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Russia’s last independent pollster tells me how Putin does it
How does Vladimir Putin manage to keep this up? For all the destruction he’s visited on Ukraine, his invasion has also inflicted so much damage on Russia.
There are the financial and economic costs. There’s the diplomatic isolation. There’s the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Russians who’d rather bet on a future abroad than support Putin’s war for the past at home.
But above all, there are the dead. The Kremlin doesn’t announce casualty figures, but a running tally by the BBC and the independent Russian outlet Mediazona estimates that at least 45,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in Ukraine.
To put that in perspective, it’s triple the number of Soviets killed in the USSR’s decade-long invasion of Afghanistan, often described as the “Kremlin’s Vietnam.”
In fact, it surpasses the number of Soviet and Russian troops killed in the entire period between 1945 and 2022, a period that also includes the Kremlin’s hamfisted and initially disastrous bid to suppress Chechen separatists and jihadists in the 1990s. To put it in American terms, those 45,000 dead would amount to 100,000 flag-draped caskets in the United States.
And yet, there’s hardly been a peep from Russian society.
To find out why, I sent a note to Lev Gudkov in Moscow. Gudkov is the academic director of the Levada Center, Russia’s last remaining independent pollster. I last saw him in person in 2018, at his messy office on Nikolskaya Street – a ritzy pedestrian boulevard – that’s just a five-minute walk from the Kremlin, which has long considered Levada a “foreign agent.”
At 77, Lev has the weary, knowing demeanor of a man who has spent his life asking questions in a society that is increasingly wary of answering them.
The Kremlin has pressured Levada over the years but always seemed to allow it to continue its work. Even autocrats, after all, need to know what their people are comfortable saying to strangers.
“The people don’t know how many are dead and wounded,” he told me. More than 60% of Russians get their news primarily from state-controlled TV, which will shout at you about neo-Nazis in Kyiv, perverts who run Europe, or cats thrown from Russian trains – but will not tell you about the bodybags coming home from Ukraine.
People who do speak out about casualties are arrested, harassed or, on occasion, driven to suicide, which is what happened this week to a hawkish military blogger who suggested Russia had lost 16,000 troops in its recent campaign for a single Ukrainian town.
Another problem, to adapt a Vietnam-era protest line, is that the Russians dying in Ukraine “ain’t no Gazprom executive’s son.”
“The funerals are held by individual families,” says Gudkov, “and its overwhelmingly conscripts from marginalized social groups who don’t have the power to mobilize.”
A look at the casualty map bears this out. Young men in remote and relatively poor Russian provinces like Tuva or Buryatia, for example, are up to 45 times as likely to die as their counterparts in Moscow or St. Petersburg.
All of this makes perfect sense. Russians don’t know about the casualties, face huge consequences for trying to find out, and are victim to the propaganda mill that keeps support for Putin above 80% and approval of his war not far behind.
But blaming this sort of collective delusion simply on a Very Bad Autocrat™ is too easy. The reality is that it can happen in democracies too, and it does.
On the eve of the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, I looked at a poll that showed 72% of the population approving of their government’s decision to launch a disastrous, unprovoked war.
But it wasn’t from Russia. It was from the US, and it was taken in 2003 to gauge popular support for the invasion of Iraq.
Say what you will about the failure of mainstream media to question the WMD narrative – and there is lots to say – but the US was, and is, a pluralistic paradise compared to today’s Russia.
But even so, it took four whole years of debacle in Iraq for a majority of Americans to finally decide that the invasion was a “bad decision.”
The emergence of social media in the years since has hardly helped. Nearly 20% of Americans today say pop star Taylor Swift was engaged in a Deep State psyop to sway the next election, while a third of Americans still think the last one was “stolen.” And as many as half of Hillary Clinton’s voters once believed Trump’s victory was the result of Russian tampering with vote tallies. None of the above is true.
The point is that you don’t actually have to live under the sway of a late-stage autocrat who controls the airwaves to believe bad, stupid, or crazy things.
A badly contaminated news environment can in some ways be as bad as a tightly controlled one.
President Joe Biden attends the return of the remains of the three slain US soldiers — Sgt. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, and Sgt. Kennedy Ladon Sanders — at Dover Air Force Base on Friday.
