Steve Gutterman's Week In Russia

NOTE TO READERS: The Week In Russia will next appear on May 6.

A Russian flagship sinks and President Vladimir Putin stays silent. More than 5 million people have fled Ukraine, where evidence of atrocities mounts while Putin sets its sights on the east and south. Meanwhile in Moscow, fears that Putin's war on Ukraine will leave Russia's "economy crippled, its security compromised, and its global influence gutted" are growing, a report says.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

August 2000

"It sank."

That's what Russian President Vladimir Putin said in September 2000, when CNN's Larry King asked him what had happened to the nuclear-powered submarine Kursk, which had sunk in the Barents Sea on August 12, killing all 118 crewmen.

More than 22 years later, the Russian military has said little more than that about the loss last week of the missile cruiser Moskva, the flagship of its Black Sea Fleet, which Ukraine says it hit with a pair of Neptune missiles fired from the shore. And Putin, so far, has said nothing at all.

The near silence of the Kremlin and the military has left families of sailors who were aboard the Moskva scrambling to find out what happened to them -- and meeting more silence, in some cases.

In the days since the warship sank on April 14, a day after Ukraine said it was hit, dramatically different depictions of the situation have emerged from the state and some of the parents desperately seeking to find out whether their sons are dead or alive.

The most substantial piece of information disseminated by the Defense Ministry -- a video it said showed the commander of the navy meeting members of the Moskva's crew in Sevastopol, the Crimean port where the fleet is based -- is one that may have raised more questions than it answered.

Up to about 150 sailors could be seen in the video -- all seemingly unhurt and showing no signs of ill-effects from the fiery incident at sea days before it aired.

The ministry has said that crew members were evacuated from the Moskva, which it said sank while being towed in a storm following a fire on board caused by the detonation of unspecified ammunition -- suggesting that the cause was an accident. But it has said nothing about casualties aboard the vessel.

'Where Are The Others?'

So even though the number of men lined up in the video looked far short of the more than 500 sailors who were believed to have been on board the Moskva, a viewer watching the placid scene on a windy spring day in Sevastopol might be led to believe that all was well -- that the warship was lost but its crew survived.

Contrast that with the words of Irina Shkrebets, who has been trying to find her son, Dmitry, since she and her husband learned that the Moskva had sunk. One place they looked was a hospital in Sevastopol, where she said some 200 wounded sailors were being treated.

"We looked at every burned child. I can't tell you how hard it was, but I couldn't find mine. There were only 200 people [at the hospital] and there were more than 500 on board the cruiser," she said. "Where are the others? We looked in Krasnodar and everywhere else, we've called everywhere, but we can't find him."

The searches by parents contained faint echoes of the journeys that Russian women and men made to the Chechnya region during the first war there in the 1990s, filled with hope and dread as they risked their lives to search for their sons -- but in this case, they are weaving through a bureaucracy, not a war zone.

And the demise of the Moskva bears a far greater resemblance to the sinking of the Kursk, even though that tragedy took place in peacetime and was caused by accidental explosions on board, despite elaborate efforts to pin blame on the West.

The Kursk disaster was a major setback for Putin, who had started his first presidential term three months earlier and faced fierce criticism over his handling of the crisis and its aftermath. Critics said he and the military were slow to start rescue operations -- with several crewmen surviving in the stern compartment of the stricken submarine for several hours at least after the blasts -- and rejected foreign assistance until it was too late.

Lesson Learned?

It tested Putin's ability to handle public pressure and revealed an adamant desire to avoid blame -- to the point where he suggested, falsely, that grieving widows and sisters of crew members were prostitutes hired to harm his reputation.

In another Russia, or another country, the lessons of the Kursk might have led to more openness and transparency -- to greater accountability of those in power to the citizens they serve, and not the other way around.

The virtual silence over the sinking of the Moskva suggests that Putin has moved steadily in the opposite direction in the years since. And the state has taken numerous steps to prevent the public from getting accurate information about developments in the war on Ukraine.

The number of deaths among the Moskva's crew is unknown, as is the number of deaths of Russian soldiers in Ukraine since Putin launched the large-scale invasion on February 24 -- after nearly eight years of war between Kyiv's forces and Moscow-backed separatists in the eastern region known as the Donbas.

