For many Russians, a deep unease over gathering spectre of war

MOSCOW (NYTIMES) - Waiting for her friends on Moscow's primly landscaped Boulevard Ring, Ms Svetlana Kozakova admitted that she had had a sleepless night. She kept checking the news on her phone after President Vladimir Putin's aggrieved speech to the nation that all but threatened Ukraine with war.

"Things are going to be very, very uncertain and, most likely, very sad," she said.

For months, Russians of all political stripes tuned out warnings from the United States that their country could soon invade Ukraine, dismissing them as an outlandish concoction in the West's disinformation war with the Kremlin.

But this week, after several television appearances by Mr Putin stunned and scared some long-time observers, that sense of casual disregard has turned to a deep unease.

Pollsters say that most Russians probably support Mr Putin's formal recognition of the Russian-backed territories in eastern Ukraine this week, especially because they had no choice in the matter and because no significant political force inside the country has advocated against it.

The gathering spectre of war is a different matter altogether, though. In recent days, Russia has not seen any of the jubilation that accompanied the annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Going to war is one of Russians' greatest fears, according to the Levada Centre, an independent polling agency. And after Mr Putin's angry speech and his cryptic televised meeting with his Security Council on Monday (Feb 21), that possibility lurched closer towards becoming reality.

"This hatred that you could read in him so clearly, it wasn't fake," said Mr Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst and former adviser to Mr Putin, who acknowledged that this week's events had forced him to revise his scepticism that the President would go to war against Ukraine. "This is not a game."

Many Russians still subscribe to the Kremlin narrative of a Russia forced to fight back against Western powers determined to destroy it. Mr Putin's speech, for all its emotion, was in tune with the grievances of many older Russians still smarting from the poverty that followed the fall of the Soviet Union and the lost prestige that accompanied it.

But for others, especially younger people, the sudden threat of war and of another downward spiral in relations with the West feel like the imminent loss of much of the freedom and opportunity that remains in Russia.

Mr Tigran Khachaturyan, a 20-year-old history student walking his corgi named Gatsby at central Moscow's Patriarch's Pond, said he knew from studying the past that the worsening international tensions would lead to decline inside the country.

"I've seen many examples of states pursuing various imperial ambitions and forgetting about the very goal of the state: the welfare of the people who live in it," Mr Khachaturyan said. "I don't support this policy and view it negatively."

And yet there is desperately little that Russians can do to change their country's trajectory. That became even clearer after Monday's Security Council meeting at which Mr Putin at times browbeat and humiliated his most powerful and senior officials into telling him that he should recognise the separatist territories.

The central message of this extraordinary spectacle of fealty, which the Kremlin taped, edited and aired on television, appeared to be that it was Mr Putin alone who had the power to chart Russia's course.

In society, opposition to this aggressive policy has been muted. The liberal-minded activists who could have been expected to lead an anti-war movement have largely been exiled or imprisoned.

This Sunday will mark the seventh anniversary of the murder in Moscow of liberal politician Boris Nemtsov, one of the loudest voices inside Russia opposing the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny warned that Russia was about to "squander the historical chance for a normal rich life for the sake of war, dirt, lies" and Mr Putin's personal luxury - but Mr Navalny was writing from prison, where he now faces an additional 15-year term.

The idea of a war with Ukraine is unfathomable to many Russians in part because millions of them have friends and relatives there. Mr Putin's annexation of Crimea in 2014 was popular both because so many Russians felt a personal attachment to the Soviet-era vacationland and because it was accomplished without a shot being fired.

The Kremlin has explained its support for the Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine as a necessary, humanitarian intervention to aid brethren under attack by a nationalist, illegitimate government. Many Russians accept that false narrative, which is one reason more than half of those surveyed told Levada last year that they would support the separatist territories' independence or their annexation to Russia.

Still, while state media trumpeted Mr Putin's recognition of the separatist territories with great fanfare, Russians responded with none of the spontaneous euphoria that accompanied the annexation of Crimea. Eastern Ukraine - even to those who buy the Kremlin's narrative about persecuted ethnic Russians in need of help - holds none of the emotional symbolism that Crimea did.

In central Moscow this week, Mr Alexei Ivanov, 53, who works in a construction company, reflected that even the Crimea annexation had made him "neither richer nor happier".

Ever since, he said, it has felt like Russia's leadership runs the country focused on its own goals.

"They want something, they have some plans," he said. "Common people don't fully get their true intentions."