Putin Needs Repression to Run an Unpopular War

On March 6, 2022, Russians gathered to protest President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, then 10 days old. That same day, Russian police arrested more people than on any other day in Putin’s more than two decades in power. The sheer scale of these more than 4,600 arrests points to a fundamental truth about judging the Russian public’s reaction to Ukraine: Political repression in Russia has reached unprecedented levels, jumping far above even the staggering baseline reached since the start of Putin’s fourth term in 2018.

A year after the invasion, the fact that Russians continue to find ways to oppose and resist the war—albeit in ways not always visible to outside observers—has important implications for the future of the war and of Russia itself.

Putin has always used repression, but it deepened sharply in 2020 following mass protests in Belarus over a stolen presidential election that appeared to threaten the Lukashenko regime, a close ally to Putin. Putin responded to these protests outside of Russia not only by providing informational, security, and financial support to Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko but also by targeting Russia’s own domestic opposition, beginning with the attempted assassination of leading Russian oppositionist Alexey Navalny.

Navalny’s near-fatal poisoning in August 2020 was the first in a series of acts between the protests in Belarus and the invasion of Ukraine in which the Russian government intended to destroy what remained of independent political, media, and civic activity in Russia. Navalny was immediately jailed on his January 2021 return to Russia; a few months later, his Anti-Corruption Foundation was declared an “extremist organization” and forced to close in Russia as many top staff fled the country under threat of criminal charges.

Along with these attacks on the political opposition, the years before the invasion also saw a harsh new government campaign against Russia’s independent media. In December 2020, the government modified the law on “foreign agents” to make the label potentially applicable to almost any Russian citizen as well as strengthened penalties for noncompliance. Over the next year, Russia would use the foreign agent designation against almost all of Russia’s top independent media outlets and the journalists who run them, severely constraining their ability to operate inside Russia.

In another part of this broad campaign of repression, this new version of the “foreign agents” law was also used widely against leading Russian human rights activists and nongovernmental organizations, culminating in the December 2021 court order to dissolve Memorial, Russia’s oldest human rights group and a pillar of Russian civil society since the end of the Soviet Union.

It’s not clear whether Putin was actively seeking to crush any sprout of dissent in preparation for his invasion. But since February 2022, the Russian government’s restrictions on political liberties have grown yet more severe.

The first indication of the post-invasion crackdown’s severity was its speed. Within two weeks of invading Ukraine, the Russian government passed new laws making “spreading false information” about or “discrediting” Russia’s military forces and their actions in Ukraine crimes carrying a penalty of up to 15 years in prison. The remaining major independent media outlets operating in the country were forced to close, and the Russian government telecommunications censor blocked their websites along with those of independent media operating from exile and the Russian-language sites of international outlets like the BBC. The government’s internet censor also blocked or degraded access to international social media platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook.

While virtual private networks (VPNs) and other anti-censorship technology make it possible for readers to access the reporting of exiled independent Russian media outlets, a variety of official bans make it difficult and risky to discuss that reporting in public spaces. New censorship measures—such as technical attacks on VPN providers and, most troublingly, a much-discussed potential imminent ban on YouTube—appear likely.

The wartime censorship laws exceed previous Putinist repression in the speed, breadth, and harshness with which they’ve been applied. According to data from the Russian human rights group OVD-Info, 2022 saw more than 21,000 Russians arrested for anti-war actions (with many reports of beatings and the torture of detainees), of whom at least 370 people face criminal charges (most often under the new “false information” law)—more than twice as many criminal cases as were brought in 2021 during protests around Navalny’s arrest and more than 10 times as many as in the infamous Bolotnaya Square Case 10 years earlier.

