As Ukraine seizes ‘first chance to win’, war horrors come home to Russia

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During the Napoleonic incursion of 1812 or the Nazi German assault in 1941, anywhere behind the mountain range that divides Russia’s European part from Siberia seemed far enough for the evacuation of civilians and military factories. In late April, a swarm of Ukrainian drones attacked Yekaterinburg, the Urals region’s administrative capital that sits more than 1,800km (1,118 miles) from the Ukrainian border. Ukraine hoped the drones would hit a plant where elements for air defence systems are manufactured, and since the first attack, the Yekaterinburg airport has been shut down at least five times. Russian locals are panicking about dwindling food supplies, a nosediving economy and dire shortages of petrol after months of Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries and fuel storage sites. “Prices are growing, shops are closing down, there are lines at gas stations, and they don’t pour the gas in canisters” to avoid reselling it at higher prices, Anatoly, a 45-year-old who owns a small business in Yekaterinburg, told Al Jazeera. He added that people are expecting a disaster and “everyone is trying to stash food”. He withheld his surname because of his anti-war stance. “My circle (of friends) has always been negative about the war,” he said. “What flies in is unpleasant but deserved.” Russia’s summer offensive, designed to occupy the Kyiv-controlled part of the southeastern Donbas region and bite off more areas in northern and southern Ukraine, has failed. Instead, Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to renew peace talks that stalled because of US-Israeli strikes on Iran. “Russia is ready for peace talks with Ukraine on the basis of the Istanbul agreements” that were worked out in 2022, Putin said on Tuesday. Kyiv is most likely to reject most of Russia’s demands as unrealistic, and observers say that Putin simply wants to buy time. “This is (Putin’s) wish to bide his time looking for a way out of a difficult situation,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a Moscow-born researcher with Germany’s Bremen University, told Al Jazeera. “For the first time since the autumn of 2022 Ukraine has a chance to win the war,” he said referring to a daring operation by Kyiv’s outmanned troops to kick a larger Russian army out of northern Ukraine. A pro-Kremlin analyst summarised Moscow’s demands. Ukraine should be “de-Nazified,” Sergey Markov, head of the Moscow-based Institute for Political Research group, said on Telegram, parroting Moscow’s controversial narrative about a “neo-Nazi junta” that allegedly runs Ukraine. Ukraine should also be demilitarised with limits on heavy weaponry and the number of troops, should be “neutral” and never join NATO, getting security guarantees from Western nations and Russia, Markov wrote. Kyiv should “stop repressions against the Russian language,” he said, referring to a string of laws that promoted the use of Ukrainian above Russian; several Ukrainian officials believe the Russian language is part of an abusive imperial influence. Markov said Ukraine should also be barred from developing nuclear weapons. Kyiv has to withdraw from Donbas, the focal point of Ukraine’s heavy industry and mineral riches, while Crimea should be “in some judicial form” recognised as part of Russia, he wrote. Any peace treaty should be signed by a “legitimate” leader of Ukraine, Markov wrote, echoing Moscow’s claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s term has “expired”. Ukraine has not held a vote because of martial law. Ukraine’s subsequent counteroffensive failed, and Russia’s slow advance went on despite losses of tens of thousands of troops – until nearly stopping this year. It keeps advancing at a glacial pace in Donbas, but no gains there “would justify a collapse in the rear,” where supply routes are increasingly controlled by Ukrainian drones, Mitrokhin said. If the collapse “goes on at the current rate, the Russian army will simply have to retreat”, he said. Another observer says that Putin’s decision to renew peace talks does not reflect the popular dissatisfaction with the stalled advance, high losses and failing economy. “The change occurred a long time ago,” Sergey Biziykin, an exiled opposition activist from the western city of Ryazan told Al Jazeera. “Because both adherents and opponents of the war were sure the victory would be swift. With time, it was the adherents who understood that Putin works no miracles, and things in Russia go back to the usual, to chaos and corruption”, he said. “In Russia, the pain threshold is too high. People can be against the war but will suffer everything patiently and work for this war,” he said. “The active ones have long left.” Moscow residents who flee the drone attacks cannot find safety in the countryside. Arseny, a copywriter from Moscow, relocated to his country house in the Yaroslav region, 280 km (175 miles) southwest of the capital. “Here, it’s much safer than in Moscow,” he told Al Jazeera, withholding his last name because of his anti-Putin position. “The air is way cleaner” in comparison with Moscow, where black and toxic “oil rains” fell after two drone attacks on a major refinery in mid-June, he said. However, even there, Arseny hears the Ukrainian drones and the loud blasts from air defence systems. “The day before yesterday, [the drones] were being shot 10km away from us. The house jumped up three times,” he quipped. Ukrainian “drone sanctions” contribute to the overall signs of “structural exhaustion” of Russia’s economy, according to a June 11 report by Sweden’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy and the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics. “The contours of a genuine economic endgame are coming into view for Russia,” it said. “The economy has not collapsed, but the structural foundations have eroded fast.” Many Ukrainians feel nothing but schadenfreude. “‘It’s a great word to describe what I feel,” Hannah Onopriyenko, a financial consultant whose Lukyanivka neighbourhood in central Kyiv has been rocked and damaged by dozens of Russian drone attacks, told Al Jazeera. The latest attack in late May left three dead and dozens wounded, and burned down a shopping centre above a subway station. “And yet, I understand that what they experience is about five percent of what we’ve been through,” she said. 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