US strikes back after deadly drone attack
Nearly a week after a drone attack killed three American service members at a small US base in Jordan, the US responded late Friday by launching strikes against more than 85 targets in Syria and Iraq. The Pentagon blames the Iran-backed Islamic Resistance in Iraq for the deadly drone attack.
The strikes hit command and intel centers and storage facilities affiliated with the Quds Force, a unit of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and local Iran-supported militias.
Tehran condemned the US strikes, calling them a “strategic error.” Baghdad said the attacks killed at least 16 people, including civilians. Syria, meanwhile, criticized the US and said the attacks would “fuel conflict in the Middle East in a very dangerous way.” The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based watchdog, said the strikes in Syria had killed 23 pro-Iran fighters, but no civilians.
The strikes came hours after President Joe Biden, first lady Dr. Jill Biden, and US Defense Sec. Lloyd Austin attended the return of the remains of the three slain US soldiers — Sgt. Breonna Alexsondria Moffett, Sgt. William Jerome Rivers, and Sgt. Kennedy Ladon Sanders — at Dover Air Force Base on Friday.
Biden had threatened to deliver a “tiered response” over time, so these strikes are expected to be just the first salvo of a broader campaign. We’ll be watching for Washington's next moves — and for any signs of escalation in the form of responses from Iran, Iraq, or Syria.
Tensions between the US and Iran have reached historic heights amid the Israel-Hamas war.
Will the US and Iran go to war?
The White House on Wednesday blamed the Islamic Resistance in Iraq, a coalition of militias backed by Iran, for the Sunday drone strike that killed three US service members in Jordan. It's only a matter of time before the US retaliates, and the White House signaled this would occur in stages.
In anticipation of this, Iran on Wednesday warned Washington there would be a “strong response” to “any attack on the country, its interests, and nationals under any pretexts.”
Will Iran make good on its threat? If the US strikes Iranian assets in the coming days, Tehran will likely feel compelled to respond.
But any retaliatory measures that Tehran ultimately takes will probably be calibrated to avoid a full-blown conflict – such as attacks by proxy groups, its preferred method of making problems for its adversaries. Depending on the scale of the US approach, it’s also possible that Iran could target US assets in the region or potentially even US forces – as it did in the wake of a 2020 US drone strike that killed a top Iranian general, Qassem Soleimani.
War, huh, yeah. What is it good for? Neither Washington nor Tehran wants a full-blown war. For one, the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas already has the region on edge. Iran also can't match up with the US in a conventional war. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden is running for reelection this year and can’t afford to get the US entangled in a war that would undoubtedly drive up oil prices.
Along these lines, there is still hope for de-escalation, but the situation remains tense.
Iran thrives on Arab "misery," says expert Karim Sadjadpour
Whether it's Hamas in Gaza or Hezbollah in Lebanon or the Houthis in Yemen, how much control does Iran have over its proxy forces? According to Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, Karim Sadjadpour, Iran tends not to micromanage these groups. Iran may not typically give direct, day-to-day instructions but instead defer to these leaders to make their own decisions. However, Sadjadpour adds, on a broader level, Iran wields significant influence as they are often the primary source of funding and military support for these groups.
More importantly, when it comes to the people under the control of these proxy forces, whether they be Palestinian, Iraqi, Syrian, Yemeni or Lebanese, Iran doesn't care about their wellbeing. Sadjadpour emphasizes that we must distinguish between Iran being anti-Israel and genuinely pro-Palestinian, for instance. He recalls a conversation with an Iranian official who suggested that Iran benefits from the instability and conflict in the region, as it furthers their interests.
"Iran really benefits from the misery of these populations and these failing states, and they don't want to see these populations become prosperous" Sadjadpour tells Ian Bremmer in the latest episode of GZERO World. " And so in some ways, the more these populations experience conflict, whether it's, you know, conflict amongst themselves or direct conflict with Israel, Iran has tended to benefit from the despair of these Arab populations."
Watch the full interview: What’s Iran’s next move?
