Putin’s election victory is assured. His victory in Ukraine is anything but

Vladimir Putin’s demeanour, usually a study of sneering command and icy stare, was showing distinct twitchiness in the run-up to this weekend’s three days of elections across Russia.

The result of the vote for the 450-seat Russian parliament, the Duma, is not in doubt. Any serious opposition parties have been ruled out on various spurious, legalistic pretexts. The last to get the thumbs-down from the electoral office was Yabloko, the only ostensibly anti-war party left in the race.

The last Duma election was in 2021, the year before the outright invasion of Ukraine. This time, it is a war election – the fiction of calling it a “special military operation” all but abandoned by the Kremlin. Putin is wrapping himself in the flag, saying this is a great war for the defence of the motherland, with strong echoes of Stalin’s Great Patriotic War of 1941 to 1945, which cost Russia around 25 million lives.

It is not just a question of winning, but winning well, and winning with a large popular vote.

Currently, his United Russia Party holds 320 of the Duma’s 450 seats. He needs at least 300 seats to change the constitution – and he will be looking to an unprecedented further term as president in 2030 or 2031.

On Wednesday, the president made a national television broadcast, looking somewhat pasty and puffy of cheek, and asked voters to make a “well-considered, responsible decision”. They had to back their leader and their country at a time of war.

At the same time, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov warned that Russia was facing a “propaganda onslaught from Nato nations”. He also repeated and stressed that Russia’s terms for peace from the early days of the invasion in 2022 were unchanged: full surrender of the Ukrainian forces, replacement of Zelensky’s “Nazified regime”, declared Ukrainian neutrality and renunciation of Nato membership forever.

It’s a high-stakes, high-risk gamble for Putin. He now has to aim to finish the war in Ukraine by this time next year at the latest. Taking the fight into the winter of 2027 to 2028 risks breaking the military machine, the Russian economy, and the personal rule of Vladimir Putin himself. Last month, he had to sack one of his erstwhile key economic advisers, Andrei Klepach, of the VEB development bank, for penning a report warning that Russia could not sustain a long war of attrition with Ukraine, and predicted that a major economic crisis could be on the way.

The run-up to the election has seen a surge in provocative “asymmetric” operations, varying between the blatant and deniable, across Europe, accompanied by a surge of propaganda from Russian state media and Western apologists. The rail junction through which high-profile visitors to Ukraine, including Boris Johnson and UK security adviser Jonathan Powell, had passed an hour or so before, was bombed by a Russian drone near the Polish border. A drone marauding into Lithuania was shot down by an Italian fighter backed by the Lithuanian air force. Russian drones also probed the borders of Moldova and Romania. Earlier this week, a Russian warship fired flares at a Danish reconnaissance helicopter watching shipping in international waters in the western Baltic.

More worrying are the signs of operations that are covered with a high degree of deniability. Submarines and unmanned submersibles have been tracked for months near strategic hubs for communication cables and underwater gas and oil pipelines. The UK gets 14 per cent of its imported gas through one single main pipeline network from Norway.

Security agencies are worried about the increasing rate of breakdown in infrastructure such as rail, electricity distribution centres, substations and transformers. On Wednesday, the Dutch railway system was hit by debris blocking and disrupting five major national rail routes. The operation, which appears to have been coordinated deliberately, involved some 30 incidents, including the jamming of signal systems and controls on level crossings. The Dutch government, which has been one of the most proactive in supporting Ukraine, has been very careful about attributing blame – so far.

Throughout the summer, the UK suffered a string of rail accidents and infrastructure breakdowns. The breakdown of air traffic control programming at Gatwick was first attributed to a mistake by the RAF inputting flight plans for its aircraft. This has since been categorically disproved.

The Burnham government has woken up to the weakness of provision for homeland defence – always underfunded by the Treasury since the end of the Cold War and neglected by the military. The War Book – the government’s guide to the population about what to do when the country comes under attack – is to be updated by the end of the year.

The Treasury have long believed this would be unnecessary, as we are not likely to be invaded. Maybe not. The Russians and their allies, like Iran or North Korea, aren’t likely to invade to occupy, but they are attacking, as numerous cases of cyberattacks, such as those on the NHS and Jaguar Land Rover, testify.

Putin has to raise the stakes now for a reason that has become glaringly obvious in eastern Ukraine. His problem is that, in Ukraine, he is not losing, but not winning enough. The Ukrainian command has announced the success of the first phase of its Operation Vivaldi, in which it has pushed back Russian brigades trying to take the fortress town of Lyman. A second phase is already underway. This means that the Russian summer offensive to seize the four fortress belt towns holding the north of Donetsk has failed pretty spectacularly. It’s a major tactical victory for Ukraine, but not a strategic one. The whole offensive has cost Russia at least 150,000 casualties in the last four months.

Ukraine is suffering badly from the increased tempo of attacks on civilian life, petrol stations, homes, roads and passenger trains. The newer jet-powered Geran 4 and 5 drones, as well as the glide bombs remotely launched from aircraft still over Russia, are a particular menace. Ukraine needs more air defences – and more people.

The aim for Zelensky’s Ukraine is to get through the winter – and this must be the main aim of its supporters and allies. If it can tough it through to February, Putin is faced with the worst dilemma of his political life.

His military commanders – who still claim to be advancing on all fronts – are talking of the need to mobilise an extra 800,000 Russian troops by spring. By sheer overwhelming numbers, they suggest they can win the war in the summer.

This is fantasy strategy. Russia does not have the skilled military manpower to command and train such a new force – the early sign of this is the reliance on soldiers and civilians from North Korea. Such a huge army would require full-blown martial law and draconian fiscal policies, including the raiding of private bank accounts.

If the latest Putin survival plan, the beauty contest for the Duma and the propaganda and grey zone tactics against Nato included, goes wrong, he could be in real difficulty by 2027. As he gets more erratic, he will become more dangerous for all of us, Ukraine and its European allies not least.