Reading Putin's Mind

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                The great guessing game today is about Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s inner thinking. He is “surprised,” and “shocked,” we are told by numerous commentators in the West: He “expected,” he “believed,” he “thought” that his war against Ukraine would be swifter, easier, and—yes—even celebrated by Ukrainians themselves. He did not think Ukrainians would rise up to defend their country with such alacrity. He did not think the rest of Europe would unite in such a tight formation against him. He did not expect the economic sanctions to be so punishing.              

                Whether this is speculative mind-reading or solid deduction, it’s important to get right, because it will inform assessments of what he might do going forward and what might induce him to stop. That’s why intelligence agencies have teams devoted to interpreting the psychology of world leaders.

It’s wise to recognize how assertions that look ridiculous from outside can look indisputable inside, as in Putin’s charge that Ukraine was a neo-Nazi base preparing military aggression against Russia—and in President George W. Bush’s charge in 2003 that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Both fictions launched devastating wars, and each side apparently believed them sincerely. Putin, whose dictatorship does not exactly reward dissent, seems to operate in the echo chamber of his narrowing inner circle. “Behind closed doors they repeat the same garbage,” said one Western analyst with access to sensitive information.

                If that is so, then the war is driven by the strong logic of self-deception. That means that it is likely to continue and perhaps conclude with false triumphalism. Putin will need a claim of victory. But to give him that, short of Ukraine’s utter demolition and defeat, will require reading a mind that may be largely illegible.

“I think Putin has been surprised by many aspects of this,” the Russian émigré writer Julia Ioffe told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “that Ukraine didn’t fall within a couple of days, by the Ukrainian resistance, and the fact that Ukrainians aren’t greeting him as liberators.” And how did she know that Putin was surprised? She didn’t say.

It’s a reasonable assumption, but an assumption nonetheless, that Putin and his military made calculations that they simply got wrong, that his cost-benefit analysis went awry, that perhaps he wouldn’t have invaded had he known.

There is a pitfall here. For Putin, that kind of balance sheet does not seem decisive. The West can load up the debit side with weapons and sanctions, but that still leaves out the “emotional, spiritual, and metaphysical overtones” of his attachment to Ukraine described perceptively by Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace before the invasion.

Young Voices from Ukraine

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Victims of war are usually caught in the present. In the midst of crisis, it's hard to think about the big picture or what comes next. But six young adults in Ukraine, during an online discussion last week, summoned up the power to reach beyond their personal immediacy into a larger time and place.

                The session, attended by young people from at least twenty-six countries, was organized by a broad array of international youth organizations and moderated by Saji Prelis of Search for Common Ground, which manages conflict-resolution projects around the globe. (Full disclosure: My son Michael Shipler is a vice president of Search.)

                If you have an hour, it’s worth spending it watching the discussion here, because you can hear and see what you cannot read: the chords of sorrow and resolve in their voices, the grieving beauty in their eyes. And by the end, which will not be an end for them, of course, you will be torn by inspiration, which they throw up against the tragedy.

                At Saji’s wise request, not knowing what oppression that elusive future will bring, I am using only their first names, even though they gave consent for their full names to appear on the screen during the live stream. Neither they nor we can calculate the dangers going forward.

Most appear to be in their twenties and early thirties. They are fluent in English. They have the innocence of idealism. They are not children, but they are young enough still to imagine and to strive. They are not yet jaded or calloused or—as far as we can see—wounded. But they understand the wounds of others and are trying to heal them, in part by seeing their struggle as being not only for themselves.

                Yulia is trapped with her two small children in besieged Sumy, near the Russian frontier, having missed the brief opportunity to escape in the first days of the war. The town is under heavy Russian bombardment. Anna, a medical doctor, crossed into Romania, where she is treating evacuees. Alina recorded a gentle but defiant message as she fled to the Kyiv train station. Yuliana, a psychologist in Lviv, is trying to help with trauma. Roman, also in Lviv, is assisting refugees flooding into the city’s train station.

Recollections of Kyiv

 

By David K. Shipler 

                An event that now seems sadly remarkable occurred in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, in 1975, when it was part of the Soviet Union. At the time, Kyiv enjoyed such a pleasant ambiance of broad boulevards and relative prosperity that Communist rulers made it one of a few “closed cities,” along with Moscow and Leningrad, where no Soviet citizen could reside without a government permit. Otherwise, millions would have flocked there to escape the deprivation of the countryside.

Now, thousands are fleeing.

In September 1975, I accompanied three American and two Soviet astronauts on a tour of tentative friendship. During a partial thaw in the Cold War, they had joined with handshakes in space during the Apollo-Soyuz mission, then came down to the hard gravity of Earth, traveling through the Soviet Union together in a pageant of hope. They were received with warm bear hugs and flower-bearing children as they tried jokingly to speak each other’s language and toasted their two countries’ exploratory steps toward cooperation.

 Russian hosts made sure to feature World War II’s Soviet-American alliance that had defeated Nazi Germany; the seven-city trip took the astronauts to significant spaces of wartime memory. Wreath-laying and somber pilgrimages at tombs and monuments were woven into the itinerary: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Kyiv, which had been occupied by Germany from 1941 to 1943; a war memorial on the way from the airport to their hotel in Leningrad, which endured a 900-day siege; an evocative monument with religious overtones in Volgograd, the site of the ferocious battle of Stalingrad with its two million dead.

At a dinner in Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, the Soyuz 19 commander, Maj. Gen. Aleksei A. Leonov, raised his glass in a passionate toast likening the rendezvous in space to the meeting of American and Soviet soldiers at the Elbe River near the war’s end. The Soviets created a collage of two photographs overlapping: the American and Soviet astronauts and the American and Soviet soldiers reaching out to shake hands at the Elbe.

                If any American president ever again wants to strive for an emotional connection with the Russians, here is some simple advice: Remember and celebrate that noble partnership of victory.