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
- What we know (and don't know) about Iran's role in the Israel-Hamas war ›
- US braces for Iran-backed blowback ›
- Fight between US and Iran’s proxies reaches boiling point ›
- Podcast: Iran's role in the Gaza war: is escalation inevitable? ›
- What’s Iran’s next move? ›
- US-Iran tensions complicate Biden's Middle East strategy - GZERO Media ›
What’s Iran’s next move?
Remember that famous line from Bill Clinton’s campaign staffer James Carville back in 1992?: “It’s the economy, stupid!” As Israel’s war with Hamas escalates, it brings to mind—in a nasally Louisiana accent—the phrase “It’s Iran, stupid.”
Because, whether it’s the dizzying arsenal of Hezbollah rockets in southern Lebanon pointed at Israel, or the Houthi drones targeting Israel from Yemen, or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard facilities in Eastern Syria-, one thing is clear: all roads lead back to the Ayatollah. And yet, there’s a big difference between skirmishes with proxy forces and an all-out US/Israel war with Iran.
"Iran feels particularly emboldened at the moment," says Iran expert Karim Sadjadpour, Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, who joins Ian Bremmer on GZERO World. "Whether it's going after Israel via proxies or going after the US via their proxies. And they may be difficult to deter because they may either correctly read the situation that the US is not interested in a conflict, or they may misread it. And that could lead us to more direct conflict with Iran."
So how close is Iran to waging war on Israel, and its Western allies? Iran is, after all, a rogue nation well on its way to developing a nuclear weapon. And that’s an escalation that no one, including Iranian leadership, wants to see happen.
Catch GZERO World with Ian Bremmer every week at gzeromedia.com/gzeroworld or on US public television. Check local listings.
- Israel at war: How will regional actors respond? ›
- Ian Explains: How Israel & Iran went from friends to enemies ›
- US braces for Iran-backed blowback ›
- What we know (and don't know) about Iran's role in the Israel-Hamas war ›
- The proxy war (still) raging in Yemen ›
- Israel's war in Gaza has emboldened Iran, says Karim Sadjadpour - GZERO Media ›
- Iran thrives on Arab "misery", says expert Karim Sadjadpour - GZERO Media ›
- Ian Explains: How Hezbollah became so powerful in Lebanon - GZERO Media ›
A Houthi militant attends a parade held by newly recruited Houthi fighters in Sanaa, Yemen, January 1, 2017.
US braces for Iran-backed blowback
As Israel prepares to launch its widely expected invasion of the Gaza Strip, Washington is bracing for blowback against American troops from proxy groups supported by Iran. The US says it is now reinforcing its air defenses, naval presence, aircraft, and troop numbers in the region.
Iran has spent years constructing a powerful network of proxy groups, which include Hezbollah in Lebanon, Houthi rebels in Yemen, an array of militias in Iraq and Syria, as well as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
In recent weeks, at least two dozen US troops stationed in Iraq and Syria have been wounded in a fresh wave of rocket and drone attacks attributed to Iran-backed groups, and last week US forces intercepted Houthi-launched missiles headed toward Israel. There are currently more than 30,000 US troops in the region. Most are based in the Persian Gulf monarchies and Iraq.
So far, both Iran and Israel have shown little appetite for a direct conflict, but proxy groups are a way for Tehran to indirectly harry the US and Israel.
The trouble is: Proxies are sometimes hard to control. If one of these groups goes further than Iran intends, a wider war could flare up fast.
- Ian Explains: How Israel & Iran went from friends to enemies - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: Iran's role in the Gaza war: is escalation inevitable? - GZERO Media ›
- What’s Iran’s next move? - GZERO Media ›
- Israel's war in Gaza has emboldened Iran, says Karim Sadjadpour - GZERO Media ›
- Iran thrives on Arab "misery", says expert Karim Sadjadpour - GZERO Media ›
- US-Iran tensions complicate Biden's Middle East strategy - GZERO Media ›
Hamas attacks in Israel ignite war
Ian Bremmer's Quick Take:
War, as I think you all know, is back in the Middle East, massive attacks by Hamas leadership into Israel. So far, over 100 deaths and 1,000 casualties among Israeli civilians that we know of, this in a country of less than 10 million. So, think of that in the context of a United States with several hundred million. This is no less than Israel's 9/11.
