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.

They noted that Putin has devised historical twists to exaggerate Russian-Ukrainian kinship over the reach of a millennium; he wrote such an essay last summer. He continually denies Ukrainian identity and separate nationhood. He shares Russia’s longstanding geopolitical anxieties about nearby threats and sees Ukraine as a huge buffer, a security prize. His personal compulsions and ethereal bonds fuel his messianic drive to cure Russia’s post-Soviet humiliation and restore his nation’s scope and dignity.

Therefore, even if the risks and reverses of war had been anticipated, his volatile mix of grievance and yearning might very well have prevailed. Going forward, it is far from obvious that punishing his military and exacting more economic pain can overwhelm his zeal for conquest and expansion. Indeed, there is worry that if he feels cornered, he will lash out with chemical, biological, or even tactical nuclear weapons.

 In their responses to the invasion, Europe and the United States proved quite different from Moscow’s caricature of weakening democracies. “The biggest surprise for Putin, of course, was the West,” Stephen Kotkin of Princeton and the Hoover Institution said in a New Yorker interview. “All the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China, et cetera: all of that turned out to be bunk. The courage of the Ukrainian people and the bravery and smarts of the Ukrainian government, and its President, [Volodymyr] Zelensky, galvanized the West to remember who it was. And that shocked Putin! That’s the miscalculation.”

But how did Kotkin, a respected historian of Stalin and an expert on dictatorships, know that Putin was shocked? He didn’t tell The New Yorker, so I contacted him to ask. His answers in a phone conversation came down to a deduction—that Putin must be shocked—based on a mélange of publicized U.S. intelligence information, hard facts, circumstantial evidence, communications intercepts, and Russian battle plans, plus Putin’s own statements over the years.

The West’s “self-flagellation,” as Kotkin put it, fit into Putin’s narrative of democracies’ decline and disarray. From Moscow’s vantagepoint, fissures in NATO, the European Union, and elsewhere in the democratic world looked deeper than they proved to be. So, a self-congratulatory note has crept into some American commentary—not unjustified, but also premature, for we don’t yet know how resilient the West’s sanctions and military responses will be.

One piece of evidence that Putin expected a quick victory lies in the antiseptic term “special military operation,” Kotkin explained: “a special operation to land paratroopers outside the capital, take the capital in two to four days. That was not a war plan for an invasion” but for a coup to replace the government. “We have all the intercepted communications,” Kotkin noted. “They didn’t employ encryption. It was real time. The secret war plan was in real time. You were watching it unfold in real time with satellites, cell phones. All of our best military analysts pieced it together.”

That false optimism crippled the military, Kotkin said, and Putin’s ban on anyone’s use of the words “invasion” and “war” is “an indirect admission not only about the criminality of the enterprise but also because his assumptions are wrong. He’s doubling down instead of admitting the mistake publicly.”

All this says that if the West projects onto Putin a conventional method of calculating pluses and minuses, we might misread him. Even Kotkin engaged in that projection, he admitted.

“It’s very important that I got this wrong,” he told me. “I understood that the war was very unpopular in Russia, that Ukrainian society was strong and would resist, and the West was not a joke. I saw that a full invasion was costly and risky whereas a gradual ratcheting would collapse Ukraine gradually. I thought that’s what he would do.” Therefore, Kotkin expected “a low risk, high reward operation. I didn’t calculate. Instead I thought what would I do. I didn’t put myself sufficiently in his shoes and take his assumptions as seriously.”

 From here on in, if President Biden and other Western leaders guess that Putin would do what they would do, they are the ones likely to be surprised.