The Russian government has used its repressive laws to terrorize ordinary Russian citizens for even private speech, such as the couple from Krasnodar couple who were arrested in a restaurant after their anti-war conversation was overheard. The young are not immune—like the teenager from Arkhangelsk who is facing more than 10 years in prison for anti-war posts on social media. Any form of protest brings terrible risk, as in the case of Sasha Skochilenko, a St. Petersburg artist arrested in April 2022 for replacing supermarket price tags with stickers printed with information about deaths in Ukraine; Skochilenko also faces up to 10 years under the “false information” law. Independent journalists remaining in Russia are similarly exposed to these laws: This month, a court sentences Maria Ponomarenko to six years in prison for social media posts about the Russian military’s deadly attack on a Mariupol theater, where hundreds of Ukrainian civilians were sheltering.

The government has also used the war to target any remaining political opposition leaders inside Russia. A Russian judge sentenced Ilya Yashin in December 2022 to more than eight years in prison for “false information” charges over a YouTube video describing Russian war crimes in the Ukrainian city of Bucha. Vladimir Kara-Murza, an opposition leader (and Washington Post columnist) faces a sentence of up to 20 years on charges including not only “spreading false information” (once again, for publicizing Russian war crimes against Ukraine) but also for state treason. Opposition leaders already jailed at the time of the invasion have also since received long sentences: four years for St. Petersburg oppositionist Andrei Pivovarov and an additional nine years for Navalny.

Coordinated, systematic government efforts to deny Russians accurate information about the war coupled with the harsh punishment of any public form of anti-war sentiment reveal an important truth about Russian public opinion: The Putin regime is not confident in its ability to maintain the public’s support if Russians can learn about and openly discuss the truth. In an authoritarian state like Russia, public polling can yield only a distorted picture of public sentiment. Nevertheless, Putin’s administration has long been known to carefully study opinion research and has clearly reached the conclusion that—unlike with the 2014 illegal annexation of Crimea—public support for this war is far from guaranteed.

The Russian public’s actions show that Putin’s administration was right to be concerned. In addition to nationwide protests early in the war, other acts of opposition and resistance have continued. One major form of resistance has been emigration: The Washington Post recently reported that somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million Russians have left the country since the invasion. A first major wave of emigration occurred in the initial weeks after the invasion, with a second wave in September after the government announced a partial general mobilization. Both waves were products of Russians deciding en masse—in some combination of principle and self-interest—that they no longer wanted to be part of their country and its war—and in doing so, hurt Russia’s war effort.

Other Russians resist the war in less noticeable ways, turning to forms of “silent protest” that carry less risk than public demonstrations. One popular form of resistance is aid to Ukrainian refugees, many of whom end up in Russian territory as a result of Russian programs that forcibly transfer Ukrainian civilians or because of a lack of other options. In Russia, underground volunteer networks are helping Ukrainians leave the country for Europe or other safer destinations; Russian expatriates in major destinations like Tbilisi, Georgia; Warsaw, Poland; and Prague have also organized to help Ukrainian refugees arriving in those cities.

Other Russians are choosing more radical forms of protest, such as arson attacks on military enlistment offices and even sabotage of defense and industrial targets. Ordinary Russians continue to resist symbolically in the face of potential fines or imprisonment by wearing green ribbons or placing flowers at cultural sites associated with Ukraine in signs of solidarity after particularly horrifying Russian military atrocities.

Russian civil society leaders, independent press, and political opposition have also defied the government’s repression—some inside the country and some from exile. Human rights lawyers continue to defend Russians facing prosecution for their anti-war speech or actions, including Russian men refusing to fight in the war. The independent press has effectively adapted to legal and technological barriers and continued to report on important stories helping Russians understand what is being done in their names.

Exiled opposition leaders are helping to organize a new generation of activists politicized by the war and ready to take on a difficult issue that has often been ignored by anti-Putin figures in the past: Russia’s post-imperial legacy and the damage it has caused—most dramatically and violently over the last year in Ukraine—to non-ethnic Russians across the former Soviet Union.

Russia’s new political prisoners are also using social media and whatever other means they have at their disposal to continue spreading the truth about the war and to condemn its irredentist aims and brutal methods. Kara-Murza has continued to write his Washington Post column via letters from pretrial detention. Navalny has not only used his occasional court appearances (conducted remotely from the prison colony where he is being held) to repeatedly condemn Putin’s war but also to put forward plans offering a different course for Russia’s future domestic and foreign politics, even as his own life remains at risk from the torturous medical mistreatment intentionally imposed by his jailers.