Now, big changes have been afoot for a long time in the Middle East. Israel actually is in its strongest geopolitical position that we've seen in decades, and that is relevant here. The Abraham Accords, for example, under the Trump administration, opening diplomatic relations between Israel and the UAE, and Bahrain, and Morocco. In the Obama administration, you had people, including the secretary of state saying, "that you could never get peace in the Middle East unless you first solved the Palestinian issue," gave them a two-state solution. That didn't happen. The Palestinians were marginalized, and Israel was able to develop and open and engage in stronger relations across the Middle East and North Africa.
A Saudi deal with Israel about to happen, also diplomatic engagement, which has been at the high level, informally very close to being announced publicly. And if you are the leadership of Hamas, refusing to accept Israel's right to exist, and not changing anything about your political positions, your corrupt governance on the ground and the rest, while watching the politics of the region turn against you, while watching your conflict, your priorities becoming irrelevant, while watching in Israel, nobody really pushing for engagement anymore, settlements expanding, well, certainly that is part of the reason why Hamas would've decided to engage in this level of unprecedented strikes against Israel, against the Israeli civilian population today.
But also, Israel has been in crisis domestically. The judicial reform, as it's called, that Netanyahu has been pushing, leading to unprecedented demonstrations across Israel, peaceful demonstrations, but involving much of the country for months and months now, and that has clearly distracted Israeli intelligence. It's also distracted the Israeli military, many of whom have said that they weren't willing to serve in the military if the judicial reform proceeded. Also, the fact that Netanyahu was focusing on expanding with his far-right coalition, Israeli settlements on the ground in the West Bank, and there was a lot of violent backlash from Palestinians as a consequence and from Israeli settlers against Palestinians, well, that meant that a lot of Israeli's defense forces were focused on the West Bank, were focused on the occupied territories and border security there, and they took away a lot of the troops in the focus from the Israeli South and from Gaza. So, clearly the Israelis took their eye off the ball.
This is a massive intelligence and defense failure for Israel and specifically for Netanyahu. They were seen as the gold standard on surveillance, on human intelligence collection, on border security, especially when we talk about the Palestinian populations. And now this, watching armed Palestinians gunning down civilians in Israeli cities and taking hostages back into Gaza, taking Israeli defense force soldiers, and even a leader, it seems, hostage overrunning a couple of military bases, small, but still, this is unimaginable for an Israeli citizen.
What happens next? A few things. First of all, war, war in the region. Netanyahu has declared that Israel is now at war with Hamas in Gaza, and Netanyahu has to take them out. This action was suicidal for Hamas leadership. It feels to me like what happened when Prigozhin and his Wagner leadership decided to go against Putin. They can say whatever they want for the first few weeks, but they will be gone. They are now dead-enders. They will be removed; they will be killed. There are already airstrikes beginning across Gaza in that direction. There will be ground warfare. There will probably be long-term occupation from Israel, an effort to disarm Hamas militias, a desire from the Israelis to paralyze and root out the threat against Israel.
We will see, of course, massive civilian casualties, more from Israel, but far more from the Palestinians in the response, the retaliation to these attacks. Now, right now around the world, what we have is mostly support for Israel and sympathy, in part because the Palestinian issue has become more marginalized, in part because of the nature of the terrorism, the extent the atrocities that have been committed in the past hours against the Israelis. Over time, that will of course shift as we see the massive human rights and failings and deprivation that occurs for Palestinian citizens getting caught in the crossfire. As always, the Palestinians on the ground are going to suffer the most, they're the most powerless.
Other consequences, the Israeli-Saudi deal, which was close to getting done, is now over. If anything was accomplished that Hamas wanted, that would be the single biggest thing. The Saudi government immediately came out, they did not support the attacks, but they said that Israel was responsible for them because of the deprivation against the Palestinians. There's no capacity to support the Palestinians from Israel in this environment that would facilitate a deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia, no capacity for Netanyahu to make nice after that statement.
