RUSSIA PREPARED FOR ‘PERPETUAL WARFARE’?
With Putin’s reelection all but certain, 2nd military mobilization possible
TALLINN, Estonia — As Vladimir Putin heads for another six-year term as Russia’s president, there’s little electoral drama in the race. What he does after he crosses the finish line is what’s drawing attention and, for many observers, provoking anxiety.
The voting that concludes on Sunday is all but certain to allow Putin to remain in office until 2030, giving him a full three decades of leading Russia as either president or prime minister.
The heft of that long tenure and the thorough suppression of effective domestic opposition voices gives Putin a very strong — and perhaps unrestrained — hand.
That position is bolstered by the Russian economy’s surprising resilience despite wide-ranging Western sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine.
It’s also strengthened by Moscow’s incremental but consistent battlefield advances in recent months, flagging support for military aid to Kyiv from the United States and other quarters, and growing skepticism in some Western countries over more progressive social attitudes that echoes Putin’s push for “traditional values.”
Putin, in short, would head into a new term with few obvious restraints, and that could manifest itself quickly in major new actions.
“Russia’s presidential election is not so important as what will come after. Putin has often postponed unpopular moves until after elections,” Bryn Rosenfeld, a Cornell University professor who studies post-Communist politics, said in a commentary.
Probably the most unpopular move he could make at home would be to order a second military mobilization to fight in Ukraine; the first, in September 2022, sparked protests, and a wave of Russians fled the country to avoid being called up. However unpopular a second mobilization might be, it could also mollify relatives of the soldiers who were drafted 18 months ago.
Some in Russia believe it could happen. “Russian leaders are now talking of ‘consolidating the whole of Russian society around its defense needs,’” Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior adviser at the RAND Corporation think tank, told The Associated Press.
“The precise meaning of this phrase is not entirely clear, but it suggests that Russia’s leadership understands that the war Putin describes will go on for a long time, and therefore resources must be mobilized,” he added. “In other words, Russian society must be organized for perpetual warfare.”
But Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, says Putin doesn’t need a mobilization partly because many Russians from poorer regions have signed up to fight in order to get higher pay than what they can earn in their limited opportunities at home.
While support for Ukraine lags in Washington, both French President Emmanuel Macron and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski have said recently that sending troops to back Kyiv is at least a hypothetical possibility.
With those statements in mind, Putin may be motivated to test the resolve of NATO.
Alexandra Vacroux, executive director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, posits that Russia within several years will make an attempt to assess NATO’s commitment to Article 5, the alliance’s common defense guarantee under which an attack on one member is considered an attack on all.
“I don’t think that Putin thinks that he needs to be physically, militarily stronger than all of the other countries. He just needs them to be weaker and more fractured,’’ she said.
“So in order to do that, it’s like you have to find a situation where you could test Article 5,” and if the response is mild or uncertain “then you’ve shown that, like NATO is just a paper tiger,” Vacroux said.