Brussels Sprouts Podcast: UNC, King’s College Professors Discuss the War in Ukraine and Russia’s Upcoming Election
Photo by Sergei Bobylev/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool via AP/NBC News
On Wednesday, January 31, UNC’s Nelson Mandela Auditorium was host to the live recording of Brussels Sprouts, a podcast by the Center for a New American Security. The podcast covers matters of Transatlantic security for a general audience, including topics relating to NATO, Russia, the EU, and Europe. In Wednesday’s “Diplomatic Discussion” on Russia’s upcoming election and the war in Ukraine, hosts Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Jim Townsend spoke with Graeme Robertson, UNC political science professor and director of the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies. The podcast was also joined virtually by Dr. Samuel Greene, a King’s College London political science professor. Greene and Robertson are co-authors of “Putin vs. the People,” which explores the dynamics of Putin’s public support in Russia.
Despite Western catastrophizing early in the war, the invasion of Ukraine has not proved to be the public approval crisis for Putin that many expected, according to Robertson. His research shows that Russian’s approval for the war remains buoyant at over 50%, and support for Putin remains high.
It is, however, difficult to get a real read on public opinion in a regime like Russia’s. Criticism of the war in Ukraine is criminalized. Additionally, the Kremlin has put forward a massive propaganda campaign to sway Russians’ opinions on the war. Surveys by Chronicles, a Russian-based research group founded by opposition politician Aleksei Miniailo, found that just 33 percent of Russians polled were against a military withdrawal from Ukraine. Of course, polling by an opposition-backed research group might be subject to its own selection and/or response biases.
Regardless of the exact rate of public support for the war, the talk raised interesting points regarding Russians’ relationship with their government and the psychological underpinnings of their support for the war.
According to Greene, Russians’ continuing support of government leaders and decisions that seem to Americans to be contrary to their own interests is rooted in the culture and history of the country. It’s not so much that Russians don’t understand the corrupt nature of their government, but rather that they have learned to accept it. So long as they can continue to go about their lives, many Russians can disassociate themselves from the actions of their government rather than risking a meaningful opposition.
“It's not difficult to convince people in Russia that they are badly governed. Most people understand that. The problem for the opposition and the problem for the West is that most Russians themselves have learned to live like that, and learn to live without a state that serves them,” Greene said during the talk.
From Tsarist Russia to the Soviet Union, Russia’s long history of authoritarian rule has impacted its de-facto political system and cultural attitudes to this day. According to one article in the Cambridge Journal of Political Affairs, for example, student writer Varvara Vassilieva argues that the legacies of past authoritarian governments have imbued Russia with a unique cultural mentality that equates authoritarianism with authority and thus allows the country to develop an “authoritarianism in practice” despite its liberalized post-Soviet constitution.
According to Robertson, the Kremlin has developed a strategy of war-time propaganda that seeks to “muddy the waters” rather than create a single narrative. Russians, unlike citizens of other authoritarian regimes like China, still have largely unrestricted access to outside information via the internet. As a result, Russian propagandists cannot rely on a single narrative to develop one unifying justification for the war. Instead, several different narratives are pushed to allow Russians of differing stripes to “choose” their own justification.
“So we're not fighting Ukrainians. We're fighting fascists, right? Okay. Let's do that,” Robertson said, for example. Russian actors have presented Ukrainians and their government as neo-Nazis to create support for the war.
Russian citizens have shown a surprising resilience to war casualties. While Russian authorities have claimed that there have been just 6,000 Russian casualties in Ukraine, U.S. intelligence estimates the number is closer to 315,000 killed and injured.
During the talk, Robertson described a survey performed by himself and his team in Russia to gauge opinions about the war. Neither the prompt “hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians will die,” nor “hundreds of thousands of Russians will die,” had any effect on respondents’ opinions on a hypothetical attack on Kiev. The respondents did, however, have a strong response when posed with the prompt that some of their friends and family will die.
“So long as not too many people feel that personal connection, then it's pretty robust,” Robertson said.
Greene suggested that this logic is likely why Putin has not moved towards a full-scale war. Russia’s borders remain open, and no conscription has been enacted, which grants the average Russian an opportunity to continue to live in peace despite the invasion and thus acts as a safety valve on public opinion.
The talk also discussed the upcoming presidential election in Russia. From March 15-17, the Russian people will vote in their eighth ever presidential election. According to Robertson, and indeed most experts on Russian politics, Putin is all but sure to win–legitimately or not.
None of the 4 candidates currently on the ballot for president are anti-war. Boris Nadezhdin, the only potential candidate running on an anti-war platform, will likely be barred for “flaws” found in his application paperwork.
While Putin is all but certain to win another 6-year term, Robertson suspects that the 71-year-old will not run again. In an interview after the talk, he elaborated further on this idea.
“As he ages, which he will do–people age faster in their 70s than they do in their 60s–the conversation amongst his entourage about how to protect themselves will intensify,” Robertson said.
Putin is already well beyond the average life expectancy for Russian males, according to the World Bank’s estimate of 64. As he ages, Robertson suspects that it will become much more difficult for the president to fulfill his role of managing and organizing his fellow oligarchs, many of whom have competing interests–and access to their own military forces, such as the KGB or the National Guard. While this election will put off any succession concerns for the time being, it is only a matter of time before the issue becomes impossible to ignore.
“He's like a mafia don,” Robertson said. “Having a weak boss is actually kind of cool because it lets them do stuff without Putin’s interference, but that very quickly leads to conflict amongst the ruling group, and that leads to violence pretty, pretty quickly.”
This is not to say that the issue of succession would be solved with arms, of course, or even that Russia’s ruling class would want such a thing. He argues that the issue of succession is more likely to be negotiated behind closed doors.
“I really wanted to keep open the possibility in people's minds that Putin is not eternal,” Robertson said, referring to a similar comment the night before.
The result of Russia’s election is all but certain. Unfortunately, it will not serve as a reprieve for Ukraine. However, it may serve as the beginning of a long-awaited shift in Russian politics: a post-Putin era.
Much of this talk fell outside of the scope of this article. To hear the rest of the talk, check out the Brussels Sprouts podcast episode.