Pro-War Russian Writers Say Moscow Isn’t Doing Enough to Fight the War in Ukraine or Support Their Own Efforts to Generate Support for It

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 1 – A group of Russian writers who have criticized the Kremlin for not doing enough to win in Ukraine is now complaining that the Kremlin isn’t supporting them in ways that allow them to get their message to Russians in general and school children in particular, the Ostorozhno Novosti agency says.

            At a roundtable of such writers in St. Petersburg, Aleksandr Pelevin said that Moscow has failed to launch “a special cultural operation since the war began” as a result of which “patriotic poetry was “in decline as it is hard to keep writing about the capture of yet another small village” (t.me/ostorozhno_novosti/55435 and ru.themoscowtimes.com/2026/10/01/zagnali-v-zagon-z-pisateli-pozhalovalis-chto-ih-ne-podderzhivaet-gosudarstvo-i-ne-chitayut-rossiyane-a207490).

            Another pro-war poet, Aksel Kobokki said Moscow’s failure to launch a cultural effort alongside its military one was threatening patriotic feelings among many Russians who have “little trust in the people aligned with the authorities as a result” and that patriots were finding it harder to defend their allies than ever before.

            And a third speaker at the meeting said that he was aware of “orders to keep patriotic writers out of schools” and that these orders “came from the highest levels of the government.” Still others complained that writers at the front weren’t being given leave to attend literary events.

60 Percent of Infrastructure on Russia’s Arctic Coast Threatened by Melting Permafrost and Warming Sea, EU’s Copernicus Monitoring Service Says

Paul Goble

              Staunton, Sept. 30 – Sixty percent of the infrastructure in coastal regions of the Russian Federation along the Arctic is at risk of collapse as a result of the ever-more-rapidly melting permafrost underlying it and the rapid warming of the Arctic Ocean which leads to more waves and erosion there, the EU’s Copernicus Monitoring Service says.

              In a new report based on an examination of the Arctic and adjoining areas, the European Union science office says that over the past four decades, the ice cover over off the Russian coast is receding faster than elsewhere in that sea (rfi.fr/ru/в-мире/20260930-доклад-copernicus-полярные-льды-быстрее-всего-тают-у-берегов-россии).

              That allows for more shipping; but together with the melting of permafrost in northern Russia, it is undermining infrastructure built near the coast because the warming of the sea means that waves are larger and contribute to more erosion of the ground on which they are built.

              According to Copernicus, the area of Arctic sea ice in the summer has been declining at the rate of more than 10 percent per decade and the Arctic waters have been warming “almost six times faster than the planet on average since 1980,” with last summer being the warmest on record.

              The Arctic Ocean off Russia’s coast is leading in this regard. According to the authoritative European center, the surface temperature of the Kara Sea has been going up by 1.68 degrees centigrade every decade, “about 14 times faster than the average for the world’s oceans as a whole,” with the Laptyev and Bering seas not far behind.

Kremlin Comes Up with Another Way to Hide Its Shortcomings: It will Cut Off Funds to Those Making Films Showing Corrupt Siloviki

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 – Russian filmmakers will lose state financing if they produce films showing Russian police or security forces accepting bribes or engaged other corrupt enterprises, Kommersant reports, pointing to yet another way the Kremlin is expanding censorship and seeking to hide problems with the Russian regime.

            Two sources in major film studios said messages to that effect have already been sent to the leaders of their studios as others and that the rule was being introduced in this way and that no one expects it to be enshrined in any formal documentation that would attract unwanted attention (kommersant.ru/doc/8990074).

            The imposition of the rule in this way is possible because “all producers know about this” already, one of the Moscow newspaper’s sources says; and they recognize that they could lose more than money because any negative treatment of the police, the FSB, the Investigations Committee or the Procuracy could be presented as undermining those institutions.

            Introducing new rules in this way often happened in Soviet times, but it is making a comeback in Putin’s, giving the regime an opportunity to deny what it is in fact doing while continuing to do it and thus making it harder but as Kommersant shows not impossible to keep track of increasing repression introduced in this way.

           

A Russian Invasion of Baltic Countries ‘Now a Likely Scenario,’ Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 –A year ago, Vladimir Pastukhov said that there were there possible scenarios for Moscow’s moves regarding the Baltic countries and eastern Europe more generally – mobilization, hybrid (subversive) war or invasion – and that the last of these was the most unlikely of all.

            But now, the London-based Russian analyst says, the situation has changed because of how the Kremlin leader views the situation; and he argues that an invasion seems to him to have become “a likely scenario” for what Putin will do next (echofm.online/opinions/vtorzhenie-kazhetsya-mne-dostatochno-veroyatnym-sczenariem).

            Pastukhov says that it many ways the current situation in Moscow parallels the situation in Washington at the time when Ronald Reagan came to power. He formed two groups, Team A, which consisted of government experts, and Team B which was made up of university experts and was headed by Richard Pipes.

            The first team, the Russian analyst says, argued that “the USSR would eventually be more and more like a ‘normal’ European state and its aggressive energy would fade. Because of the likelihood of that, the West’s strategy should be not to take any steps that would interfere with this evolving convergence.

            Team B, led by Pipes, came to “the exact opposite conclusion.” Focusing on communist ideology, they argued that “aggression is an essential feature” of those who accept this ideology and that Washington and the West must therefore adopt a strategy of “’strategic deterrence’” to prevent disaster.

            Reagan was convinced by the arguments of Team B and launched a program designed to contain and weaken the USSR. “Ultimately,” Pastukhov says, “this accelerated the collapse of the USSR although in my opinion, that was not the cause” of what Putin calls “the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20^th century.”

