While Russian forces nightly attack Ukrainian cities with long-range missiles — killing increasing numbers of civilians since the reduction of US military aid to Kyiv — this year has seen Ukraine escalate its own long-range campaign against Russia. Drones have targeted two types of infrastructure important to Russians’ sense of normality: the logistics hubs for Wildberries, an Amazon-style online marketplace which is Russia’s single largest goods distribution network, and, perhaps more importantly, petrol and diesel fuel refineries, which appear to be relatively easy targets and a weak link in the overall domestic economy.

Beyond the battlefield, responses within Russian society matter to the Kremlin’s chances of keeping the war effort going. It appears increasingly likely that after another set of falsified parliamentary elections this September, it will attempt a renewed form of compulsory military mobilization. Such a policy was briefly tried in late 2022 but soon proved a political failure and was abandoned in favor of mercenary payments. This latter approach now appears to be reaching its limits, however, after exhausting the reserve populations of potential recruits among both ethnic minorities and Russians in disadvantaged regions.

There is already increasing fatigue and discontent with the war’s enormous human cost and parlous effect on the economy. If severe demographic decline wasn’t bad enough, then revisiting the politically taboo topic of military conscription will bring, if not open political crisis, at least a more febrile atmosphere of fear and yearning for change. What we don’t know yet is what the texture of this political moment will feel like. It may be “hot” and prickly like the painful mass mobilizations around the late 1980s–early ’90s, or else it may feel, as it sometimes did for the rearguard civil society that bravely resisted the slide into autocracy in the late 2000s, like wading through sand while being pursued by an implacable horde.