When things get dicey in Moscow, Vladimir Putin tends to drop out of sight for a while, retreating to one of his residences and canceling public events. Only his closest aides know how he spends his time during these absences, which can go on for days even in the middle of a national crisis. The Kremlin does its best to fill the vacant airtime on state TV with pretaped footage of the president, waiting for him to reemerge and declare that everything remains under his control.
Since the end of last year, when Ukraine intensified its campaign of drone and missile strikes on Russian cities, Putin has taken a few of these breaks. Two of them lasted for more than a week. He has mostly avoided talking about the Ukrainian strikes, even as they caused fuel shortages across Russia, destroyed infrastructure, and shattered the sense of stability that Putin offers his people in exchange for their loyalty. His first detailed response to the threat came on Monday, and he did his best to seem unmoved.
In a carefully scripted interview on state TV, Putin looked bored with the details of governing Russia and managing the frustrations of his citizens, but he did not appear tired of his war in Ukraine. He spent most of the 19-minute conversation with a Russian news anchor dissecting the minutiae of the fighting, even naming a particular street in one small town in the region of Donetsk where, according to Putin, his forces had managed to gain a bit of ground. The performance seemed designed to suggest that, away from the cameras, the Russian leader spends his time hunched over maps of the battlefield.
The Russian people, by contrast, have run out of patience with the war their leader seems so eager to continue. A survey released on the same day as Putin’s interview found that 81 percent of Russians want the war to end “as early as tomorrow.” The number of respondents who want the fighting to continue until Russia’s victory, no matter how long it takes, dropped in the survey to 9 percent, the lowest level ever recorded by the Institute for Conflict Studies and Analysis of Russia, which has conducted 10 rounds of polling since the start of the war, in 2022.
Its most recent survey matched up with the images and complaints that have flooded Russian social networks in the past few weeks, showing long lines at gas stations in Moscow and trucks stalled without fuel on the roadside. “There’s no gasoline in the city,” one man posted from a suburb of Moscow. “And the TV is silent about it.”
If Putin cares about such problems, he has done a decent job of hiding it. “Everything is working stably and with a big reserve of strength,” he said in Monday’s interview, referring to the fuel shortages spreading through Russia. His tone reminded me of Putin’s attitude toward the war in Syria, where Russian forces intervened in 2015 to save the regime in Damascus from a revolution. Back then, Putin still held regular meetings in Moscow with Russian businesspeople and corporate executives, hearing out their concerns about high interest rates, slow economic growth, and other matters of concern for the state.
One of the regular guests at those meetings described to me how Putin had trouble sitting through them. Obviously distracted, he would fidget in his seat and doodle in his notebook. When the conversation turned to the subject of war, however, the president would come alive, describing the kinds of fighter jets Russia used to bombard rebel positions in Syria and naming towns with stubborn pockets of resistance. “This was his passion,” the businessman told me. “Nothing else interested him the same way.”
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A decade later, and more than four years into his invasion of Ukraine, this element of Putin’s character seems only to have hardened. He treats the war as his calling, the purest expression of the power he has hoarded for a quarter century. The incalculable pain and suffering it has caused, with more than a million casualties overall, do not evoke for Putin anywhere near the level of emotion he displays when talking about the war’s mechanics.
“The direction of Rubtsi, on the left bank of the Stary Oskol river, we have nearly, practically, blocked a mixed group of enemy forces, around 5,000 troops, who are now pressed up against that river,” Putin said, apparently reading from a screen that stood over the interviewer’s right shoulder. “Only about two kilometers remain until their final encirclement, a problem that our 144th Division is working to solve.”
He carried on like this for nearly 10 minutes, at one point listing the number of houses that remain unconquered in one village in eastern Ukraine, a place that the average Russian does not care about, will never visit, and would have trouble finding on the map. Putin appeared to be making up facts as he went along. No encirclement around Rubtsi (population: 350 ) has been reported by any reliable source in Russia or Ukraine, and there is no river called Stary Oskol in that region. The Russian president’s obsession with the details of the fighting appears to have crossed the line into delusion.
Does that mania for war make him any more likely to cut his losses and accept a negotiated peace? Probably not. His interview on Monday illustrated what many in Ukraine and Europe have long concluded about Putin’s state of mind. He has convinced himself that the attritional math of the war favors Russia, and he will continue to press the numerical advantage of his forces regardless of how long the lines for gasoline in Moscow might get.
In the end, Russia could still face defeat, and the recent dynamics of the fighting have made that outcome look more likely than ever. Russia now loses an average of at least 30,000 troops a month, killed or gravely wounded. The Russian military struggles to replace those losses despite offering bonuses to new recruits worth up to $80,000—enough to buy an apartment in many Russian cities. For those sent to the front, the average life expectancy stands at around two or three weeks, according to one Russian military blogger who follows the fighting closely. “I have no doubt that another wave of mobilization will come as expected,” the blogger wrote at the end of May.
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Mobilizing more troops would be among Putin’s more obvious options for continuing the war for a long time to come. In September 2022, during another low point for him in this war, Putin called up 300,000 soldiers in the first military draft in Russia since the Second World War. Doing that again would devastate the Russian economy and risk a surge of popular unrest. But many close observers of the war in Russia have concluded that Putin has no other choice. “This fall, there will either be peace or mobilization,” another military blogger wrote a few weeks ago, setting off a debate on Russian social networks about whether men should pack their bags for basic training.
In his interview, Putin did not mention any plans to mobilize more forces. He also didn’t point to any viable path to peace. He only repeated his aim to conquer all of Novorossiya, or New Russia, a vague term that, in his mind, seems to encompass most of southern and eastern Ukraine. At their current rate of advance, Russian forces would need several more years of fighting to stand a realistic chance of achieving that goal. They would also need to be prepared to lose hundreds of thousands of soldiers. But that appears to be Putin’s intent, regardless how his people might feel about it.
