The view from Russia: Do citizens think an invasion of Ukraine is likely?

"To understand what the state wants you to think, you just need to watch the TV."

That is what a Russian friend told me after the United States declared a Russian invasion of Ukraine could happen this week. Some US media have been briefed that it will begin with two days of aerial bombardment of Ukraine. President Joe Biden warned President Vladimir Putin in a phone call that Russia would face “severe economic costs” from “taking innocent lives for a bloody war.”

If you watch state television in Russia, you will see TV news anchors crying about western "hysteria" over Ukraine, repeated clips of President Putin slamming NATO and diplomats and pundits exclaiming how the west is trying to triumph over Russia. Ukraine is a big story in Russia, but there is room for other news; on the latest doping scandal involving Russia’s prodigy figure skater at the Winter Olympics, crime and Covid.

It contrasts to the years of 2014 and 2015 when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine and backed pro-Russian separatists in a war against the Ukrainian government in the country’s east. Then the news bulletins only seemed to be about Ukraine. The rhetoric was aggressive and rabid: fascists were taking over the government in Kyiv; there were plans to attack the largely Russian-speaking population in the Donbass.

I lived in Russia for five years, including at this time. I remember walking to work and hearing the words from television echoed on the streets of central Moscow. Every day for what felt like months I walked past a group under a little tent collecting donations for the Donbass, concerned for the safety and security of people there.

Then, almost as if a dial was turned, the rhetoric on state television calmed down. The needle moved towards a different topic - Syria - and the tent and the group collecting donations for the Donbass on the streets of Moscow disappeared. Collections of clothes and toys for the impoverished Donbass region still happen, but quietly and not apparently with such public fervour.

"If they were preparing for a war in Ukraine, they would have been preparing the groundwork for it here for months," my friend told me. "TV right now reinforces this picture of Russia being a besieged fortress. If the state wanted to invade Ukraine, it would be putting out a campaign about how Russians there are under threat of slaughter. That’s not happening."

Russia’s military campaigns in Ukraine

Russia’s previous campaigns against Ukraine had the element of surprise; Crimea was annexed in an almost entirely bloodless coup. The annexation was almost over before anyone had realised it had happened. 'Little green men', masked Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms, entered the peninsula in February 2014 and took control of the airport and the main roads from Ukraine to the region. In eastern Ukraine, after the annexation of Crimea, Russia backed pro-Russian separatists with volunteers, regular troops and weapons in a war still being fought today in the east between separatists and the Ukrainian government.

Today, with more than 100,000 Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s borders, countries advising their citizens to leave Ukraine and the United States and other allies warning that war is imminent, the military element of surprise has disappeared.

What does Russia get from appearing to stage an invasion?

In Sunday’s most recent broadcast of the TV program ‘Moscow, Kremlin, Putin,’ a fawning and uncritical look at the Russian president’s week, the programme started with a montage of clips of Putin standing next to French President Emmanuel Macron slamming NATO expansion. Television showed the Russian president claiming Russia’s security concerns have been "totally ignored" for thirty years; alongside archive of a slimmer, younger Putin in 2001 and 2002 criticising NATO for expanding eastward.

Since the United States started warning about increased Russian military build-up around Ukraine late last year, Russia published a draft document of an agreement it wants signed limiting NATO’s role in eastern Europe. Putin wants NATO and the United States to guarantee Ukraine and Georgia (former Soviet states) will never be allowed to join, wants NATO forces removed from former Soviet states in eastern Europe and a return to 1997 levels of deployment.

Can western nations prevent an invasion of Ukraine? ITV News Global Security Editor Rohit Kachroo explains

The United States and NATO have ruled out limiting who can join but have suggested, for the first time, areas for negotiation with Russia over the alliance’s activities in Eastern Europe.

President Biden and President Putin met in person in Geneva last summer when cyber crime and human rights were at the top of the agenda. After a phone call in July, their next call was five months later, in December, once the US had started warning about the Russian build up of forces. Since then, they have spoken three times in total.

