Putin's Gamble

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

When Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine three years ago, he made several bets that might have seemed like sure things to him then. One, that Ukraine would quickly fold. Two, that the United States had no staying power. Three, that Europe was too fractured to mount effective resistance.

            Ukraine has fought valiantly, however. The US under President Biden mustered huge supplies of weaponry and diplomatic support. Europe united to provide even more aid than the US. And instead of crumbling, NATO added two new members, Sweden and Finland.

Nevertheless, Putin’s gamble finally began paying off last week, thanks to his admirer Donald Trump, who is so obviously volatile that next week might be different. Putin once labeled him unpredictable. By contrast, the Russian leader has the patience of a chess master—albeit an emotional player, as I wrote in the Washington Monthly two months before the invasion.

His long game relies on a wish and a belief: his wishful, messianic ambition to expand and restore a Russian empire, and his passionate belief that Western democracies are vulnerable to moral decay, internal disorder, and external subversion.

He is acting in both these dimensions simultaneously, and now has a willing (or unwitting) partner in President Trump.

Russia has tried to accelerate the decline of democracies by exacerbating domestic divisions with online disinformation during elections, which probably helped elect Trump in 2016. Moscow is promoting pro-Russian parties in Germany and other NATO states, a Russian interference campaign that has been joined by Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance, who have championed rightwing European parties with neo-Nazi sympathies.

In Ukraine, Both Sides Are Losing

 

By David K. Shipler 

                A year into Europe’s largest land war in nearly 80 years, the prospect of “winning” remains not only elusive but—more telling—defined by wishful thinking rather than military reality.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine seems capable of achieving its ambitious aims. Perhaps, looking far into the future, Russia will succeed in taking over all of Ukraine. Or perhaps Ukraine will manage to expel Russian forces from its entire territory, including Crimea and the eastern Donbas region that Moscow grabbed in 2014. Perhaps. But so far, neither scenario looks possible.

Instead, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a conflict of mutual loss. Russia is losing its soldiers and weapons, its global standing, its economic vitality, its modicum of cultural and political freedom, and hundreds of thousands of talented citizens who are fleeing abroad. Convicted prisoners, freed to fight, are coming home, along with traumatized troops bearing shame and emotional scars. Russian society is being wounded.

Ukraine is losing population to death and migration, its houses and bridges and factories and farms, its energy grid, its medical system, and its reliable independence. If it survives, it will be hobbled by neediness and severe militarization. The coming generation will not easily erase the terrors endured in childhood.

Yet there is talk of “victory.” What that means today is certainly not what will be claimed eventually in whatever compromise may be reached, for this war—unlike Vietnam and the two World Wars—is not susceptible to the categorical defeat of either side. Both portray it as a clash of virtues and values, a colossal contest over the entire international order.  

Putin's War Shrinks and Widens

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Russia’s war in Ukraine might be one of the strangest in history. Even while his army is being pummeled into retreat, President Vladimir Putin expands the goals of the conflict into a messianic campaign against the entire West. As his military holdings shrink on the ground, his strategic ambitions spread into a miasma of self-delusion. It is a dark comedy with monstrous effect.

                Not only does Russia aim to retake the Ukrainian part of the lost Soviet empire, according to Putin. Not only must Russia parry American military threats to preserve its very existence, he claims. But also, more deeply, Russia must fulfill its mission, borne of its thousand-year history, to lead toward a multipolar world: to defeat the arrogant West’s “faltering hegemony”; its “neo-colonial system”; its “enslavement” of the less wealthy; its “pure Satanism,” its “radical denial of moral, religious, and family values.”

                That is a tall order for a country with a limping economy, few international friends, and an army that looked formidable until the first shot was fired. It also suggests a war in search of an ideology—or at least a rationale trying for resonance in both Russia and developing countries that feel exploited.

In a way, it seems a lame throwback to the communist era of Russian evangelism for worldwide social justice. But it also reveals something more significant.

Putin seems to fancy himself a brilliant global analyst. He has been holding forth in various writings and several long speeches, most notably on September 30 in annexing Ukrainian territory that his troops didn’t entirely hold, and then on October 27 in a three-hour session at the Valdai International Discussion Club—an annual gathering of fawning Russian and foreign guests who lob softball questions after he pontificates at length.  

Several conclusions can be drawn from this disconnect between solid ground and atmospherics. First, Putin is not stupid and he is not unaware. He is Donald Trump with a sheen of sophistication. He is a cunning wordsmith who weaves lies and truths together into webs of alternative reality.

Second, he is a chess player with the long view, cognizant of historical trends and able to think several moves ahead. But he does not play well when he is emotional; emotion is not helpful in the logic of chess. And despite his steely pose, Putin reveals his emotions with a mystical reverence for Russian destiny. It has thrown him off his game.

And that leads to the third conclusion, perhaps the most important. Whether in sincerity or opportunism, Putin is tapping into a strain of ethno-nationalism that has endured through upheavals of state rule from czarist monarchy to Soviet communism to transitory pluralism to post-communist autocracy.

