Russia is no stranger to costly, grinding wars. Soviet authorities made a point of allowing the performing arts to continue during the 872-day battle for Leningrad during World War II, widely considered the bloodiest siege in history.
Thousands of displaced and starving locals flocked to the Mariinsky, Komissarzhevskaya, and other theaters to the unrelenting hum of shelling and air raid sirens. The 1942 Leningrad premiere of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony stands as both a singular cultural achievement and a grim reminder of Russian tenacity in the face of unspeakable hardship.
The situation today is very far removed from the horrors of the Eastern Front. I found nary a hint after spending over a week in Moscow that I am in a country prosecuting the largest and most destructive war in Europe since 1945. Business is booming. Previously vacant storefronts in Moscow’s luxury GUM department store and the city’s many other shopping malls are, for the most part, reoccupied by Chinese companies and multibrand stores selling the same Western high-end products that continue to flood into Moscow through countless parallel import schemes that have proven highly lucrative for Russia’s neighbors.
It was striking how convincingly Chinese car manufacturers have tightened their grip over the Russian market. “What, did you expect us to walk?” one of my interlocutors said, perhaps sensing my incredulity. “We have to drive something.” Yet German cars remain a clear status symbol for well-off Russians — one can find far more Mercedes and Maybach makes on the streets of Moscow than in Washington, D.C.
It is true the city is peppered with military recruitment posters, but this, too, is a remarkable testament to the normalcy the Kremlin has been able to maintain over three years into this war. Russian President Vladimir Putin resisted calls from Moscow’s hardliners — more on them shortly — to pursue full-scale wartime mobilization, instead creating a soft semi-mobilization model that draws large numbers of contract soldiers with generous compensation and benefits packages.
The government enjoys popular confidence, stemming in no small part from its effective handling of the economy. It is shocking to the Western imagination that, even amidst this war and the many personal tragedies that come with it, there is a sense among the people I spoke to that the post-1999 Russian Federation is the most stable, comfortable iteration of Russia in recent and even distant memory.
The rhythm of Moscow life is dictated by an insatiable hunger for upward mobility and ever-greater consumption — there is a brazenly capitalistic quality to it all that would take many Americans, let alone our more staid Western European friends, by surprise. Russians generally still do see themselves as Europeans and as part of a broader Western civilizational inheritance, but there is a realization that must have crept in somewhere between 20,000 sanctions imposed since 2014 that life will go on with this conflict in the background and without the West, even if the vast majority of Russians strongly prefer to be part of a common Western commercial and cultural space.
I came away from my contacts with the Moscow elite, including officials, with the conclusion that there are two broad camps in Russia. Most elites are what I would describe as situational pragmatists. These aren’t people who would give away the farm for a peace deal, but they are well aware of the long-term costs of prosecuting this war — including a deepening dependence on China that far from everyone in Moscow is comfortable with.
They are also cautiously interested in working with the Trump administration on a settlement that doesn’t just end the war but potentially addresses a broader constellation of issues in the ongoing confrontation between Russia and the West.
Then there is a smaller faction of hardliners who treat this war not as an arena for resolving larger strategic issues between Russia and the West but as a bilateral conflict wherein Moscow’s goal is simply to crush Ukraine and secure its unconditional capitulation. Though the political balance of power decidedly tilts toward the moderates, especially with the advent earlier this year of a U.S. administration that supports a negotiated settlement, the hardliners’ influence wanes and waxes proportionally with the belief that the U.S. is unable or unwilling to facilitate a settlement that satisfies Russia’s core demands.
What exactly these demands are, and whether Russia is willing to compromise on them, is a complex issue that hinges on all the potential linkages involved. To what extent would Russia, for example, be willing to scale back its territorial claims in exchange for a reopening of Nord Stream 2, reintegration into the SWIFT financial messaging system and other financial institutions, or an agreement foreclosing NATO’s eastward enlargement?
Still, nearly everyone I spoke to identified a baseline set of conditions for any peace deal. These include Ukrainian neutrality and non-bloc status, limits on Ukraine’s postwar military, guarantees against the deployment of any Western troops on Ukrainian territory, and at least de facto international recognition of territories controlled by Russia. My interlocutors argued that an unconditional ceasefire without a roadmap for addressing these issues is a recipe for freezing the conflict in Ukraine’s favor, something they say the Kremlin will never agree to.
These points are of course subject to numerous caveats and provisos. For one, Russia’s insistence on non-bloc status never extended to Ukraine’s ability to seek EU membership, something Kyiv can hold up as a victory in a settlement. There is also an implicit recognition that Moscow can’t prevent Ukraine from maintaining a domestic deterrent, even if subject to certain restrictions along the lines discussed during the 2022 Istanbul negotiations, against a Russian reinvasion.
I developed the impression from my meetings that Russia would demonstrate a great degree of flexibility in other areas, including rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine and the status of around $300 billion in Russian assets frozen in the West, if the strategic issues rehearsed above are resolved to Moscow’s satisfaction.
No one in Moscow who favors a settlement, which is almost everyone I spoke to, wants America to “walk away” from this war in the way that U.S. officials have previously suggested.
There is a widespread recognition that, if the White House permanently extricates itself from the conflict, Moscow would be left with European and Ukrainian leaders who will reject anything that can be remotely perceived as a concession. In that case, the Kremlin will undoubtedly decide that it has little choice but to take this war to its ugly conclusion.
I return from Russia with the conviction that such an outcome is neither inevitable nor desirable from Moscow’s perspective. A deal is possible, which is not to say that it can be achieved in short order or that Russia won’t drive a hard bargain. But for all of the destruction and tragedy visited by this war, it is not, mercifully for all involved, Leningrad in 1942.