In Ukraine, meanwhile, the suffering from the unprovoked invasion seems incalculable. Thousands of soldiers and civilians have been killed and more than 5 million people have fled the country -- with more than 7 million others driven from their homes but still in Ukraine.

Evidence of war crimes continues to mount, both in the areas around Kyiv and Chernihiv that Russian forces devastated before retreating a few weeks ago and in numerous cities, towns, and villages in the east and south, including besieged Mariupol, Izyum, and Ukraine's second-largest city, Kharkiv.

The Donbas and regions relatively nearby are now the main focus of the fighting. After failing to topple President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's government or capture Kyiv following what are widely believed to be major miscalculations about what the Russian invasion could achieve and how fast, Putin now seems determined to seize control of at least the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and probably also swaths of territory nearby, including a "land corridor" from the Russian border to the isthmus that links mainland Ukraine to Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Russia occupied and seized in 2014.

'Years Of Isolation'

If that is the plan, whether the Russian military can achieve it is unknown and may hinge heavily on the volume and variety of military aid the West provides to Ukraine.

In Russia, meanwhile, there are rumblings of dissatisfaction and concern in circles close to Putin -- though maybe not within the very small circle of hawkish associates who seem to have had his ear more than ever in the last year or two.

Citing 10 people "with direct knowledge of the situation," Bloomberg News reported that "with military losses mounting and Russia facing unprecedented international isolation, a small but growing number of senior Kremlin insiders are quietly questioning his decision to go to war."

"The ranks of the critics at the pinnacle of power remain limited, spread across high-level posts in government and state-run business," the April 20 article says. "They believe the invasion was a catastrophic mistake that will set the country back for years."

Mark Galeotti, an author and political analyst who is an expert on Russia's intelligence and security services, wrote on Twitter that he had been hearing that, too -- "and it is certainly not confined to technocrats [and] businesspeople."

"Even within the security structures, there's growing alarm and dismay at the invasion, the way it was mishandled, and Putin's apparent refusal to appreciate the long-term dangers," he wrote.

At the same time, the Bloomberg article says that "support for Putin's war remains deep across much of Russia's elite, with many insiders embracing in public and in private the Kremlin's narrative that conflict with the West is inevitable and that the economy will adapt to the sweeping sanctions" imposed by the West.

And while "more and more top insiders have come to believe that Putin's commitment to continue the invasion will doom Russia to years of isolation and heightened tension that will leave its economy crippled, its security compromised, and its global influence gutted," it says, there is "no sign that Putin is yet ready" to cut it short or make "the serious concessions needed to reach a cease-fire."

"Putin is determined to push on with the fight, even if the Kremlin has had to reduce its ambitions from a quick, sweeping takeover of much of the country to a grueling battle for the Donbas region in the east," Bloomberg reported, citing its sources. "Settling for less would leave Russia hopelessly vulnerable and weak in the face of the threat seen from the U.S. and its allies, according to this view."

A warship sinks, accusations of atrocities, war crimes, and genocide mount, and despite a relentless clampdown, determined Russians find ways to protest President Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.

'A Dark Place'

Over the years of Putin’s rule, with the Kremlin pressing harder and harder against dissent, Russians determined to push back have come up with creative ways to protest -- and not a few poignant slogans that seem to capture the mood.

At a demonstration outside the Defense Ministry maybe 15 years ago, one woman held a sign that read, “There have been worse times [in Russia], but none so revolting.”

The current era seems to be giving those times a run for their money.

In the year after the return of Kremlin opponent Aleksei Navalny in January 2021, following treatment in Germany for a near-fatal nerve-agent poisoning he blames on Putin, the state turned screws that had already been cranked tight, broadening and deepening a clampdown on political opposition, independent media, civil society, and all forms of dissent.

Then came the invasion of Ukraine – a large-scale offensive against an independent country that had been under intense pressure from Moscow since 2014, when Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula and fomented separatism across the east and south, resulting in a war that had killed more than 13,000 combatants and civilians in the region known as the Donbas before Putin launched the new assault on February 24.

Just a few weeks later, allegations and evidence of war crimes are emerging -- many of them in towns near Kyiv where retreating Russian forces have left a trail of death, destruction -- the sickening stuff of countless horror stories from survivors.

