MOSCOW — For months, Russian state media has insisted the country is only hitting military targets in Ukraine, ignoring the suffering the invasion has inflicted on millions of civilians.
On Monday, state television not only reported on the suffering, but also displayed it. It showed plumes of smoke and carnage in central Kyiv, along with empty store shelves and a long-range forecast promising months of freezing temperatures there.
” There is no hot water ; part of the city is without electricity,” a presenter said, describing the scene in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv.
This abrupt shift was a sign that domestic pressure on Russia’s war effort had escalated to the point that President Vladimir V. Putin felt a show of brute force was needed – as much for his audience as the house than for Ukraine and the West.
His army has come under increasing criticism from war supporters for not being aggressive enough in its assault on Ukraine, a chorus that came to a head after Saturday’s attack on the 12-mile bridge leading to the annexed Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea – a symbol of Mr. Putin’s reign.
With Monday’s devastating escalation of the war effort, Mr. Putin appears to be responding, in part, to those criticisms, momentarily quieting the roars of hardliners furious at the Russian military’s humiliating reverses on the field of battle.
“It’s important from a domestic political point of view, first and foremost,” Abbas Gallyamov, a Russian political analyst and former Putin speechwriter, said of Monday’s strikes. “It was important to demonstrate to the ruling class that Putin is still capable, that the military is still good at something.”
But with his escalation, Mr Putin is also betting that Russian elites – and the general public – indeed see it as a sign of strength rather than a desperate effort to inflict more suffering on Ukrainian civilians in a war that Russia appears to be. . lose militarily.
“The response was supposed to show power, but in fact it showed helplessness,” Mr. Gallyamov said. “There is nothing else the army can do.”
The attacks killed at least 14 people and injured dozens more, while countless other Ukrainian cities were terrified by dozens of incoming missiles explicitly targeting civilian infrastructure.
After the strikes, some of the harshest critics of the invasion among Russian hawks said the military was finally doing its job. Chechnya strongman Ramzan Kadyrov – who recently denounced the ‘incompetent’ army leadership – said in a Telegram post that he was now ‘100 per cent satisfied’ with the war effort.
“Run, Zelensky, run,” he wrote, referring to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
Other war cheerleaders triumphantly recalled Mr Putin’s declaration in July that Russia had “not started anything serious yet” in Ukraine.
“Now it looks like it has started,” said a state television talk show host, Olga Skabeyeva.
Hardliners in Russia have long advocated this strategy, said Greg Yudin, professor of political philosophy at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences. “For example, we have to scare them into submission,” he said of the hard-right perspective. “So to do that, we have to be really, really violent.”
The strike on the Crimean Bridge, Mr Yudin said, meant the Kremlin “had no choice but to give in” and step up attacks on Ukraine.
Mr Putin described the strikes as a response to Ukrainian “terrorist acts”, presenting them as a one-off assault to deter future Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory. In his hometown of Saint Petersburg, where he had visited on Friday for his 70th birthday, Mr Putin spoke on national television for just over three minutes in what the Kremlin called the start of a a meeting with its Security Council.
He insisted that the strikes had been initiated by the military, an apparent effort to avoid claims that he was planning the war effort in isolation.
“This morning, at the suggestion of the Ministry of Defense and according to the plan of the Russian General Staff, a massive strike with long-range high-precision air, sea and ground weapons was launched against Ukrainian energy, military command and communications facilities,” Putin said.
“If the attempts of terrorist attacks on our territory continue, the measures taken by Russia will be harsh and their scale will correspond to the level of threats facing the Russian Federation. No one should doubt that. »
In his speech, Mr Putin made a notable omission: He did not name the West as the ultimate culprit in the Crimean bridge explosion on Saturday or other alleged Ukrainian attacks. It was a break from the typical Kremlin rhetoric that portrays Washington and London as puppeteers behind the Ukrainian resistance.
This change was a possible signal that the Russian leader wanted to control the escalation of the war and that he was not about to provoke a direct conflict with NATO.
Yet the deadly and seemingly indiscriminate strikes, while satisfying the bloodlust of Russian hawks, carry some risk for Mr Putin, not least because they clash with Kremlin claims that Russia was not targeting Ukrainian civilians and was simply conducting a “special military operation”. .”
They could also pressure Mr Putin to step up further in the event of additional Ukrainian attacks or front-line successes, which could increase discord within the Russian ruling elite over how difficult it is to push in Ukraine. .
Indeed, pro-Kremlin figures, while celebrating the strikes, have struggled to explain the incongruity of the fiery assault on cities that Mr Putin says are central to Russia’s cultural heritage. Some have justified the chaos by blaming Ukraine and the West.
“It is bitter for us to see missile attacks on one of the most beautiful cities in the world, our Kyiv,” Sergei Markov, a pro-Kremlin commentator who frequently appears on state television, wrote on Telegram. “All responsibility for the attacks on Kyiv lies with the occupiers and their collaborators. That is, on Biden and Zelensky personally.
In Russia, few voices called for restraint on Monday. Even as hawks praised the attacks, some lamented that Mr Putin did not go far enough; Dmitry A. Medvedev, the former Russian president and current deputy chairman of Mr. Putin’s Security Council, said on Telegram that the only way to protect Russia was to “completely dismantle” the Ukrainian government.
There were signs that Mr Putin was preparing for a wider escalation in the war. On Saturday, he appointed a general known for his ruthlessness, Sergei Surovikin, to lead the war effort in Ukraine. And Mr Putin’s closest international ally, President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus, said on Monday that thousands of Russian troops would soon arrive in the country to form a joint military group with Belarusian forces, creating the specter of a new threat to northern Ukraine. .
Vladimir B. Pastukhov, a Russian political scientist and lawyer, said Putin’s escalations “go against his own intuition” and severely limit his policy options by pushing him into a corner.
“All of Putin’s actions today are aimed at getting out of this corner whose only way out is the nuclear button,” Mr Pastukhov, honorary senior research associate at University College London, said in a telephone interview. “In a way, what just happened really increases the risk for him.”
In central Moscow, many people said they were unaware of what happened in Ukraine. People were soaking up the sun in the upscale neighborhood around central Tsvetnoy Boulevard or rushing to work or appointments.
Some younger people, more attuned to social media, said they knew about the strikes on Ukraine but felt powerless to blame. “It’s wrong when people are killed for whatever reason,” said Sasha, 19, a university student. Still, she continued, “In any fight, both sides are responsible.”
In Russia, penalties for criticizing the war — or even using the term war — come with heavy fines or jail time, so many Russians are cautious about making comments that might have a negative connotation about the war.
Anton Troyanovsky reported from Berlin, and Valerie Hopkins From Moscow. Alina Lobzina contributed reporting from London.