A year ago, Russia marked the 9 May Victory Day celebration with a spectacular display of fireworks that lit up the Moscow sky. This year the fireworks have again been spectacular – but this time they have been caused by long-range Ukrainian attack drones slamming into refineries, pumping stations and factories deep inside Russia.
In the Black Sea port of Tuapse, fireballs of burning gasoline 15 storeys high erupted over the local oil refinery, while rivers of burning fuel ran down the city’s streets. Firefighters took three days to extinguish the inferno, which created a plume of smoke so high it was filmed by skiers from the slopes of the Caucasus mountains more than 60 miles away. Near the Urals in the city of Perm, two days of Ukrainian attacks on a crude oil pumping station, refineries and chemical factories created a toxic cloud 80 miles wide, according to Nasa satellite imagery, and prompted a region-wide chemical emergency alert. Three weeks before, strategically vital oil and liquefied gas storage and export terminals at Ust-Luga on the Baltic were repeatedly blown up.
Most symbolically humiliating for the Kremlin has been the scaling down of this year’s Victory Day parade on Red Square – traditionally a moment for Soviet and Russian leaders to show off their country’s military might. University military reservists will take the place of servicemen and there will be no tanks, missiles and military hardware. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov cited the ‘operational situation’ for the change, as well as Kyiv’s use of what he unironically called ‘openly terrorist methods’ – by which he meant the newfound drone capability that has allowed Ukraine to give the Russians some of their own medicine.
That their country is at war is finally coming home to many ordinary Russians who had hitherto ignored it
Vladimir Putin, for his part, did what he has been doing best ever since the sinking of the Kursk submarine in 2000 – pretend that nothing has happened. As Perm burned, he appeared on TV discussing cabbage-salting techniques with plump ladies in traditional Russian headdresses. Addressing a cabinet meeting, he assured his ministers there has been ‘no serious damage’ from the attacks.
Increasingly, Russians are ceasing to believe him. ‘In Russia, it feels as though the very composition of the air has changed – or, seen from the outside, as if a haze has settled in,’ says Alexander Baunov, a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. ‘Attitudes toward Putin are shifting. Economic optimism is fading, along with the everyday patriotism tied to it… Finally, there is a growing recognition that the war cannot be won – a war that has itself changed, eroding Russia’s advantages.’
Putin’s ‘special military operation’ has now lasted longer than the USSR’s participation in the second world war and has seen at least 220,000 Russians killed in action – to count only those confirmed by name by international NGOs and BBC monitoring. Yet of the four Ukrainian provinces claimed by Russia since the invasion, only one – Luhansk – has been taken completely, the toll on the Russian economy is starting to cause serious fiscal strain and inflation, and – perhaps most significantly – repeated strikes deep inside Russia have become unignorable. The reality that their country is at war is, in short, finally coming home to many ordinary Russians who had hitherto ignored it.
In a noticeable shift, a taboo against criticising the government directly on Russian social media has evaporated over recent weeks. The charge was led by a slew of glamorous internet influencers who used their platforms to blast the authorities for an economic downturn, official corruption and sporadic blockages of mobile internet coverage. Open expression of discontent has suddenly become commonplace.
‘Pypa celebrates someone else’s victory for the USSR, but there are no victories of his own, only failures and embarrassments,’ lamented Evgeny Shcherbakov on the Telegram social media platform, using a derogatory term for Putin. ‘What kind of parade can there be when they’ve completely screwed up everything that was won by our grand-fathers and great-grandfathers?’ asked ‘Maria’, another Telegram user, in a post that attracted more than 4,000 likes. ‘Our government are corrupt and worthless grandchildren who’ve squandered the achievements of their ancestors.’ According to ‘Elena’, ‘the demilitarisation is going according to plan, but there’s a nuance’ – a biting reference to the Kremlin’s stated war aim of ‘demilitarising’ Ukraine.
