As the conflict in Ukraine grinds into its second year, the once-monolithic facade of Russian public opinion begins to show hairline fractures. Vladimir Putin, that modern-day czar in a grey suit, remains as uncompromising as a Roman consul refusing to negotiate with barbarians at the gates. Yet the barbarians are not at the gates of Moscow. They are in the minds of a war-weary populace, a populace that has begun to whisper what they dare not say aloud: that the price of empire may be too high.
Let us be clear: Putin’s intransigence is not a sign of strength but a symptom of the intellectual decadence that has gripped his court. He channels the ghosts of Peter the Great and Stalin, demanding sacrifices for a ‘greater Russia’ that exists only in the febrile imaginations of old men in the Kremlin. The war was supposed to be a swift, surgical affair. Instead, it has become a trench-bound quagmire, a replay of the First World War’s futile attrition, but with drones and Twitter instead of cavalry charges and telegrams.
The Russian public, long anaesthetised by state propaganda, is waking to a hangover. The first sign of this was the infamous ‘partial mobilisation’ in September 2022, which sent men fleeing for borders faster than you could say ‘special military operation’. Now, the casualty lists are long, the coffins draped in flags delivered to villages that once cheered the annexation of Crimea. War fatigue is a slow poison, and it is spreading through the Russian body politic like a moral gangrene.
But let us not mistake this for a coming revolution. The Russian people have a high tolerance for suffering; they have been conditioned by centuries of autocracy and hardship. Yet even the most stoic of nations tires of a war that has no clear end and no visible gain. The fractures are not in the streets—yet—but in the discourse. Independent media, crushed but not silenced, reports of soldiers refusing to fight, of wives begging for their husbands’ return, of local officials quietly protesting the constant funerals.
Compare this to the fall of the Roman Republic, when the army became loyal to generals rather than the state, and the plebeians grew weary of endless wars. Or, more pertinently, to the later years of the Soviet Union, when the Afghan war bled the nation’s morale and set the stage for collapse. Putin, however, is no Gorbachev. He will not reform or retreat. He will double down, insisting that Russia’s fate hangs on the outcome of this conflict. And he may be right.
For the West, this creates a perilous paradox. We want Russia to tire of the war, but we fear a desperate, cornered Putin. A crippled bear is still dangerous. The collapse of Russian public morale could lead to a chaotic power struggle, a nuclear-tinged succession crisis that makes the Tsarist abdication look orderly. Or it could lead to a new, more pragmatic leader who sues for peace. We do not know.
What we do know is that Putin’s uncompromising stance is a mirror of our own. The West has also grown weary, with rising energy costs and inflation testing the resolve of democracies. The difference is that we can change our minds. Putin cannot. He has staked his entire legacy on a concept of Russian greatness that is now bleeding in the fields of Ukraine. He is trapped by his own rhetoric, a prisoner of history he sought to command.
The lesson from the Victorians is that empires overreach and then they fall. The lesson from Rome is that even the mightiest powers can be hollowed out from within. Russia is not yet hollow, but the rot has begun. The question is not whether the fractures will widen, but whether they will crack the edifice of the Kremlin’s power before the last shot is fired.
