Professional-Ukrainian fighters stormed throughout the border into southwestern Russia this previous week, prompting two days of the heaviest combating on Russian territory in 15 months of struggle. But President Vladimir V. Putin, in public, ignored the matter solely.
He handed out medals, met the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, hosted pleasant international leaders and made televised small discuss with a Russian decide about how Ukraine was not an actual nation.
In managing Russia’s largest struggle in generations, Mr. Putin more and more seems to be like a commander in chief in absentia: In public, he says subsequent to nothing in regards to the course of the struggle and betrays little concern about Russia’s setbacks. As a substitute, he’s telegraphing extra clearly than ever that his technique is to attend out Ukraine and the West — and that he thinks he can win by exhausting his foes.
“There’s no want for any illusions,” mentioned Natalia Zubarevich, an skilled on Russian social and financial growth at Moscow State College. Mr. Putin, she mentioned, has laid the home groundwork to maintain the struggle for a “lengthy, lengthy, lengthy, lengthy, lengthy” time.
However whereas Western analysts and officers consider that Mr. Putin’s Russia does have the potential to maintain combating, his army, financial and political maneuvering room has narrowed, presenting obstacles to prosecuting a prolonged struggle.
Whilst Mr. Putin refers back to the combating as distant “tragic occasions,” the struggle retains hitting dwelling — with rising fissures within the army management, unease among the many Russian elite and worrying indicators for the economic system because the West vows to additional wean itself off Russian vitality.
On the battlefield, Russia’s skill to go on the offensive has shriveled as ammunition has run low and the monthslong battle for the japanese Ukrainian metropolis of Bakhmut took 1000’s of troopers’ lives. Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the chief of the Wagner mercenary group that led the assault on Bakhmut, mentioned he was beginning to pull his troopers out of town whereas releasing one profane tirade after one other aimed toward Russia’s Kremlin-allied elites.
To mount a serious new offensive, Western officers and analysts say that Mr. Putin would want to search out new sources of ammunition — and impose a politically dangerous, second army draft to replenish his depleted troops. Nonetheless, the U.S. director of nationwide intelligence, Avril D. Haines, instructed Congress this month that the probabilities that Mr. Putin would make any concessions in talks this yr had been “low,” until he had been to really feel a home political menace.
Western officers additionally stay involved in regards to the risk that he might resort to nuclear weapons, however calculate that the danger is best if Mr. Putin is dealing with a catastrophic defeat that threatens his maintain on energy.
At dwelling, Russia’s economic system has proved versatile sufficient to adapt to Western sanctions, whereas authorities reserves have been enough to finance larger army spending and elevated welfare funds. However the longer the struggle drags on — particularly if oil costs drop — the likelier it’s that the Kremlin can be compelled into exhausting selections on reducing authorities spending or letting inflation surge.
Politically, some researchers argue that public assist for the struggle in Russia is broad however shallow — able to shifting rapidly in response to unexpected occasions. The incursions throughout the border this week introduced the struggle into Russia in a means it had not earlier than, stirring unease amongst army bloggers, who’ve a widespread following.
Then there may be the wild card of Mr. Prigozhin, who has been morphing right into a populist politician taking up prime Russian officers, and who this week delivered a broadside towards the technique of ready out the West.
In an hourlong video interview with a Russian blogger, Mr. Prigozhin described an unlikely “optimistic state of affairs” during which “Europe and America get uninterested in the Ukrainian battle, China sits everybody down on the negotiating desk, we agree that every thing we’ve already grabbed is ours.”
The extra probably state of affairs, Mr. Prigozhin asserted, is that Ukraine pushes Russian troops again to prewar traces and threatens the Crimean peninsula — the crown jewel amongst Mr. Putin’s Ukrainian land grabs.
Western analysts and officers doubt that Ukraine’s upcoming counteroffensive can ship a knockout blow. On the identical time, they are saying that Russia’s skill to wage the struggle is steadily degrading, as evidenced by tens of 1000’s of casualties in Bakhmut and the sharp decline within the variety of shells that Russian forces are firing per day in japanese Ukraine in contrast with the peak of the battle final yr.
“It’s not as if the Russians will all of a sudden cease with the ability to wage a struggle,” mentioned Max Bergmann, a former State Division official now on the Heart for Strategic and Worldwide Research in Washington. “The query is can they nonetheless wage it with any kind of depth.”
