Europe | Everyday Putinism

Vladivostok is a window into wartime Russia

Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is transforming the far eastern city

Mar 13th 2024

In Russia the day begins not in the capital, but in the far east. When Vladimir Putin announced his “special military operation” against Ukraine on February 24th 2022, much of Moscow was asleep. But in Vladivostok, on Russia’s eastern coast, they were already having lunch. When Russia votes in presidential elections on March 15th to 17th, Vladivostok’s results will be among the first to be tabulated. Mr Putin will win the ersatz contest. Yet the country he will rule is different from when his current term began.

Perched at the very edge of Mr Putin’s would-be empire, some 7,000km from Ukraine, Vladivostok is a good place to observe how the war has changed Russia. One sees neither the economic or political collapse that some Western observers predicted and Ukraine hoped for, nor the triumphant mobilisation that Russian patriots desire. Russia has become more repressive at home, and more isolated abroad. But its economy and society have proven resilient both to pressures from the West and from Russia’s own repressive state, and Vladivostok demonstrates that. As Ilya Lagutenko, the frontman of Mumiy Troll, the city’s most famous rock band, puts it on a recent album, the city has always been one “that made historical zig-zags with the ease of a hitchhiking teenager”.

Unflagging patriotism, icy determination

Founded in 1860, Vladivostok served as the Russian Empire’s outpost in its vast far-eastern territories, which had once been partly under Chinese control. The city was off-limits to foreigners during the Soviet era, but came to symbolise a new openness after the Soviet Union collapsed. “Vladivostok 2000”, a song by Mumiy Troll from 1997, became a local anthem and captured the national zeitgeist. “We’re leaving, we’re leaving, we’re leaving, purer times are coming,” goes the chorus. Politicians in Moscow and Brussels spoke of a “Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok”.

Such talk largely stopped after Russia annexed Crimea and fomented a war in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Relations with the West soured and the Kremlin renewed its focus on a “pivot to the east”, in which Vladivostok was to play a key role. “If earlier we spoke of Vladivostok as the country’s outpost in the far east, now we say it is our ‘window to Asia’,” says Vasily Avchenko, one of Vladivostok’s most prominent authors.

The latest phase of the war has changed fates across the city. For some, it has been a tragedy. BBC Russia and Mediazona, independent media outlets which monitor Russian casualties, have confirmed 759 deaths so far from the Primorye region—of which Vladivostok is the capital—by combing through funeral announcements. The true toll is likely to be much higher. For others, the war has been an opportunity. Take Vladivostok’s former mayor, who was convicted of taking bribes from an undertaker and sentenced to 16.5 years in prison in 2023. Late last year he was granted early release to serve in the armed forces.

Public attitudes towards the conflict vary. Some abhor the idea of fighting Ukraine. “It’s as if everything is happening in a dark dream, people are depressed, they’re afraid,” says one opposition-minded Vladivostok native. Others are defiantly optimistic about their struggle with the West. “The mood is that the West doesn’t understand what it got itself into—it shouldn’t have messed with Russia,” says one Vladivostok-based scholar.

After an initial shock, many have returned to their regular rhythms. “Yes, it’s happening, it keeps going, but what can be done?” says one Vladivostok resident. “The city basically lives as it lived.” Russians, as they have done throughout history, have adjusted to their new realities. As the scholar puts it, “Have there ever been easy times in Russia? We’re used to this, we’re adaptive.”

To get to know Vladivostok in 2024, The Economist analysed open-source information, crunched numbers, and spoke with residents from across the political spectrum by phone and over the internet. The journey begins where the city itself began.

The gateway to China

On any given day, dozens of ships bob in and around Vladivostok’s port. Many contain coal, minerals and hydrocarbons, heading from Russia’s mines and wells to distant shores. Others are stacked with containers of consumer goods to stock shelves across Russia. The port has become a lifeline for the country as a whole. While the number of container shipments cratered in the year after the invasion, those coming through Vladivostok recovered quickly, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German research outfit (see chart). “Many things have to be replaced and they can only be replaced via China,” says Alexander Gabuev of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre, a think-tank in Berlin. “And it’s the gateway to China.”

