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Ukraine's lightning counteroffensive in the Kharkiv region has fostered hope in Kyiv and beyond that Russia's war machine might be running out of gas. In the past week, as the Ukrainian Armed Forces liberated a Rhode Island-sized swathe of the country's previously occupied northern territory, several Western commentators and military experts hailed the sudden development as a potential turning point in the nearly seven-month-long war.
While facts on the ground indicate that those Western experts are likely to be proven correct, the reaction coming out of Moscow makes clear that Russia has no intention of giving up the fight.
"On the Kharkiv front, we suffered a military defeat, but not a catastrophic one," Russian military expert Vladislav Shurygin told Newsweek. "The Ukrainian operational success has simply led to the realization that now we are going to have to start fighting for real."
According to Shurygin, the counteroffensive around Kharkiv has forced the Russian leadership to reconsider some of its prior assumptions about Ukrainian capabilities.
"Up until now, there was still the belief that we were fighting against a force that had numerical superiority, but was poorly trained and poorly armed," he said. "Now we are entering a phase in which we must fight against a well-armed, capable force which also has numerical superiority."
Rather than suing for peace or seeking a similarly diplomatic end to the conflict, however, Shurygin predicts that Russia's response will be to attempt to meet force with force.
"The time when we could be successful with inferior numbers has passed," he said, "and so we will have to create superior numbers."
While it remains to be seen what the Russian public's response might be if a general mobilization were to be announced, close observers do not see any visible indication that the Russian defeat around Kharkiv has boosted antiwar sentiment.
"The typical person in Russia still simply tries to pretend as if nothing is happening," Andrei Nikulin, a liberal political analyst, told Newsweek.
"It's indecent to discuss the war in polite company," he added. "It's indecent to mention defeats. It's indecent to talk about losses and victims and the amorality of it all."
Nikulin said that for the most part, the Russian public avoids confronting unwelcome news.
"Of course, people know that things did not go according to plan around Kharkiv," he said, "but their psychological coping mechanism of choice is to act as if everything is still normal, even if it obviously isn't."
For those Russians genuinely interested in keeping up with events in the war, the Kremlin's domestic propaganda apparatus has succeeded in creating a surrealist atmosphere in the country's information space.
"Propagandists are trying to unite society around the idea that this is a war of survival, that if Russia loses, we will all be destroyed," Nikulin explained. "Of course, the propagandists' logic is understandable — from the very start, they linked their own fate to the success of the military operation. They understand that, if everything in Russia collapses, they will be held responsible, just as political leadership will be."
Conversations with everyday Muscovites reinforce Nikulin's description of a society divided between hopeless inertia and propaganda-fueled delusion.
Max, a Western-styled tech professional, told Newsweek that the current atmosphere makes it all but impossible to understand who in society believes what.
"I would imagine that the software engineers on my team have opinions about the situation, but none of us would ever voice them in a work context," he said. "In my social circle, we talk about movies, concerts, what bar to go to, how difficult it has become to get tourist visas and to fly to Europe from Moscow, how hard it is to buy sneakers and other Western consumer goods, but no one talks about politics anymore."
"It's like in Soviet times," Max continued. "When I visit my parents, my father and I can sit in the kitchen and discuss the fact that we both hope Ukraine wins, and the sooner the better. It's just that the only place I would ever talk about that under the current circumstances is in the kitchen with people I absolutely trust."
While there may well be other Russians who share Max's sentiments about the war, there is no indication that they form a politically significant block. Even among relatively well-off Muscovites, sincere support for the war is not difficult to find. "Konstantin," an entrepreneur who asked that his real name not be used, shared his sentiments with Newsweek.
"As a citizen, as a patriot, it's not important what I may have previously thought of the president," he said. "During wartime, I fully support his actions and will give all I can for victory."
Konstantin spoke openly about the harsh reality that Western sanctions have revealed about the Russian economy.
"We lived on hydrocarbons for so long that now we can't even make a decent frying pan," he said. "There are not any problems with food or with services, but anything that was previously imported from the West, from automobile parts to branded clothing, has become much more difficult to get."
Still, the economic setbacks have not shaken Konstantin's conviction that Russia has no choice but to keep up the fight against its wide array of enemies, real or imagined.
"This war isn't with Ukraine," he said. "The United States is at the root of all these troubles, and so the defeats that our army is suffering are very hard to take. People are afraid that, if we retreat, it will end in the apocalypse."
Konstantin's talk of a wider war echoes a trope common in the Kremlin's domestic propaganda — that Russia is fighting for its very survival against the "collective West." Despite all of the real-world evidence, a staggering number of Russians still claim that their country's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine was an act of self-defense.
Another Muscovite sees the Ukrainian war as part of a larger Russian struggle against the West — and Nazis.
"Judging from the news, we are moving step by step deeper into the territory of the Nazis," Alexey, a designer in Moscow, told Newsweek, "fighting not only against the Ukrainian troops, but also the troops of almost all of Europe."
Still, like the apolitical majority that the liberal analyst Nikulin described, Alexey seems to be taking the continuation of Russia's purported war for survival in stride.
"We've been relaxing at the dacha, everyone celebrated the Day of Moscow recently, and in my son's school, the new arrivals from Ukraine were received without any problems," he said.
