Putin’s War Is Breeding Russia’s Next Opposition, But It Will Not Be Liberal

Among Russians following their country’s war in Ukraine, it is difficult to overstate the lasting and depressing impact of the story of Ernest and Goodwin, the call signs of two experienced Russian drone pilots in Ukraine. In September 2024, after they exposed their commander’s corruption, they were sent to the front on a so-called avoidance mission – the Russian military’s euphemism for a guaranteed suicide attack. Their deaths in Ukraine sparked public outrage on pro-war Telegram channels, forcing even the Kremlin to address the issue publicly. Colonel Igor Buzek, the corrupt commander who sent drone pilots to their deaths, remains in charge of his battalion and is regularly praised on state television. Among contract soldiers puzikovschina It has become a grim new expression of a Russian command structure rife with impunity, incompetence, and murderous betrayal; A warning that merit and loyalty no longer protect you from use, abuse, and even murder due to your boss’s corruption and other ambitions.

Puzikovskina It now indicates a systematic breakdown of trust between army leaders and its bases. The problem is no longer limited to isolated cases; He is a settler. Entire regiments function as private fiefdoms, with officers hauling supplies, selling fuel intended for the troops, and responding to complaints by sending complainants on neutralization missions to the front. On his Telegram channel, a mobilized soldier with the username Vault 8 described thousands of contract soldiers who were promised one-year contracts by recruiters, only to have their service extended indefinitely. Experienced submarine crews and ICBM operators have found themselves forced to join the assault infantry, regardless of their skills or medical conditions, because they are more valuable to the Russian General Staff as cannon fodder than as specialists.

Among Russians following their country’s war in Ukraine, it is difficult to overstate the lasting and depressing impact of the story of Ernest and Goodwin, the call signs of two experienced Russian drone pilots in Ukraine. In September 2024, after they exposed their commander’s corruption, they were sent to the front on a so-called avoidance mission – the Russian military’s euphemism for a guaranteed suicide attack. Their deaths in Ukraine sparked public outrage on pro-war Telegram channels, forcing even the Kremlin to address the issue publicly. Colonel Igor Buzek, the corrupt commander who sent drone pilots to their deaths, remains in charge of his battalion and is regularly praised on state television. Among contract soldiers puzikovschina It has become a grim new expression of a Russian command structure rife with impunity, incompetence, and murderous betrayal; A warning that merit and loyalty no longer protect you from use, abuse, and even murder due to your boss’s corruption and other ambitions.

Puzikovskina It now indicates a systematic breakdown of trust between army leaders and its bases. The problem is no longer limited to isolated cases; He is a settler. Entire regiments function as private fiefdoms, with officers hauling supplies, selling fuel intended for the troops, and responding to complaints by sending complainants on neutralization missions to the front. On his Telegram channel, a mobilized soldier with the username Vault 8 described thousands of contract soldiers who were promised one-year contracts by recruiters, only to have their service extended indefinitely. Experienced submarine crews and ICBM operators have found themselves forced to join the assault infantry, regardless of their skills or medical conditions, because they are more valuable to the Russian General Staff as cannon fodder than as specialists.

Among ordinary contract soldiers and mobilized conscripts, there is almost universal disdain for military generals, many of whom have become notorious for nepotism, gross incompetence, and indifference to the horrific loss of life on the front. Gen. Alexander Lapin became a symbol of that rift after awarding a medal to his son at the front as Russian forces under his father’s command retreated in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region in 2022, a gesture now remembered as a symbol of the high command’s inattentiveness. Colonel-General Rustam Muradov’s endless attacks near the Ukrainian town of Voledar – which the Russians first attacked in January 2023 and took nearly two years – led to massive casualties among Russian soldiers and made his name synonymous with abject failure and disregard for human life. Stories about these generals spread widely in the trenches and on social media, eroding the essential bond of trust and dependency between ordinary soldiers and those they lead.

This institutional rot has led to disastrous military decisions and created a wave of opposition far broader than anything Russian president Vladimir Putin has faced in peacetime. My own best estimate of Russian military losses, based on multiple sources, is 350,000 dead – or nearly a million if that includes those who cannot return to duty because of severed limbs or other permanent injuries. Many of them are listed as missing, including tens of thousands of bodies that have not been recovered. Since Russia’s initial advances in the first weeks of the invasion, these losses have not resulted in any meaningful territorial gains; Russians who are paying attention know that the myth of Russia’s unstoppable war machine does not reflect the reality on the ground. The Army’s tactical shift from bite-sized “flesh waves” to desperate, ill-equipped small assault groups of two or three men (more than that would immediately invite a swarm of heat-seeking Ukrainian drones) means that new recruits, on average, do not survive for more than 12 days, according to estimates by Russian war correspondents. Promises of extensive training during recruitment evaporate once the contract is signed; Most new soldiers get less than three weeks – sometimes just a few days – of routine training before their first combat, which often leads to their death. The operation they died for was worth nothing more than a few seconds of footage on the evening news. The resulting atmosphere was one of defeat, despair, and disbelief, and even Russia’s most loyal military bloggers acknowledged mutiny, desertion, and fatalism in the ranks.