The big ongoing question is does the war expand? Certainly, if it is found that Iran helped to plan these attacks by Hamas, that would be a game changer and would probably lead to Israeli strikes against Iranian military, Islamic defense forces, revolutionary guard forces, this sort of thing. But the broader question is whether or not we see ongoing military cooperation, collaboration for Hamas, from Iran, from Syria, beyond just statements of support and solidarity, that could of course lead to an expansion of the war.
Also, I do want to say that I've seen online, and I've seen on television over the last few hours, a lot of people saying that Netanyahu benefits from this, that it's good for him, even some saying that are relatively respected forces, "Well, maybe this was planned in some way by the Israelis." That's insane, and I want everyone to just put this in the context of saying that about President Bush in the hours after 9/11, when I was in New York and watched our two towers go down and the thousands of people die in the horror that the civilians in the country faced. Yes, Bush's political stature went up, but it was a disaster for the country, and I have no doubt in my mind that President Bush would trade his presidency if he could have 9/11 never have happened.
And also, we need to recognize that the response from the United States, the war on terror was intemperate and did massive damage, massive damage to America's standing around the world, massive damage to the lives of millions and millions of people around the world, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, that we are still feeling in 2023. And I hope that if anything possible good can come from this human tragedy, it's that Bibi Netanyahu and the world has learned a little something about America's failures after 9/11.
This is something that is intolerable and needs to be responded against in the harshest possible manner against those that are responsible for it, but 8 billion people on this planet have to find a way to learn to live together, and today we're a little farther from that than we were yesterday.
That's it for me. I'm sure I'll be covering this quite a bit going forward. I hope you're all doing well, and I'll talk to you soon.
- Israel prepares for Gaza escalation ›
- The latest from Israel and Gaza ›
- Netanyahu faces national unrest after judicial reform vote ›
- Israel and Hamas on the brink of war ›
- What We’re Watching: Putin in Mariupol, Xi in Moscow, Israeli-Palestinian talks, Trump fearing arrest, Kosovo-Serbia agreement ›
- Israel/Palestine one of the few Middle East areas getting less stable ›
- Biden on Hamas attacks: “This was an act of sheer evil” - GZERO Media ›
- Hamas: What is it? - GZERO Media ›
- Israel-Hamas war: How is Europe responding? - GZERO Media ›
- Israel’s impending Gaza invasion: a moral quagmire - GZERO Media ›
- Israel at war - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: The war between Israel and Hamas and its unfathomable human toll - GZERO Media ›
- Gaza: "Hearts will harden" against its people - GZERO Media ›
- Ian Bremmer: Understanding the Israel-Hamas war - GZERO Media ›
- Israel-Hamas War: The race to avert escalation in the Middle East - GZERO Media ›
- Biden's Middle East visit buys time for diplomacy - GZERO Media ›
- Will Israel's war with Hamas spread north to Lebanon? - GZERO Media ›
- What we know (and don't know) about Iran's role in the Israel-Hamas war - GZERO Media ›
- Israel-Hamas War: Can the US count on its Arab allies? - GZERO Media ›
- Israel's war in Gaza has emboldened Iran, says Karim Sadjadpour - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: The path to a two-state solution for Israel & Palestine: Former PM Ehud Barak's perspective - GZERO Media ›
Police officers secure an area near the Interior Ministry following a bomb attack in Ankara, Turkey, on Oct. 1, 2023.
Turkey retaliates for terrorist attack
Turkish warplanes on Sunday destroyed 20 suspected targets of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, in northern Iraq following a suicide bombing of the Turkish Ministry of Interior Affairs in Ankara for which the PKK claimed responsibility. Two police officers were injured and one of the bombers was killed in the assault.
The attack happened hours before Turkey’s Parliament was set to return from its summer recess. The legislature opened as planned, and a defiant Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the bombing “the last stand of terrorism” and vowed that “the scoundrels who targeted the peace and security of the citizens could not achieve their goals and they never will.”
The PKK, which is designated as a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States, and the European Union, has conducted a number of attacks in Turkey together with the Islamic State group.
Erdogan also reiterated Turkey’s plans to create a 20-mile safe zone along its border with Syria to secure the area from attacks.
This Turkish parliamentary session is notably supposed to ratify Sweden’s membership in NATO, but Erdogan has not yet indicated when that is likely to take place.