The port of Vladivostok has been the centre of life along the Golden Horn Bay ever since 1859, when Nikolay Muravyov, the governor of Tsarist-era eastern Siberia, arrived to survey the region aboard a corvette built in New York and dubbed the Amerika. The following year the Russian imperial flag went up above a settlement that Muravyov’s team called Vladivostok, meaning “Rule the East”. (China kept referring to the city by the name Haishenwai, or “Sea Cucumber Cliffs”.) Settlers arrived by ship, including many Ukrainians who boarded steamers from Odessa, enticed by promises of free homesteads. (The free spirit in Vladivostok was strong enough that following the fall of the Romanov dynasty it became the centre of the short-lived independent Far Eastern Republic between 1920 and 1922.)

The ships filling the port today demonstrate the growing importance of trade with Asia, a trend that began long before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. “Current events didn’t start this process, they accelerated it,” says Artyom Lukin of the Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok. FESCO, the parent company of Vladivostok Port, has long aimed to compete with Russia’s Europe-facing ports. “By the time of the war, everything was ready, everything was laid out—it came in handy in new circumstances,” says one former FESCO executive.

Those Asian trade routes have helped the Russian economy weather Western sanctions. Russian businesses, which have plenty of experience working in crisis conditions, found new markets and worked out new logistics quicker than expected, says Natalia Zubarevich, an economist who specialises in Russia’s regions: “The country is big and the world is big, and there are plenty of alternatives out there.” China is the key. Two-way trade with China reached a record high of $240bn last year, up 64% from 2021 (see chart). Russia’s customs service says it added 1,000 staff in the far east to help manage the new flows.

In Vladivostok, China alone accounted for three-quarters of imports through the port. A marquee car factory that once partnered with Japan’s Mazda now pumps out Chinese cars, which are growing in popularity in a city once known for its love for right-hand-drive Japanese vehicles. (Chinese car brands represented five of the six top sellers across Russia last year.) Even the Primorye police force has a new fleet of Chinese-made patrol cars.

But the window to Asia is not wide enough. Getting goods to and from the Vladivostok port is expensive and time-consuming. Demand for freight on the country’s eastern railways is nearly twice the capacity, according to the government’s own data. While container shipments through the far east have risen, trade in minerals and energy products has likely been hamstrung by a lack of infrastructure, given that most of Russia’s terminal capacity is in the west, says Julian Hinz of the Kiel Institute.

The Russian government is making a renewed push to build up alternate routes. “They have one set of infrastructure—now they’re trying to make a second,” Ms Zubarevich says. In a recent address to the Federal Assembly, Mr Putin touted plans to modernise eastern rail lines. “We have to catch up and we will catch up,” he declared. FESCO—including Vladivostok’s port—was nationalised at the end of last year and placed under the control of Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear power company, which wants to make it a terminal for shipping through the Northern Sea Route in the Arctic.

Despite the bump in trade, Chinese investment in Russia remains limited. And its willingness to trade comes with a price. China has begun using the Vladivostok port, with Russian permission, as a domestic terminal to ferry goods from landlocked provinces in its north-east. Some locals jokingly call the port Haishenwai again.

Brand loyalty

Some of the goods coming through the port may end up at the Kalina Mall. When it opened in February 2019 it billed itself as the biggest shopping centre in the Primorye region, with a supermarket, an IMAX cinema, dozens of fashion boutiques and a food court with a view of the Golden Horn Bay. The mall epitomised the consumerism of a globalised, monied Russian middle class. Among the names on the building’s façade when it opened were those of big Western brands such as Swatch and Zara.

Western sanctions targeted Russia's war machine, not shopping malls. But some Western politicians also hoped that disruptions to daily life would fuel popular resistance to the war. Ukraine called on consumer brands to leave Russia, lest their tax payments help fill Mr Putin’s coffers. Some big Western firms did so: at least 372 have completely severed ties with Russia, according to the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), a Ukrainian university. Yet the spectre of empty store shelves, which many Russians remember from the end of the Soviet period, never materialised. Plenty of other Western companies—more than 2,000, by the KSE’s count—decided to stay. An index of Russian consumer sentiment compiled by the Levada Centre, an independent pollster, is at its peak since 2012, the year Mr Putin returned to the presidency.

