliament elections next June.

I am not among those who think that Fico, Orbán, Poland’s right-wing Konfederacja party or other European populists are on Putin’s payroll, though it hardly matters if the effect is the same. Like the Republicans in the US, they have found that they can score political points by claiming that the money going to Ukraine would be better spent at home. And that line of attack needs a robust response, too.

Here’s the thing: the vast majority of the voters who support these populist appeals are not, at their core, pro-Russian or anti-Ukrainian. On some level, most of them appear to be available to the argument that it is both a moral and a national-security imperative for Ukraine to win this war. In fact, the fact that support has gradually eroded over time suggests that they once believed that the West should make sacrifices to support Ukraine. The problem is that they are increasingly coming to believe that they — ordinary middle- and working-class citizens — will bear the overwhelming brunt of that burden, just as they have borne the overwhelming brunt of the 2007-8 global financial crisis, the Covid pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis of recent years, while inequality only ever seems to grow.

Ukraine’s supporters in the West cannot continue to rely on public support if we cannot find a way to extend to our own compatriots at least a measure of the same solidarity we extend to Ukrainians. In short, we need fiscal and social policies that are commensurate with our foreign and security policies. The good news, I think, is that the Biden Administration has the right ideas on this front, as do many European governments. What they need now is to have the political courage of their policy convictions.

What I’m reading

The social media feeds of Russia watchers have been ablaze for the past week or so with an article by Sergei Chernyshov, a journalist from Novosibirsk. Published in Russia.Post back on 19 September, the piece brings to bear anecdotal evidence from Chernyshov’s immediate surroundings and personal experience to argue that Russia’s large underclass has bought into the war because of the material benefits it brings them — largely (but not exclusively) in the form of additional income for those who serve (and particularly the beneficiaries of those who die).

Chernyshov’s piece has met with a chorus of approval, particularly from those unconvinced by Russian liberals’ insistence that most Russians do not really support the war. But it has also met with skepticism. The most cogent critique I’ve seen came from Jeremy Morris, a sociologist at Aarhus University in Denmark and one of the few people who has been able to conduct meaningful fieldwork in Russia since the war began. Jeremy points out at least three problems with Chernyshov’s piece. First, and most obviously, generalizing about an entire class of people based on anecdotal evidence is analytically dangerous. Second, the available polling evidence suggests that the modest ardent supporters of the war are actually more affluent Russians, not the poor. And third, the same people who are supposedly benefitting from the war are also those who have been hit hardest by Russia’s wartime economic difficulties — and the spoils of war that do reach them are, on the face of it, insufficient and too few and far between for us to expect them to have any systematic effect.

In this particular debate, I’m more or less on Jeremy’s side. No one here is arguing that the majority of Russians are actually opposed to the war. Moreover, it’s likely that the motivations Chernyshov describes are in fact at play for some number of Russians. But Jeremy’s point is correct: we can’t build generalized arguments on the basis of anecdotal evidence, especially when other available evidence points in other directions. I also agree that, in the absence of methodologically robust research, we need to avoid pinning ourselves to arguments just because we find them ideologically or emotionally satisfying. (Indeed, I made a similar argument in Foreign Affairs last week.) I’d actually take the argument one step farther: we really need to stop making arguments about “the Russians”. We’re much better off recognizing that Russian society, for all its behavioral conformity, is socially diverse, and the pathways that lead people to conformist behavior are likely to be equally diverse.

For more evidence of that diversity, take a look at the profile in Kholod of Andrei Timin, a Russian enlisted man who decided to serve a two-and-a-half-year jail sentence rather than fight in Ukraine. Similarly complicating our analysis is a piece, also from Kholod, describing the the 29 September Red Square rally commemorating the supposed annexation of occupied Ukrainian territory. The picture that emerges is difficult to interpret — a mix of genuine (if propaganda-driven) enthusiasm and astroturf — and that, in fact, is the point.

The team at Verstka had quite a week, with three intriguing reports: one on Wednesday on how Russian authorities are preparing for a jump in the number of people with physical disabilities; one on Thursday on the prevalence of drug use among Russian soldiers on the front lines; and one on Friday profiling the Russian women traveling to the front to see their sons and lovers. Also on Friday, Irina Dolinina at iStories reported on the flagging morale among the late Evgeny Prigozhin’s former Wagner fighters.

For those interested in fresh academic analysis, the good people at Communist and Post-Communist Studies published an excellent reading list of recent articles from the journal across a range of sub-regions and topics.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to plug three new publications from CEPA:

• A report by Marija Golubeva, Nicolas Tenzer and Katarzyna Pisarska on the internal EU politics that will shape the fate of Ukraine’s bid for membership;

• A report by Aura Sabadus on the challenges of improving corporate governance at Ukraine’s state-owned energy and infrastructure companies; and

• A conversation I had with Bayer Crop Science chief executive Rodrigo Santos on the imperatives and challenges of getting Ukraine’s agricultural sector back on its feet.

What I’m listening to

I’m not quite sure why, but I’ve been struggling to find new music I like. I blame it on falling editorial standards at Pitchfork. (Is it just me?) That, or the fact that my daughter’s musical tastes have forced me to abdicate my Spotify account. (Again, just me?) So I was tooling around looking to see if there was anything new from Frazey Ford, whose voice and songwriting sensibility I adore. I didn’t exactly find what I was looking for, but I did find this, from something like ten years ago. Come for the vocal harmonies (yes, that’s Frazey backing it up), stay for the dissonant guitar solo.