Rally around or abandon the flag? Data on Russia’s support for the Kremlin

Earlier in the year, famed international relations thinker John Mearsheimer poured cold water on suggestions that the West’s sanctions would destabilise the Russian regime and ultimately bring an end to Russia’s bloody invasion of Ukraine.

Rather, Mearsheimer leaned on years of data to argue that sanctions instigate a “rally around the flag” effect, and could in fact, strengthen President Vladimir Putin’s control over Russia.

“States are able to sustain huge amounts of punishment and the population does not rise up against the ruler. You want to think about what we did to Japan in World War II,” Mearsheimer said as part of a recent discussion with the Committee of the Republic in March.

“You want to think about what we did to Germany. You want to think about the literature on sanctions, economic sanctions. Look at Iran. It’s amazing what we’ve done to Iran. Look at Cuba. There have been sanctions on Cuba forever. And these countries don’t throw up their hands.

“So the first point I would make to you is nationalism is a very powerful force. And I think that the Russian people will rally around Putin.”

Already, opinion research has demonstrated that Mearsheimer’s hypotheses are coming true.

Polling conducted by the Levada-Center in 2015 showed that a majority of Russian respondents thought that the sanctions levelled against the nation’s political elites and military were designed to “humiliate Russia”.

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More recent polling from the center demonstrated that those in Russia who held the United States responsible for the ongoing war in Ukraine jumped from 50 per cent to 60 per cent during the beginning of 2022.

Evidence presented by Germany’s Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung has also shone a spotlight on the growing prevalence of anti-Western sentiment among Russia’s youth.

According to a report, 16 per cent of Generation Z consider themselves Russian nationalists (6 per cent higher than the total sum of Russian society).

Meanwhile, 65 per cent of Russia’s Generation Z somewhat-or-strongly agree that Russia “should have a leader who rules with a strong hand for the public good”. Further, 37 per cent of youth don’t care for the existence of a political opposition.

Such figures don’t signal the existence of liberal youth who will propel Russia to reconsider their opposition to the rules-based order.

Despite this data, Dr John Mueller in the US Army University Press examined media and public polling trends following the US’ invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan – and extrapolated lessons from Vietnam and Korea – to observe inflection points at which public support for military intervention decreases.

“The comparison suggests that, after a rally-around-the-flag effect at the outset of the war, a decline of support is to be expected regardless of the effects of media coverage, anti-war demonstrations, censorship and propaganda efforts, or the military course of the war,” Mueller argued.

According to the analysis, despite initial support from the Russian public for the war – support will nevertheless wane, in no small part due to the fact that most Russian families will be negatively impacted by the war either by sanctions or by the considerable death toll.

In fact, Mueller argued that these two parameters will prove stronger motivators than the propaganda produced by Russian state media, with the government already failing to convince the Russian public of the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine.

“In all of this, what has chiefly mattered for American public opinion is American losses, not those of the people defended,” Mueller reflects of the recent war in Iraq, with opinion toward the invasion primarily influenced by US deaths and not by humanitarian considerations.

“And although fully 60 percent of the American public held the Iraqi people to be innocent of any blame for their leader’s policies in the Gulf War of 1991, this lack of animosity toward the Iraqi people did not translate into a great deal of sympathy among the American public for Iraqi casualties.”

On the other hand, Mueller also observed the inefficacy of anti-war demonstrations in shifting public opinion. The commentator goes as far as to suggest that they could be even “counterproductive”, with the poor behaviour of those in attendance strengthening the government’s public image and narrative.

In short, the combination of sanctions and ongoing death at the hands of the Ukrainian military – at best impacting the typical Russian family’s back pocket and at worst the loss of loved ones – over time will foment the feeling of war fatigue throughout the country.

“This phenomenon suggests that the Russian venture into Ukraine may well prove to be a one-off rather than a harbinger of other such attacks. As in the United States, the primary response will likely be ‘let’s not do that again’,” he noted.

This feeling of fatigue and resentment won’t be spread equally across Russia.

Indeed, Mueller’s argument that casualties will drive resentment to the Kremlin’s invasion will be worsened by the concentration of conscripts sourced from ethnically non-Slavic areas.

According to Connor Mitchell in the Small Wars Journal, the “majority of soldiers killed for Putin’s invasion are indeed not ethnically Russian and come from rather impoverished non-Slavic regions, a conclusion that the BBC Russian Service coincided with”.

Such concentration of losses in areas, some of which have had long histories of separatist movements, will likely exacerbate anti-government sentiment in regional thought bubbles.

Your say

As sanctions continue to hit the back pocket of the every day Russian worker, and as Russia continues to lose more soldiers on the battlefield, will the public continue to “rally-around-the-flag” or will support for the Kremlin wane?