In Kalina, there were 36 shops bearing foreign brands when it opened in 2019; there are 26 now. While some of the big names left, in their place are analogues that peddle similar wares, such as Limé, an up-and-coming Russian fashion brand (see chart). “Sure all the brands like Zara and H&M left,” one Vladivostok shopper says. But their products “basically came back under different names”. In some cases, Russian partners continued operating foreign brands’ shops. What is no longer shipped directly to Russia can usually be obtained, albeit at a markup, via parallel imports through third countries. “I can go to the store and buy a new iPad, there’s no problem,” another shopper scoffs. Hollywood films continue to find their way onto movie screens: the Kalina Mall’s cinema currently advertises the upcoming release of “Dune: Part Two”, an American science-fiction epic.

Russian firms have found ways around the obstacles of wartime business. When Apple Pay and Google Pay halted their services, Russian banks developed stickers with embedded chips that enabled the same functionality. “Be trendy—pay with a sticker!” reads one advert from PrimSotsBank, the biggest regional bank in Primorye. “Pay with your smartphone, like before.” Many shoppers at Kalina Mall do just that.

Putin’s history lessons

While daily life carries on much as before, the government has sought to alter the underlying fabric of society. Starting in the autumn of 2022 schools across the country were ordered to hold Monday morning lessons aimed at inculcating traditional values and national unity. At Vladivostok’s School Number 14, which serves hundreds of students from primary to high school, these “Important Conversations” have included benign topics, such as volunteering, Russian cinema and mums, but also patriotic fare, including the meaning of the motherland and the heroism of Russia’s spetsnaz (special forces).

Officials boast that such measures for “patriotic upbringing” will reach 72% of Russian children by the end of this year. All high schools have also been supplied with new history textbooks, written in part by Vladimir Medinsky, a former culture minister and nationalist ideologue. The narrative portrays Russia as under constant threat from conniving forces in the West; the war in Ukraine is described as defensive. School Number 14 marked the arrival of the new books with a post on its social-media accounts. “Truthful history in a new textbook!” it exclaimed. “The volume presents the most complete historical picture of significant events in Russia and the world.”

“‘This is ultimately a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a people.’ - Russian president’s appeal, 24th February 2022”

“Putin emphasised: ‘We have not started any hostilities, we are trying to finish them. These hostilities were started by nationalists in Ukraine in 2014, when a coup d'état was carried out.’”

“The West is trying by all means to bring down Russia's economy. All these so-called sanctions—it is important to realise this—are absolutely illegal. They violate all norms of international law, which the West likes to invoke so much.”

“The West has stolen all the assets of the Russian state held in their banks, totaling more than $300 billion. They have also de facto stolen funds of Russian corporations, personal funds and property of many private individuals...”

Teachers, administrators and students have some latitude as to how enthusiastically they implement the new material. Some lap it up. Local authorities in Russia’s far east went a step further and released an “Important Alphabet”, which recast the ABCs in patriotic form. In this telling, A is for armiya (army)—“defenders of the country and our pride”—and B is for bratstvo (brotherhood) and bog (god). Some schools have even been given new patriotic monikers. A blue plaque on the wall of School Number 14 now bears the name of Yevgeny Orlov, a soldier with the Wagner mercenary group who was killed on the battlefield in eastern Ukraine.

Others go through the motions, much as many did with mandatory “scientific communism” classes for university students during the Soviet era. “People have experience with this kind of adaptivity: you do one thing but think another,” says Andrei Kolesnikov, a Moscow-based senior fellow of the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Centre. Those who resist the state openly face harsh consequences.

Fight ye not

When Mr Putin announced the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Alexei Galimov thought it was fake news. Born and raised in Vladivostok, Mr Galimov worked in logistics, and one of his closest business partners was Ukrainian. He belongs to the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, and has many friends who visited a church college in Bucha, a small town north of Kyiv. The idea of war with Ukraine was “just unbelievable, just crazy,” he recalls.