            The London-based analyst suggests that a debate has been taking place behind the scenes in Moscow much like the one between Team A and Team B almost half a century ago and says that Putin has accepted as the basis of his actions the view that aggression is not only necessary but useful whatever Russian government experts say.

            Because that is so, the Kremlin leader is likely to launch more aggressive actions against the West in general and the Baltic countries in particular as long as he believes that he is winning in Ukraine. Unless he loses there and loses convincingly, that won’t change as long as Putin is in office in the Kremlin.

Many Russians Untroubled by Abuse of Prisoners Because They Believe ‘Criminals Must Suffer,’ Titayev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 1 – Most Russians don’t think about prisons very much, independent criminologist Kirill Titayev says; but when they do because someone prominent is behind bars, they often are untroubled by reports of the mistreatment and even torture of prisoners because they believe that “criminals must suffer.”

            As a result, the prison system, which censors the letters of prisoners often does not remove reports about such things because guards consider this normal and know that a many outside the walls agree with them (istories.media/opinions/2026/10/01/prestupniki-dolzhni-stradat-muchitelstvo-kak-osnovnoi-printsip-ispolneniya-nakazanii-v-rossii/).

            That is why the flood of reports of abuse of prisoners in Russian jails and camps do not generate the kind of response one might expect to such brutality and why the loss of the European Human Rights Court as a final place of appeal is going to have such tragic consequences for Russian inmates.

            In many countries, some believe that prison should involve harsh conditions; but most national prison systems have now moved beyond that recognizing that allowing such treatment will not only make the rehabilitation of prisoners unlikely but also cast a negative shadow on the entire society.

            Participants in focus groups discussing this issue that Titayev has conducted are horrified by individual stories in prisons but at the same time “are not ready to accept the idea that criminal should not be tormented” by their guards.  Until that changes, there is little chance for positive change in the Russian prison system, he says.

 

New Segments of Russian Society Turning to Drugs Not to Escape Reality but to Cope with It, Moscow Institute of Sociology Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 30 – Russian government officials have been celebrating the decline in the number of those abusing drugs and alcohol; but behind these figures, the Moscow Institute of Sociology says, are others which are seldom counted by the authorities but are becoming increasingly worrisome.

            The Russian government has focused on those who use opiods and alcohol to escape reality, the institute says; but Moscow has largely ignored those who use synthetic drugs not so much to escape reality but rather to adapt to it, people who have jobs, good incomes, and families (club-rf.ru/theme/731).

            The Moscow sociologists say that these people tend to be those “with higher educations, are members of the creative professions, and office workers who take drugs that in themselves are not illegal and thus whose use helps them to adapt to the tensions they increasingly feel in Russia life.

            According to the sociologists, this upsurge in the consumption of such drugs is the result of “the sharp deterioration in the mental state” of Russian society, a community which roughly half suffer from depression and a third from anxiety. The most vulnerable are young people between the ages of 25 and 34.

            Stimulant drugs, the scholars continue, have “become a tool to cope with this condition not a means of getting away from it.” But this creates “a vicious cycle” for an ever larger group: “growing anxiety promotes ‘controlled’ use and that in turn “provokes psychosis and aggravates other mental disorders.”

            Most of the people who use drugs of this kind in this way do not turn to doctors, violate the law, or appear all that different from those who don’t use drugs. As a result, “this new wave” of drug abuse has remained “invisible”to statisticians and the Russian government.

Kremlin Fighting Statistical War Against Its Own Country and the West and All Too Often Winning There, Voronenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 29 – One of the most important fronts in Putin’s war against his own people and the outside world is the statistical one, a front that the Kremlin leader has had numerous victories because both Russians and outsiders are all too ready to accept statistics as somehow inherently true, Dmytro Voronenko says.

            That allows Putin to convince Russians that things are better overall than they may appear to individuals and too cause foreign governments to adopt policies he favors because his cooked statistics to hide the truth about Russia, the independent Ukrainian analyst says (ridl.io/ru/sem-oshibok-pri-analize-dannyh-iz-rossii-i-kak-ih-izbezhat/).

            Voronenko gives seven examples of Putin’s statistical sleight of hand, although he stresses that these are neither ranked nor comprehensive. Rather, he suggests, they are the tip of a very dangerous iceberg that Russian society and Western governments all too often Titanic-like risk running into. These include:

1.     Treating official figures as market prices when the state can set them thus contributing to the idea that Russia is really a market economy rather than an increasingly command one.

2.     Citing international sources which use Russian ones without mentioning that fact, thus giving more credence to Moscow’s figures and reducing the chance people will question them.

3.     Failing to mention Russian government laws and decrees that have changed what the numbers mean, leading people to compare apples and oranges without recognizing that fact.

4.     Changing the definition of categories so as to be able to leave out key components that are moving in a different direction than Moscow wants to advertise.

5.     Routinely changing the time frame data covers and thus presenting data sets “as if the last four years had not happened” and thus the impact of Putin’s war is concealed.

6.     Ignoring the ways in which Moscow counts stockpiles as part of production and thus buys time for itself when production falls.

7.     And last but far from least, pointing to special actions by the government as just a normal way of doing business and proof that the state is in control and that all is well.

The best way to protect oneself against such attacks by Putin on the statistical front, Voronenko concludes his detailed discussion of each of these, is to be aware of what Putin is doing and question his statistics just as much as would be the case if the numbers came from others, something that all too often now is not the case.