Russian cinemas will open their doors this winter not to provide movie-goers with entertainment from the almost year-long war in Ukraine, but exactly the opposite.
President Vladimir Putin this week ordered the defense ministry to grant access to filmmakers to make a documentary about forces trying to conquer territory in neighboring Russia. The Ministry of Culture was ordered to hold cinema screenings.
While the documentary was commissioned to portray the “heroism of special military operations participants”, rather than the brutal reality of Russia’s faltering war effort, the decision is a sign of how the Kremlin is adjusting its narrative – despite its demands. unilateral ceasefire in Ukraine over Orthodox Christmas.
Instead of continuing to protect the Russian people from war and cost, Putin seems more inclined to expose them. It is, said analysts, the inevitable response to what has become a protracted and all-too-many conflict and a way of girding the population for future sacrifices, including the mass mobilization more possible than fighting people’s age.
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last February, Putin has taken “a clear position that society should be kept away from war”, said Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The president’s message is: “the war is handled by professionals. Life continues in Russia as normal. And he has tried to protect the public in various ways from the problems of the war, trying to assure them that the government will handle itself,” he said. Stanova.
“But on the other hand, there is reality. And it has begun to introduce changes in the situation in a way that is not under Putin’s control.
Putin set the tone with a militaristic New Year’s address to the nation last week, surrounded by grim-faced men and women in army uniforms.
The president has always presented himself as “the apostle of balance, the great protector of balance,” said Russian political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann, in a radio interview this week. “He always comes out and tells people everything is fine, he sings lullabies . . . telling them tomorrow will be the same as yesterday.”
Putin’s New Year’s message on the other hand “sends a sobering picture” that 2023 will be far from normal, Schulmann said.
Hours after the speech, a Ukrainian guided missile struck a technical school serving as a temporary barracks for Russian conscripts in Makiivka, a town in occupied eastern Ukraine.
The Kremlin may try to cover up the attack, as it did after the sinking of the Black Sea flagship, the Moskva, in April. However, it was confirmed, saying first 63 and then 89 of its troops were killed – the highest number of deaths recognized from a single incident since the invasion in February, although some Russian correspondents and commentators of the war as well as Kyiv said the number of dead. there are higher.
In Samara, in central Russia, from where many of the dead were ordered, local authorities held a rare official memorial attended by grieving families.
Even Yegveny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner paramilitary group that has sent tens of thousands of men to the front lines in Ukraine, has begun to show elements of candor about the brutal nature of the war.
In the new year he released a video featuring him in a makeshift morgue where the bodies of dead fighters were piled high. In another clip, he described how Wagner’s forces were able to spend days fighting just to control one house in the eastern city of Bakhmut.
His paramilitary group has previously boasted of its achievements in the battle for the frontline city of Donetsk province and has been compared to regular Russian forces.
Russian military bloggers and western analysts say the scale of Russia’s losses in the Makiivka attack is so great that it should manage the story rather than hide it – blaming local commanders and mobilized soldiers for unauthorized use of cellphones, giving away their positions.
Russian nationalists, including Prigozhin, and some Kremlin officials have for months called on Putin to move to “total war” in order to expand the country’s population and resources.
“Russia will always win any war if it is a people’s war,” Sergei Kiriyenko, deputy head of the presidential administration, said in October.
“We believe we will win this battle: “heat” [fighting], and economic, and very psychological, information war against us. But this requires a people’s war, so that everyone feels involved.
Dara Massicot, an expert on the Russian military at the Rand Corporation think-tank, said the change in the narrative about the war began with the mobilization of 300,000 people in September. This is the “formation of the situation”, he said, which will help mobilize more in the coming months.
“I think we need another mobilization in 2023 to replace the losses from the beginning and allow rotation – from what they say about it, maybe try to do it on a smaller scale if possible.”
Putin, however, is still ambivalent about exposing Russian society to war, said Stanovaya, although he wanted to be seen as a public choice and a product of the historical process rather than a personal decision.
“He has a desire to share responsibility [for the war] with society, but at the same time not to traumatize and to lower the level of anxiety as much as possible, although this is now soaring regardless, “he said. “Putin tried to sit on two chairs, but this is increasingly difficult to do.”