Call it Russianism, the label I settled on when I first encountered the phenomenon under Soviet rule in the late 1970s. A liberal writer saw it as the country’s only mass movement, and the most dangerous.

The War of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

 

By David K. Shipler 

                To the extent that we think we know the fears and expectations of Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, they seem fraught with contradictions.

On the one hand, Putin labeled Ukraine as an incipient NATO base with malicious designs on Russia itself. On the other, he supposedly thought his “special military operation” would be a cake walk, seizing Ukraine’s capital and toppling its government in a matter of days. How could both be correct?

On the one hand, Putin portrayed Europe and the United States as formidable threats to Russian security. On the other, he disparaged the West as fragmented, decaying, polarized, and weakened by internal disorder. Those two versions cannot coexist in the real world.

                So, which of Moscow’s prophecies have proven true, and what does that imply for Putin’s future posture toward Western democracies? And which of the West’s anxieties about Russia have been realized, and how will those determine policy going forward?

It’s not good news. In the perverse calculus of war, even one side’s frustration and defeat can reinforce the convictions that led it to attack in the first place. So it might be with Putin. His terrifying assault has provoked a flood of NATO weapons into Ukraine, justifying his assessment of the risk posed by the North Atlantic Alliance. And Russia’s war of choice has galvanized most democracies in a unified front of economic punishment, surely enhancing Putin’s dogma regarding Western hostility.

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.

A Russian Tragedy

 

By David K. Shipler

 

                As terrible as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will be for Ukrainians, it also spells suffering for Russians, who cannot shake their own society’s paranoid, authoritarian traditions. Long gone is the modicum of pluralistic politics attempted briefly under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Vanished is the relatively relaxed acceptance of multilateral interests in “the near abroad,” as Russia calls its European neighbors. Now, as if reaffirming its tragic history, Russia is firmly back into autocratic form under Vladimir Putin, with its attendant xenophobia, insularity, and belligerence.

                For all its bigness and might, Russia has a thin skin, easily penetrated by slights and humiliation. There have been plenty of those inflicted by the United States and Western Europe, most dramatically in breaking promises from the early 1990s to refrain from expanding NATO. But even with that, Putin’s pugnacious sense of victimization runs far beyond reality. It depends on a demonization of the outside world as vitriolic as in Communist times. It depends on a vertical flow of power as dictatorial as the czars’.

                Putin’s raging, wounded speech February 21 setting the stage for war brought back a memory from the 1977 Soviet Union, when a Moscow police lieutenant stopped a West German television crew from filming the smoke-damaged exterior of the Rossiya Hotel after a fire that killed at least twenty. The reporter asked why. The officer explained, “We do not want to let foreigners laugh at our misfortune.”

The remark offered a telling insight. To imagine that foreigners were eager to mock Russia over a deadly fire must have required extraordinary self-torment, a loneliness of unfathomable pain. There is every indication, 45 years later, that Russia’s leadership remains stuck in that state of mind.

The sense of persecution echoes into Putin’s current remarks. Ukraine “has been reduced to a colony [of NATO] with a puppet regime,” the Russian president declared. It “intends to create its own nuclear weapons,” and “Ukraine’s Western patrons may help it acquire these weapons to create yet another threat to our country.”  Its policy is “to root out the Russian language and culture and promote assimilation.” It is subjecting ethnic Russians to “horror and genocide” in Ukraine’s Donbass region, which—he neglected to mention—was being wracked by an eight-year civil war that he launched and fueled. Those crimes, he said, were being ignored by “the so-called civilized world, which our Western colleagues proclaimed themselves the only representatives of.” He called Ukraine’s democratic movement, which overthrew the pro-Moscow government in 2014, “Neanderthal and aggressive nationalism and neo-Nazism.”

These dystopian fantasies about Western designs on Russia’s pride and security make a volatile chemistry. Whether he believes them or not, he uses a technique once described by a Soviet professor as characterizing sophisticated propaganda: “a truth, a truth, a truth and then a lie.”

The Origins of Cold War II

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The new Cold War, which now grips Europe and the United States, is not all Russia’s fault. A seed was sown in the American assurances broken by Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, who reversed verbal pledges to refrain from expanding the Atlantic military alliance toward Russia. The Russians didn’t get it in writing, and some analysts doubt that commitments were made, but official records of conversations suggest American bad faith.

That past doesn’t excuse Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressive effort to reconstruct Russia’s sphere of influence. He has ignored one commitment that actually was put in writing, the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, which obligated Russia, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. “to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine.” Negotiated in exchange for Ukraine’s relinquishing Soviet nuclear weapons stationed on its territory, it was brushed aside by Putin in 2014 when he annexed Crimea from Ukraine and began an ongoing proxy war against Ukrainian forces in the country’s east.

There are myriad reasons for Putin’s own expansionism, including Russia’s historic anxieties about the West’s political and military encroachment. Nevertheless, the past American behavior helps explain his distrust of the U.S., his sense of victimization, and his worries about national security. As exaggerated as those concerns might appear to the West, whose alliance has not threatened to attack Russia, they are amplified by Moscow’s experience with Washington after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has said that he was “swindled.”