However Mr. Putin will not be betraying any public sense of urgency.
He stays remoted in his pandemic-era cocoon, requiring Russians who meet with him to quarantine for days. (A cosmonaut honored at a Kremlin medal ceremony on Tuesday began his speech with, “Sorry, we’ve been silent for per week in isolation.”)
Mr. Putin seldom goes into element in regards to the course of the struggle, at the same time as he sits in prolonged televised conferences on matters like interethnic relations. So banal was the dialogue that an Armenian civic chief instructed Mr. Putin that his group had despatched “300,000 chocolate bars with raisins and nuts” to japanese Ukraine.
As a substitute, he typically speaks of the struggle he ordered as a phenomenon exterior of his management. In televised remarks to businesspeople on Friday, he referred to “right this moment’s tragic occasions.” His silence concerning the dramatic, two-day incursion into Russia this week was a shift from his reaction to a smaller such strike in March, when he known as off a visit and denounced the episode as a “terrorist” assault.
When he does talk about Ukraine, his remarks are heavy on distorted historical past — as if to inform the world that it doesn’t matter what occurs on the bottom, Russia is destined to regulate the nation. On Tuesday, the Kremlin launched footage of Mr. Putin assembly with Valery Zorkin, the chairman of Russia’s Constitutional Court docket, who introduced with him a replica of a Seventeenth-century French map of Europe.
“There’s no Ukraine” on the map, Mr. Zorkin tells Mr. Putin.
Mr. Putin then falsely asserts that earlier than the Soviet Union was shaped, “there was by no means any Ukraine within the historical past of humanity.”
Some Russian officers are already waiting for subsequent yr’s presidential election in the US, hinting {that a} Republican victory might flip the tide. Dmitri A. Medvedev, the previous Russian president and the vice chairman of Mr. Putin’s safety council, said this week that “the primary factor” was that President Biden not be re-elected.
Former President Donald J. Trump, who’s the early front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, “is an efficient man,” Mr. Medvedev mentioned, and, “traditionally, it was all the time simpler to work with the Republicans.”
However there are dangers to Mr. Putin’s wait-and-see method past the potential for a battlefield breakthrough by Ukraine. Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow on the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Heart, argues that Mr. Putin’s “tactic of inaction” might elevate the affect of hard-liners like Mr. Prigozhin.
“Russia’s elites are liable to see defeatism in inaction,” she wrote this month. “Already, Putin is struggling to elucidate what precisely he’s ready for.”
The sturdiness of Russian public assist for the struggle — just like the financial stability that helps underpin it — is much from clear.
However some researchers and American officers consider that cracks in pro-war sentiment have already begun to show due to heavy casualties.
A current report from a gaggle of Russian sociologists, based mostly on scores of in-depth interviews, argues that Russians see the struggle as “a pure catastrophe” they can’t do something about, moderately than as one thing they’re firmly satisfied is true.
“This assist will not be constructed on elementary political positions or some ideological views,” mentioned Sasha Kappinen, one of many report’s authors, who makes use of a pseudonym for safety causes as a result of she works at a college in Russia. “This isn’t secure assist.”
Russia has spent closely to placate most of the people because the struggle started, growing welfare funds and easing the burden on small companies. Its economic system has tailored to sanctions, benefiting from the quite a few nations exterior North America and Western Europe that proceed to do brisk commerce with Russia.
Ms. Zubarevich, the Moscow financial growth skilled, mentioned the federal government had the capability to maintain spending at its present clip at the least till the presidential election subsequent March, when Mr. Putin, 70, is anticipated to run for a fifth time period. However a fall within the worth of oil might pressure the federal government to chop spending on issues like infrastructure.
“The 2 sacred cows are state protection procurement and assist for low-income teams and pensioners,” she mentioned, referring to the necessity to fulfill key constituencies. “They are going to be stored in place for so long as attainable.”
On the identical time, analysts and Russians who know Mr. Putin nonetheless see him as essentially versatile and opportunistic — a person who would most likely settle for a freeze within the combating if it had been supplied, at the same time as he prepares to combat on for years. Because of this, well-connected individuals in Moscow see an unpredictable future whereas girding for an extended struggle.
“Putin’s spectrum of choices is fairly broad,” a distinguished businessman in Moscow mentioned, “from doing a cease-fire right this moment to combating a hundred-year struggle.”
Julian E. Barnes and Oleg Matsnev contributed reporting.