As the war dragged on, Mr Galimov decided he could not remain silent. In February 2023 he wrote a Bible verse on a poster—“Thou Shalt Not Kill”—and walked, hands shaking, onto Vladivostok’s Central Square, in front of the regional administration offices and a big Orthodox church. (The Russian Orthodox Church actively supports the war.) The first person he saw raised a fist and smiled. Others patted him silently on the shoulder. “I understood that actually many people don’t support what’s happening in the country,” he recalls. “Yes, they are afraid to speak up, afraid to take to the streets, but inside they disagree.” After about 20 minutes police arrived and bundled Mr Galimov into a freezing bus.

Mr Galimov’s political awakening had begun years earlier, in 2017, when he watched an online video by the late opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, investigating corruption in the businesses of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the deceased mercenary leader. He realised that his company was working as a subcontractor for one of Prigozhin’s entities. He severed the contract out of disgust. “I was inside the system, I saw how much was being stolen, how it was plundered, how the pie was carved up,” he reflects. He attended rallies when Navalny travelled to Vladivostok before the presidential election in 2018.

Vladivostok was long a hotbed of opposition to the authorities in Moscow. But in recent years those networks have largely been uprooted, part of a broader campaign of repression. On March 13th police arrested the head of the Vladivostok office of the would-be presidential candidate Boris Nadezhdin. Artyom Samsonov, an opposition-minded leader of Vladivostok’s Communist Party, was arrested in 2021 and sentenced to 13 years in prison. Some 80-90% of former staff and volunteers at the Vladivostok office of Navalny’s foundation have left the city, reckons Yuri Kuchin, who used to run it. “The political opposition is afraid and in hiding,” he says, speaking from exile in Europe.

That fear did not deter Mr Galimov, at least not initially. After his first protest, the police released him. He returned to the square with signs bearing the same Bible verse thrice more in the subsequent weeks. On the first anniversary of the invasion, he made a new sign, with a verse from the Books of Chronicles: “fight ye not…for ye shall not prosper.” Several days later, armed officers broke through the door of his apartment at 5.30am, pinned him to the floor and charged him with “discreditation of the Russian army”. During his detention, the guards threatened to summon members of the Wagner mercenary brigade to force him to sign a contract to fight in Ukraine.

As he awaited his court case, he and his family made the decision to flee just as hundreds of thousands of other Russians have done. When Navalny was pronounced dead in an Arctic prison on February 16th, Mr Galimov joined a small protest in Las Vegas, where he has requested asylum. This time his signs read: “Kremlin Killers Belong in the Hague” and “PUTIN IS A DICKHEAD”.

Marching orders

Russia’s Pacific Fleet, as its name suggests, is typically tasked with defending the country’s eastern flank. An early sign that Mr Putin’s invasion plans were serious came when some of these units appeared near the border with Ukraine. Among the soldiers sent west were the Pacific Fleet’s elite 155th Marine Infantry Brigade, which is based on the hilly northern side of Vladivostok. Like most of Mr Putin’s troops, they knew little of their commander’s plan. “They were sent off on January 2nd 2022, supposedly for training, they were told nothing,” one wife of a soldier from the 155th griped in a chat group on Telegram, a messaging app.

In the initial days of the invasion, the brigade was part of the force heading for Kyiv. Ukraine’s intelligence services allege that the brigade then ended up in Bucha and took part in the massacre and torture of civilians. Since then, its soldiers have been on the offensive in various locations along the front line in eastern Ukraine. In February, according to Telegram channels run by soldiers and supporters of the 155th, they were engaged in fierce battles for Novomykhailivka, a village to the south-east of Donetsk.

The fighting has taken a toll on the brigade. During an assault in late 2022, members of the brigade sent a letter to Oleg Kozhemyako, the governor of the Primorye region, accusing their commanders of treating them as cannon fodder. According to BBC Russia and Mediazona, 250 members of the 155th Brigade have been confirmed dead. The outlets reckon that their counts miss at least half of the true total.

