In Russia, there is calm amidst the storm
Gabriel Gavin reports from the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don near the Ukrainian border.
When President Vladimir Putin appeared on television screens across Russia in the middle of the night, few people could have been up to watch it in real time. The speech, which may well prove to be the defining moment of his 18 years in office, was announced with almost no notice. But within just a few moments, the whole world was watching it back.
As he railed against “Nazism” and “militarism” in Ukraine, cruise missiles were already homing in on their targets, laying waste to airports and landing strips across the country, as well as army facilities and a growing list of other areas. Behind them came the troops, who have now encircled major cities like Kharkov and Mariupol in the east.
“Peaceful Ukrainian cities are under strikes,” Kyiv’s Foreign Minister, Dmitry Kuleba, said, in line with local reports. “This is a war of aggression. Ukraine will defend itself and will win,” he insisted. “The world can and must stop Putin. The time to act is now.”
At the same time, leaders in the self-declared breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk launched an offensive against government forces stationed along the contact line, calling on the army to lay down its weapons. Meanwhile, Ukrainian officials signed edicts to hand out weapons to anyone willing to serve and doubled down on demands for the international community to step in and offer support. At present, that is coming in the form of sanctions against Russia – even if EU envoys are still divided over the content, with countries like Italy demanding exceptions for the export of luxury goods.
And yet, in the city of Rostov-on-Don, just over 50 miles from the border with the contested Donbass, it seems like any other Thursday. People walk dogs in the park, cafes are bustling and workers are returning to the office from a day of national holiday to commemorate “Defender of the Fatherland Day”, honoring those who fought for the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union and the country since the fall of the USSR. One upmarket burger restaurant has hung camouflage balloons and pasted cut-outs of tanks on the walls.
The only sign that all-out war is being waged, just over the horizon, is the occasional low hum of warplanes, invisible through the cloudy skies. But, for many Russians, the conflict is likely to hit home sooner rather than later. For weeks, Western leaders speculating that an attack could be on the cards had been preparing an apocalyptic package of punitive measures intended to make clear the consequences if Putin gave the order for the tanks to start rolling. The sanctions, US President Joe Biden said in December, will be “like none he’s ever seen before.”
Some have already started. Approval of the colossal Nord Stream 2 pipeline, designed to link the Siberian gas fields to consumers in Western Europe, has been put on indefinite halt amid the crisis, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz confirmed on Tuesday. The project, which cost an estimated £8 billion to build and had been branded by Ukraine a “threat” to European energy security, cannot begin operation in the current circumstances, despite construction having already finished, he said.
While Brussels is still split over which areas of the Russian economy to begin hitting, top Eurocrats including Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, has said they will unveil measures to ensure “massive and severe consequences on Russia for its actions.” In all likelihood, this will include divesting from Russian energy supplies as much as possible, and isolating the country on global markets. Over the past ten years, persistently stubborn growth and a massive trade surplus has buoyed cities like Rostov, where chains like Starbucks and Hugo Boss dot the streets. The middle class – or the closest thing to the middle class Russia has – has found a way to prosper despite hostile relations between East and West. Those routes are likely to close, with foreign firms pressured to divest their holdings.
For Ukrainians, the consequences of Putin’s announcement are in a different stratosphere. Pictures of shattered apartment buildings and burned out vehicles in the street have only just begun emerging – and worse is likely still to come. Those who choose to pick up a weapon and fight will likely die, and those who stay face an uncertain future. In the face of overwhelming military might, the only remaining option is to flee – but with motorways at standstill and the net closing around the country, even leaving their homeland to seek refuge is no easy task even logistically.
The vast majority of correspondents and journalists actually in Russia, myself included, spent the past several weeks dismissing Western intelligence reports that Moscow could order an invasion. It is now abundantly clear that we were wrong – either because we genuinely thought it wouldn’t happen, or because we simply hoped it couldn’t.
Putin and his top ministers had been pushing for security guarantees from the West for months, demanding that Ukraine’s aspirations to join NATO would be blocked indefinitely. While the door to membership of the bloc was hardly ever open for the Eastern European nation, the potential deployment of American troops on the border was always presented as an existential threat to Russia.
“Most Russians hate Ukrainians,” Olha Tsurkan, a human rights lawyer living in Kyiv told me when I interviewed her for a previous piece. I’m now unable to get in touch with her and confirm that she is safe as Moscow’s forces reportedly surround the capital. She had told me she planned to attend a self-defense course, in which civilians were told how to handle explosives and fire rifles.
In my experience, her vision of ordinary Russians is far too bleak. Many people have Ukrainian family, friends and co-workers, and young people are generally either positive about the neighbouring nation or apathetic. Older people, those born under the USSR, see Ukraine as a brotherly nation and, if they’re critical of its direction since the 2014 Euromaidan, still have a sense of nostalgia for their shared history.
Domestically, Putin had done little to prime the public for a mass assault. Until this week, it wasn’t just journalists but the overwhelming majority of the public who couldn’t imagine war would be on the cards. While people in Rostov, and by all accounts elsewhere, are carrying on as normal, the prospect of caskets being flown back from the front line and devastating sanctions could easily turn a decisive military offensive abroad into a political crisis at home.
The decision to invade Ukraine has blown apart the European security system and likely cost a great many lives already. What happens next, nobody knows – and many haven’t realised just how serious it will be.