A handful of angry social media posts do not make a revolution. But what is striking is how high the wave of criticism has gone and how many former self-described patriots have come out to voice their pessimism about the war and about Russia’s political and economic future. ‘We’re fucked, just totally fucked,’ said the prominent Russian ‘Z-blogger’ Yevgeny Golman – formerly known for his passionate support of the Kremlin. ‘Eighty per cent of my friends closed down their businesses. The system failed. They’ve been lying to Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] and they keep on lying.’
Igor Girkin, leading instigator of the 2014 Russian separatist takeover of the Donbas and known by his nom de guerre Igor Strelkov, posted on Telegram: ‘Unfortunately, we are heading toward military defeat. That is a fact.’ Strelkov, currently serving a four-year jail term for extremism after vehemently criticising the top brass of the Russian Defence Ministry, wrote: ‘NO ONE in Europe fears us AT ALL – the weak, talkative and boastful are respected nowhere and by no one.’ In a since-deleted post, the leading war-blogger Maxim Kalashnikov predicted: ‘After the change of the central figure of power, as a result of this un-triumphant war, a period of chaos and instability is inevitable.’ He also warned that ‘although, for the time being, the security forces keep Russian society in check, the process of forming new centres of political activism among citizens is intensifying’. Even the arch-hawk and television attack dog Vladimir Solovyov gloomily drew parallels with Napoleon, ‘who exhausted his resources and lost’, and warned that ‘prolonged war is bad’ for Russia.
More worryingly for the Kremlin, top managers in the Russian defence industry have also lost their fear of speaking out. Viacheslav Yakovlev, head of the Kubanzheldormash engineering company which supplies heavy machinery for railway maintenance, took to YouTube last week to complain that the corrupt state procurement system is effectively killing off domestic factories and that Russia’s attempts at import substitution have ‘completely failed’. Yakovlev predicted that his own 92-year-old factory would soon close.
Closer to the top of Putin’s ‘vertical of power’, Moscow’s Higher School of Economics published a detailed report about business confidence falling to its lowest level for the entirety of Putin’s rule, but soon removed it under alleged pressure from the Kremlin. Elvira Nabiullina, governor of Russia’s central bank, bluntly told a press conference that ‘economic activity is slowing down’ – and warned that a temporary rise in oil prices due to the US-Israeli war on Iran would not be enough to reverse the pressure of war on Russia’s economy.
A frustrated cadre of the government elite could be starting to chafe at the Kremlin’s forever war
Russia’s GDP has begun to contract for the first time since 2023, according to the country’s statistics agency. Seventy-three regions out of 89 closed last year with a fiscal deficit, and nationwide the deficit is five times what it was in 2024. Interest rates peaked above 20 per cent and are now a crippling 14 per cent; businesses have accumulated $109 billion in unpaid bills. Industrial production fell by 0.8 per cent and 0.9 per cent in January and February and Austria’s Raiffeisenbank analysts estimate that GDP could decline by about 1 per cent by the end of the first quarter.
On the other hand – and luckily for Putin – middle-aged Russians remember at least three economic crises over the past three decades, all far more serious than the current downturn. The veteran Communist party leader Gennady Zyuganov warned the Russian Duma earlier this month that the country faced ‘a repeat of 1917’ unless the economy was taken in hand. But that is mere hyperbole. The war may have erased the prosperity and growth to which Russians had grown accustomed. But the economy is still objectively far from collapse.
More worrying for Putin and his septuagenarian inner circle is that a frustrated cadre of younger members of the government elite could be starting to chafe at the Kremlin’s forever war. Online conspiracy theorists have speculated that the wave of high-profile influencers speaking out against the Kremlin could have been a plot coordinated by dark insider forces seeking a change of regime. While there’s little evidence beyond rumour and gossip to substantiate that, what is clear is that neither Putin himself nor his media machine have come up with a coherent narrative of what the Kremlin’s plan for the end of the war might be.
The bad news for Ukraine is, as Adam Smith said, there’s a lot of ruin in a nation. Russia’s economy may be groaning, but there’s no sign yet of any serious political challenge to Putin’s power either from his own elites or from below. Grumbling may be on the rise, but organised political dissent is still ruthlessly stamped upon. Putin remains firmly at the helm – but running on fumes, and without a map.
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