Russia in 2024: Same president, same war

Looking ahead to the new year, an optimistic President Vladimir Putin said at December's United Russia party conference that "our tasks are growing like a snowball, but we are Russia, we are a winter country, we love snow — look at how much has already fallen."

Indeed, the biggest event of the year in Russian politics will be the presidential election in mid-March, and the outcome is already clear. Putin faces no competition in his campaign for a fifth term, despite major losses over two years of waging war in Ukraine.

"People are dissatisfied with a lot of things," political scientist Aleksandr Kynev told DW. "But the political field has been cleared. The country is huge, and nobody would have the resources to fight for the presidency."

The most important challenge for Putin will be securing a voter turnout high enough to give his reelection a veneer of legitimacy. "Putin's main task is not to upset people too much," said Kynev.

Most Russians, Kynev said, are apolitical and afraid of change. However, he said, people are tired of the so-called special military operation, as the war in Ukraine is officially called in Russia, and "want it to be over as soon as possible."

Russians increasingly optimistic

The mood in Russia is much more confident now than it was at the beginning of the war in February 2022, said Denis Volkov, a sociologist and the director of the Levada Center, an independent opinion research institute in Moscow. The number of Russians who believe that their situation is worsening has halved compared to last year, he added. Volkov thinks this optimism will continue, especially as the banking system has stabilized despite Western sanctions.

Moscow-based economist Natalya Zubarevich doesn't think the economy will collapse in 2024. "The Russian economy is robust," she told DW. "EU sanctions will have no different effect than before."

Such punitive measures have been ineffective, she said, because "there are many other supply routes for sanctioned goods outside the EU." Indeed, exports from Russia are now increasingly going to China, India and the Middle East.

Zubarevich said she expected Russia to generate reasonable revenue through oil exports in 2024. This would enable the Kremlin to increase spending "to support the special military operation" in Ukraine.

Russia gripped by 'gigantic repression machine'

The largely unsuccessful counteroffensive by Ukrainian forces has dispelled fears of military defeat and contributed to improving the overall mood in Russia, said Volkov. He added that initial concerns about what Western military aid to Ukraine might mean for the war have also disappeared.

The number of people who believe that Russia's campaign is successful has increased, he said. The war has been normalized, he added, meaning people have become accustomed to it and most are not directly affected by it. The feeling is that "yes, the war is being waged, but somewhere far off."

After the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, hundreds of thousands of Russians fled abroad to protest Putin's politics or out of fear of being conscripted into the armed forces. Russia's leadership could have been swept from power in the early days of the war, Kynev said, if "all those who organized protests had taken to the streets in large numbers, instead of leaving the country in droves."

Irina Sherbakova, a historian who lives in exile, told DW that most Russians are not content with the situation. Sherbakova, who co-founded the renowned human rights organization Memorial — which was banned by the Kremlin in 2021 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize a year later — said Russia was gripped by a prevailing sense of fear.

"There is a gigantic repression machine," she said. "The long arm of the regime reaches ever deeper into people's lives and is now trying to exclude nonconformists and discontents from cultural life, or to defame them." 

Under a new law, for example, the Kremlin has slapped an  "extremist" label on supposed adherents of an "international LGBT movement," she said.

 

Sherbakova said many Russians didn't want to think about the war in Ukraine. "They are trying to distance themselves from it as best they can, for example by not saying certain things out loud," she said. Russians no longer believe in institutions and democracy, she added. "Instead, they believe in the stability of the Putin regime [...] and fear that if they rock the boat, everything will only get worse."

Nevertheless, Sherbakova will permit herself a degree of optimism. One should not believe that "the war will last a very long time, or that Putin will live forever," she said, nodding to Germany's history. As happened with the fall of the Berlin Wall, she said, regimes can crumble in a matter of hours, provided that the moment and the circumstances are right.

This article was originally written in German.

Edited by Richard Connor