On April 4, U.S. President Joe Biden called Putin a “war criminal” and said evidence should be gathered for use at a war crimes trial. On April 12, he accused Russia of committing “genocide,” saying that Putin is trying to “wipe out the idea of even being a Ukrainian.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has also said Russia’s war is genocidal.

Those accusations are based an alleged actions of Russian forces in Ukraine and Putin’s repeated statements about Ukrainians and their country, which he has frequently said has no right to exist as a sovereign state.

Crimes And Miscalculations

Obviously, the alleged atrocities underpinning the use by Biden and others of these terms deepen the human suffering that Putin has caused by unleashing the unprovoked invasion. They also appear to have also altered the course of the war and affected its potential outcome, as well as the roles of Washington and the West.

“The mass torture and killings carried out by Russian forces in Bucha, Irpin, Borodyanka and other Ukrainian towns add a new level of horror to a terrible war,” but they also “change the strategic context in three ways,” Nigel Gould-Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, wrote in an April 12 article.

They will “entrench Ukrainian hostility towards Russia,” they are “driving the Russian public into a dark place,” and they “show that, as long as Russia occupies Ukrainian territory, an end to fighting does not mean an end to violence,” Gould-Davies wrote.

“The prospect of even a temporary halt to the war, already slim, is now remote. Russia is in many ways more isolated than it was in the Cold War,” he wrote, adding: “Unless major Western states elect leaders with very different political priorities, it seems virtually unthinkable that sanctions will be eased while Russia occupies Ukrainian territory and Putin remains in power.”

'It Sank'

There appears to be little likelihood of the former KGB officer and Federal Security Service (FSB) chief being driven from power anytime soon in an internal coup at the hands of his security agencies, despite signs of unrest in the power structures in Moscow -- with a senior Federal Security Service officer, Sergei Beseda, reportedly tossed in the infamous Lefortovo jail after feeding Putin bad intelligence that led to major miscalculations about how the invasion would go.

In a real and symbolic blow that seemed to underscore how badly the war seems to have gone for Russia, the country's Defense Ministry said late on April 14 that the missile cruiser Moskva -- the name means Moscow -- sank in the Black Sea during a storm after a fire on board detonated ammunition and damaged the hull. The admission came hours after Ukraine said it had hit the vessel with anti-ship missiles.

“We are a long way from any such potential parricide,” author and analyst Mark Galeotti wrote in an April 13 article in The Spectator, likening Putin to the mythical titan Cronos, who “thought that by devouring his children he would be safe” but “actually drove the last, Zeus, to slay him.”

Meanwhile, Putin’s government has turned the screws even tighter since the invasion began, seeking to silence any opposition to the war – in part by suppressing information about the conflict, which Ukrainian and U.S. officials estimate has, in less than two months, killed as many Russian soldiers as the number of Soviet troops killed in Moscow’s nearly decade-long war of occupation in Afghanistan, if not more.

The Kremlin’s relentless propaganda campaign about the war, at its most venomous on state TV, has divided society, pitting pupils against teachers and family members against one another.

At What Price?

To anyone watching the way the intensifying clampdown has unfolded, it might seem like there would be nobody left in Russia to protest against the war. Navalny is in prison and his network of offices nationwide has been outlawed by the state. Some of his associates have also been jailed, and some have fled the country -- as have tens of thousands of Russians who have left as a result of the war, driven by disgust with the government, concerns about making a living in a country isolated by Western sanctions, fears about the future, or all three and more.

In fact, though, there are still people protesting.

One of them is Aleksandra Skochilenko, an artist from St. Petersburg. She and other activists across Russian found a creative way to protest the war and reveal information that the government is trying to hide.

In shops and supermarkets, they have replaced price tags with statements about the war or the repercussions in Russia.

One such tag said that Russian forces had bombed an art school in Mariupol, Ukraine, where hundreds of people were sheltering; another blamed rising inflation in Russia on the assault on Ukraine and said, “Stop the war.”

With a small group of supporters clapping and cheering as she was led toward the courtroom in handcuffs for an April 13 hearing, Skochilenko was jailed pending further investigation and trial.

She could be sentenced to 10 years in prison.