Ekaterina (not her real name) last saw her husband when he told her he was leaving for a stint working in nearby mines. Actually he had signed a contract with the armed forces. As a veteran of the Russian spetsnaz, he felt drawn to the action. Yet when he arrived on the front with the 155th, he found disarray. “This is a strange war, it’s not our war,” he messaged his wife from Ukraine. “The commanders are dumbasses and set impossible tasks.” He was killed in the summer of 2023, just before his 49th birthday, during a battle for Vuhledar, a small town that Russia is still fighting to capture. “It’s all politics, they’re dividing something up—and we’re losing loved ones,” says Ekaterina.

Yet despite the losses, there has been relatively little backlash. The 155th has managed to regenerate itself and remains an effective fighting force—much like the Russian army as a whole. Russia’s defence industry is working overtime to keep troops supplied. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, a British think-tank, calculates that Russia will be able to “sustain its assault on Ukraine at current attrition rates for another 2-3 years, and maybe even longer”. (In private, senior Western military officials estimate two to five years.) High salaries have enticed many men, especially from poorer regions, to sign up to fight. The 155th continues to go on the offensive. “It takes small unit leadership, unit cohesion, and courage to assault well prepared defences—and these guys still do it despite heavy losses,” says Rob Lee, an expert on Russia’s armed forces.

That is at least in part because many believe in the cause they are purportedly fighting for. As Tatiana (not her real name) explains, her son enlisted with the 155th because he felt a threat from “NATO coming close to our borders” and from “open Nazism” in Ukraine. “We all know that NATO is a source of evil, and that the main evils are America and Britain,” she says, repeating a common trope of state propaganda. In the last message she received from him last fall he told his mother he loved her. “He died a hero in every sense of the word,” she says.

No mates

Vladivostok’s fate could have been different. When Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, after a four-year hiatus as prime minister, the city was one of his first stops. That year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit took place at the spiffy new campus of the Far Eastern Federal University. The assembled leaders, including America’s then secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, pledged to “promote our shared economic growth and prosperity in the coming years”. Eighteen months later, Mr Putin annexed Crimea and instigated a war in eastern Ukraine.

The Russian government launched a new flagship gathering, the Eastern Economic Forum, in 2015, at the same location as the APEC summit. A parade of Asian leaders came in the ensuing years, bringing along large delegations of businesspeople. In 2018 the plenary session featured Mr Putin alongside Xi Jinping, China’s president; Abe Shinzo, Japan’s prime minister; Lee Nak-yon, South Korea’s prime minister; and Khaltmaagiin Battulga, Mongolia’s president. The following year, Mr Putin was joined by Narendra Modi, prime minister of India, along with Mr Abe, Mr Battulga and Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia’s prime minister.

While plenty of countries, especially in Asia, are happy to continue trading with Russia, few now want to share the stage with Mr Putin and his cronies. Public participation in the forum by foreign guests has dropped off. Among the high-level foreign visitors to participate in the public programme at last year’s forum, more than half were from China or Myanmar (see chart). Officials from Europe, Japan and South Korea have disappeared.

The most prominent visitor during last year’s event was Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s leader, who inspected Russian military wares and toured an aquarium on the university campus. He did not join the forum on stage—in fact, no heads of state did. For the plenary session in 2023, Mr Putin had just one guest: Pany Yathotou, the vice-prime minister of Laos.

Fight or flight

For those looking to leave Vladivostok, the airport offers the quickest way out. Established in the 1930s, the Vladivostok International Airport added an international terminal only in 1999. Ahead of the APEC summit in 2012, the facilities and runway were modernised. By 2019 it was serving more than 3m passengers a year, many of them heading abroad. In January that year—before war and pandemic disrupted travel—international flights accounted for more than half of those coming or going from Vladivostok airport, according to data from Flightradar24, a website that tracks air traffic (see chart). Flights to or from South Korea made up nearly a third of all traffic.

That has since changed. Vladivostok is hardly cut off from the world, but increasingly “China is playing the role of go-between,” says Mr Lukin. This January over 80% of all flights to or from the airport were domestic. International flights were available only to China, Thailand and Uzbekistan. (A fourth destination may soon be added: plans are afoot to restart direct flights to and from Pyongyang.) The new routes may not be convenient. But as with much of wartime life, says one Vladivostok resident, “people find ways”. ■

Sources: CGIAR-CSI; Natural Earth; OpenStreetMap; USGS