In recent weeks, the phone and video calls have been accompanied by a stream of visits to Moscow. Last week Macron visited the capital, along with the British foreign and defence secretaries. This week it is the turn of new German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. On state TV on Monday afternoon, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov was shown briefing Putin on the latest diplomatic talks, advising him to continue them despite Putin's concern they are "an attempt to draw us in to an endless series of talks which have no logical conclusion."

Of course, this does not mean Russia is not going to invade Ukraine. But by massing troops around Ukraine, Putin has succeeded in driving Russia back into the headlines, forcing his key issues, including the expansion of NATO, onto the table. He is demanding the US and NATO take Russian guarantees for security seriously and respond in writing - and threatening the consequences otherwise. His calls with President Biden and meetings with foreign leaders mean he is a great statesman - or at least is depicted as such on Russian television.

Internationally and domestically, Putin seems to have gotten quite a lot out of appearing to prepare an invasion. What is not clear, is what he gets if he does it.

What does Russia get from an invasion of Ukraine?

Previous Russian military moves abroad in the last two decades have been risky but, broadly speaking, have had quite limited and specific aims.

Russia’s 2008 war in Georgia enabled it to reassert itself as a military power, back separatists in South Ossetia and Abkhazia and create instability and insecurity in Georgia making it difficult for the former Soviet state to join western organisations. Similar goals were achieved by backing pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s Donbass in 2014 and annexing Crimea, enabling Russia to maintain its Black Sea Fleet in the port of Sevastopol. In 2015, Russia displayed its military might by shoring up the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, securing a Russian base in the Mediterranean in the process.

In these conflicts, the Russian military was "invited" to Syria by Assad and was seen largely by local populations in Georgia and Ukraine’s separatist regions as a supportive force. Trying to invade Ukraine and subjugate a hostile population and highly motivated army would involve mass Russian casualties and, in President Biden’s words, “take innocent lives for a bloody war.”

Russia has not directly fought a war with thousands of military and civilian casualties since the wars in Chechnya in the 1990s and 2000s. Then, Russia bombed and devastated the capital Grozny in a fight against Chechen separatists in a long and brutal military campaign.

The idea of a similarly bloody conflict with Russian soldiers coming home in body bags from Ukraine is unpalatable to many Russians.

“I don’t think anyone wants to see our soldiers come home dead,” said Anastasia Tenisheva, a journalist in Moscow. “It would be really awful. Many Russians have family in Ukraine and it would be like killing them.”

In the most recent non-governmental poll from December, most Russians said they thought war between Russia and Ukraine was unlikely.

"We don’t need a war," one man in Moscow said. "Russia has the largest territory in the world, it’s rich with resources. We don’t need Ukraine."

President Biden, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and other western leaders have warned Putin that any invasion of Ukraine would be catastrophic economically and politically for Russia.

"Ukraine as a territory is likely to become a burden for Russia, on top of the fact that sanctions and economic losses will hit the country. The only obvious reason for this escalation could be to show Russia’s strength and negotiate with world leaders - which Putin has already achieved," Tenisheva said.

Some Russians believe Putin is using the threat of invasion to force the west and Ukraine to implement agreements signed in 2014 and 2015 in the Belarussian capital Minsk. These agreements set out the conditions for a ceasefire in the Donbass but also for constitutional reform. Many people in Ukraine believe they would give the pro-Russian regions in the east a veto in the Ukrainian parliament should there ever be a vote over the country joining NATO or the European Union.

"This, I think, is definitely one of Putin’s goals," my friend told me. "Why invade Ukraine when you can destabilise it from the inside? By invading you just create another Afghanistan [referring to the Soviet-Afghan war which the Soviets lost] in the middle of Europe."

One thing Muscovites agree on is that the current situation is deeply dangerous. Putin is shown demanding on state television that the west agrees to his demands over NATO and Ukraine but Russians in Moscow question whether he will get what he wants. Russians largely do not believe there is going to be a war, but, at the same time, they do not know how this will end.

“Don’t tease the Russian bear,” one man in Moscow said. “When it swings its paw at the offender, there can be all sorts of consequences.”