Now opposition comes not only from the remnants of cowardly Russian liberal circles, but from millions of soldiers and their families, and even from patriotic pro-war bloggers. War propaganda, police control, and the flow of money paid to soldiers and their families did not succeed in buying social peace. Protest movements such as “The Road Home”, led by the wives and widows of mobilized soldiers, regularly strike the Ministry of Defence, despite being harassed by police as alleged “foreign agents”. Families of missing soldiers face threats for their insistence on knowing their fate; Some commanders have reportedly threatened to “disqualify” soldiers whose relatives speak out. Survivors of the first mobilization in 2022, stuck on the front for years without a break, openly discuss their desire for revenge on their officers once the war is over one way or another. Even patriotic state journalists and war correspondents like Roman Saponkov warn that unless Bozek and other disreputable leaders are held accountable, mobilization will fail and public confidence in conscription will never recover.

The Kremlin’s machinery of repression – selectively imprisoning its loudest critics, branding dissidents as “foreign agents,” and encouraging state media to attack “traitors” – can no longer keep pace with the scale and breadth of the anger. The crackdowns on Putin’s war critics – including the death of Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, the imprisonment of war veteran Igor Girkin, and the stigmatization of war blogger Roman Alekhine and pro-Kremlin political commentator Sergei Markov as “foreign agents” – were meant as a warning not to cross invisible red lines. But this strategy fails when discontent is no longer led by a handful of public figures and spreads to millions of soldiers, as well as their families and friends, whose personal experiences contradict the official narrative. Independent polls have found that up to 72% of Russians surveyed would support Putin to end the war immediately, while more than half would prefer a ceasefire to any new mobilization. In 2024, 48% of Russians reported financial difficulties, and more than 48,000 families requested DNA testing to find their missing relatives. With every sealed coffin, every unanswered question, every family pushed into poverty by the swell of war becomes not just a personal tragedy, but a collective opposition that the old regime’s tactics cannot suppress.

On the other hand, the economic consequences of the war were so severe that even talk shows broadcast on state television openly discussed rising prices, supply shortages, and general frustration. Russia’s wartime inflation rate is about 9 percent, and central bank interest rates are 17 percent. Gasoline shortages, worsened every day by Ukrainian drone strikes on oil refineries, fuel depots and pumping stations, have led to rationing and price hikes across the country. Komsomolskaya PravdaArguably Putin’s favorite newspaper, it now publishes video debates on inflation, supply disruptions, and rising food and utility prices, something that would have been taboo to mention just two years ago. What was previously easier to manage on a local basis – protests against wage arrears or state-sanctioned environmental disasters – has turned into a nationwide political headache, harming not only the poor or opposition-minded, but also large swaths of ordinary Russians who no longer believe in the Kremlin’s victory.

The recruitment crisis in the Russian military embodies the collapse of confidence in military and state promises. Despite sign-up bonuses for new recruits worth seven times the average annual wage – and despite the regime’s propaganda – the army is struggling to make up for losses on the front. The gaps are now filled with the imprisoned, the desperate and the marginalized. “Until measures are taken against Bozek that society considers justice, the rewards can be raised to $20 million,” Saponkov wrote on his Telegram channel. [rubles, equivalent to approximately $240,000] This still won’t help. No act of financial persuasion can restore trust lost on this scale.

When even state-sanctioned war correspondents and decorated veterans mock or ignore the chain of command, the social contract that once united Russia around the promise of quick victory is in tatters. Not only has Russian morale declined, it has imploded, as a result of successive betrayals, apparent incompetence, and constant revelations of military and state lies. It is true that the Kremlin succeeded in exiling, imprisoning, and beating the old liberal opposition to the point of almost complete impotence. Over the years, Putin has built a fragmented society by design, where any kind of unsanctioned grassroots organizing is outright banned. But as the promise of national greatness and unity collapses through war, all the Kremlin’s coercive power will be tested – not against the reform movement among a small urban elite but against the simmering and unexpected disillusionment among the regime’s supporters and broad swaths of the population.