As courageous as all of these acts are, none of them poses an imminent threat to the Putin regime’s hold on power or its ability to continue its war of aggression against Ukraine. But public sentiment still has an impact. Military analysts Rob Lee and Michael Kofman show that the Russian military faced a serious troop shortage as early as May 2022 and that Putin’s refusal to carry out a mobilization helped create conditions for Ukraine’s successful counteroffensives in the fall. Putin delayed the mobilization, likely out of awareness that the public would be strongly opposed to it (which indeed turned out to be the case), until he had no choice.

As the war goes into its second year, public sentiment constraints on Russia will persist. Economic sanctions will continue to degrade Russians’ quality of life; as political scientist Samuel Greene has pointed out, this has the potential to turn individual resistance (which characterizes most acts of resistance described above) into collective resistance with a broad social base. A second wave of mobilization, which military analysts now see as almost certainly necessary, could have the same effect. During the first mobilization wave, the government concentrated call-ups among Russia’s poorest citizens and ethnic minorities while disproportionately passing over urban middle-class Russians who have considerably more political voice. A second wave would be forced to draw more heavily from that population.

As both sides prepare for a long war, growing anti-war sentiment in Russia can add to Putin’s challenges in outlasting Ukraine and its allies. Internal Kremlin polls obtained by Russian outlet Meduza showed that the share of Russians favoring peace talks grew from 32 percent to 55 percent between July and November 2022 (before and after mobilization); over the same period, support for continuing the war among respondents dropped from 57 percent to 25 percent. Although the level of repression means such sentiment has little immediate political impact, it nevertheless constitutes a long-term constraint on Putin’s action because of how he has structured his regime.

Further growth in Russian anti-war sentiment can also be an important factor in a successful post-war settlement. For Russia to truly accept an agreement enshrining Ukrainian sovereignty and security (rather than simply seeking a pause before a renewed assault), it will require Russian leadership to adopt a radically different policy toward Ukraine from the one it has pursued for the last 10 years. However unlikely it may seem at the moment, this is the vision offered by figures like Navalny, writing from apparently permanent solitary confinement.

Navalny is a controversial figure outside of Russia (perhaps nowhere more so than in Ukraine), with a history of racist statements and nationalist policy ideas. As Navalny rose to prominence, Russian government media constantly exploited exaggerated versions of this history to discredit Navalny, at times with a concrete impact on his international image. This smear campaign has often spilled over into misrepresentations of Navalny’s foreign-policy positions—in particular, false claims that Navalny “backed” the illegal annexation of Crimea.

Navalny has consistently condemned Putin’s military interventions in Ukraine and opposed the annexation of Crimea as illegal. Although in the past he hasn’t ruled out that the peninsula’s post-annexation future might lie with Russia (perhaps after a true referendum), such a resolution struck some as potentially acceptable to Ukraine prior to February 2022. Like so many others, Navalny now appears to recognize that over the last year, Russia’s disastrous attack on Ukraine and Ukraine’s powerful resistance have shifted the horizon of the politically feasible. This week, he published a plan for Russia’s future, calling for Russia to end the war on the terms demanded by the Ukrainian government, including the restoration to Ukraine of all territory within its internationally recognized borders.

Just as the Putin regime distorts Navalny’s views, it also works to distort the views of the Russian public, presenting false images portraying ordinary Russians as united in support of the war. The messages sent through this propaganda—with Navalny, that Russia will continue Putin’s policies under any other leader; with the Russian public, that they will support those policies no matter how bloody and senseless—are intended to intimidate Putin’s domestic opponents and Russia’s international ones. In truth, absent Putin’s censorship and repression, Navalny might well find many more Russians on his side. A Russia that takes a course away from imperialism and destruction would create a better future for Ukraine—and for Russia itself.