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How Putin’s Economic Forum Exposed Russia’s Divide Over the Ukraine War
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The Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, confronted two competing visions of his country's future on June 4 as he opened Russia's flagship investment forum with the war against Ukraine still unresolved, Reuters reported on the same day.
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Delegates at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum had split into two camps. One urged Russia to fight on and brace for a prolonged confrontation with the West; the other pressed to end a war that is draining the economy.
The rift, Reuters noted, exposed a deeper argument among Russian political and business elites over the country's direction after more than four years of fighting.
On the Kremlin's side, the message was that there would be no return to the old order. Putin's deputy chief of staff, Maxim Oreshkin, told the conference it was pointless to expect a return to the past or for the West to lift sanctions. "You should not wait for something to change, for something to come back; it will not come back and it will not change," Oreshkin stated.
Putin, has long ruled by balancing rival Kremlin factions competing for his ear. Signs that the $3 trillion economy is stagnating, with no end to the war in sight, have hardened a view among parts of the elite, the outlet added.
Those costs are no longer confined to the front. A day before Putin took the stage, Ukrainian long-range drones reached St. Petersburg itself, setting fuel tanks ablaze at the Petersburg Oil Terminal, a strategically important Baltic facility roughly 1,100 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
A separate strike hit the Kronstadt naval base near the city, damaging the Baltic Fleet missile corvette Boykiy as it underwent repairs and sending smoke over parts of St. Petersburg.
Within the peace camp, the case is increasingly economic. Kirill Dmitriev, Moscow's main interlocutor with the Trump administration, has pointed to the gains a settlement could unlock, the report indicated. US-brokered talks nonetheless remain stalled, and Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed Washington was "unfortunately" now paying less attention because of the crisis with Iran.
For many in the hall, the choice reduced to a single question. "Does this war end or do we stare into a much tougher future?" one Russian participant told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
The rival camp framed the war as merely the first chapter of a far longer struggle with a West it sees as fading. "We have to admit that we will be at war in the next few years, maybe for a couple of decades," declared Andrey Bezrukov, a former intelligence officer arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2010 while living under a false identity in the United States, Reuters reported.
"It may be a very hot war, it may be a creeping war," Bezrukov added, telling a packed hall that two generations of Russians would effectively live at war and had to learn to do so.
On the battlefield, little has shifted. Russia holds about one-fifth of Ukraine after Putin sent in troops in February 2022, but its advances have slowed this year, the report stated. It controls most of the Donbas region in the east yet cannot take the remaining tenth, and Kyiv has refused to cede the land it still holds or to recognize Russian sovereignty over occupied territory.
Putin maintains that Moscow has no intention of attacking NATO, whose members' combined economies dwarf Russia's. The hardliners, however, gave the last word to ultra-nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, whose daughter Darya was killed in a 2022 car bombing that Moscow blamed on Kyiv. The war, he told reporters, "will end either with Russia's victory or it will never end."
"We need to gather all our strength, gather all of our will and stop pretending that we are a peaceful country that goes off to barbecues or summer vacations," he declared. Asked to sum up Russia's relations with the West in the years ahead, Dugin answered with one word: "War."
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