Declassified documents tell the story of how American officials led the Russians to believe that no expansion would be undertaken by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), then later nearly doubled the size of the alliance. Russian and American transcripts and summaries of high-level meetings, posted in recent years by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, record multiple assurances in the early 1990s.

Putin, Emotional Chess Master

 By David K. Shipler 

                You can almost picture Vladimir Putin, perpetual president of Russia, hunched over a chess board the shape of Europe, divining strategies many steps ahead of his fractious, ambivalent opponents. A gas pipeline here, troops and tanks there, propaganda everywhere to set the stage for the twenty-first century’s Great Russian Expansion.

He is a skillful player. He reads the other side, detects its weakness, studies its patterns of resolve and hesitation. He appears coldly rational. Yet some who watch him closely see something beyond careful calculation. That is especially so when the issue is Ukraine, now in his military’s crosshairs.

“Putin’s attachment to Ukraine often takes on emotional, spiritual, and metaphysical overtones.” write Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Alongside his tangible geopolitical concerns, they believe, he is driven by the personal compulsions of historical fabulation and ethereal bonds to a land that he denies constitutes a country. Its capital, Kyiv, was the center of the Slavic state Rus a millennium ago. Its size places it second only to Russia in Europe. Its historic kinship with Russia is exaggerated by the Russian leader to justify making it the target of a sacred claim.

This year is the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse and breakup of the Soviet Union into fifteen countries along the lines of its fifteen republics, including Ukraine. Imagine the trauma—as if the United States fragmented into fifty independent nations, with a searing loss of dignity and global standing. Putin called the Soviet breakup “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Rumer and Weiss see him impelled to retake the prize of Ukraine to burnish his legacy.

 “No part of the Russian and Soviet empires has played a bigger and more important role in Russian strategy toward Europe than the crown jewel, Ukraine,” they note in their essay. “The country is essential to Russian security for many reasons: its size and population; its position between Russia and other major European powers; its role as the centerpiece of the imperial Russian and Soviet economies; and its deep cultural, religious, and linguistic ties to Russia, particularly Kyiv’s history as the cradle of Russian statehood.”

 Washington policymakers gave no hint of understanding any of that when they moved to fill the power vacuum left by the Soviet collapse.

Does Putin Want Trump? Really?

By David K. Shipler

            Of all the odd things that have happened on the way to the presidential election, the weirdest is the spectacle of Republicans, once the fist-pounding party of national security, shrugging off Donald Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin and for Russia’s geopolitical ambitions. Further, to turn normalcy completely upside down, the Democrats, once the party of internationalism, are pointing fingers at the specter of treacherous foreign influence subverting American democracy.

            With some exceptions, the right has been indifferent and the left has been apoplectic over Trump’s embrace of Moscow’s perspectives. He has spoken admiringly of Putin, and Putin has returned the favor. The Republican candidate has accepted Russia’s annexation of Crimea, deleted a call for lethal arms to Ukraine from the Republican Party’s platform, brushed off the suspicious murders of nonconforming Russian journalists, and questioned whether NATO members such as the Baltics should be defended in accordance with the treaty’s obligations.

            Presumably to help Trump, two of Russia’s intelligence services hacked the email files of the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, with mildly embarrassing releases so far and, surely, more serious disclosures to come. Meanwhile, Trump receives favored coverage and commentary by the Kremlin’s Russia Today television broadcasts in the U.S.

            The question is whether Putin, who is reputed to be a canny manipulator, really thinks that Russia would be well served by having a crackpot in the White House. Maybe so, if he’s as short-sighted as his KGB training taught him to be.

The Common Ground Between the United States and Russia

By David K. Shipler

            Washington may regard Vladimir Putin as the world’s Number One Nuisance, but he came through in the Iran agreement, just as he did in 2013 by negotiating the removal of chemical weapons from Syria (minus chlorine, unfortunately, which has industrial uses but has been weaponized). Before its thinly disguised invasion of Ukraine, Russia also shared intelligence on terrorism and other security matters. Unpublicized contacts among Russian and American military and civilian intelligence officials were reportedly frequent and productive; perhaps they still are.

So, a new overlay of common ground should be drawn onto the map of conflict between Washington and Moscow. President Obama, answering a well-placed question by Thomas Friedman Tuesday after the deal restricting Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons, said this:

            “Russia was a help on this. I’ll be honest with you. I was not sure given the strong differences we are having with Russia right now around Ukraine, whether this would sustain itself. Putin and the Russian government compartmentalized on this in a way that surprised me, and we would have not achieved this agreement had it not been for Russia’s willingness to stick with us and the other P5-Plus members in insisting on a strong deal.”

            Quite an endorsement. But he shouldn’t have been surprised. Preventing Iran from going nuclear is as much in the Russian interest as it is in ours. Look at a map. Iran is in Russia’s back yard. If there is any constant in Russian history (and there are several), it’s the importance of the back yard. Ukraine is also in Russia’s back yard. You mess with the back yard, you mess with house and home. And while Putin can certainly be faulted for his aggression against Ukraine, for exaggerating Western designs on Russia’s security, and for fostering jingoism among the Russian public, his country and the United States share important overlapping interests.

            Let’s make a short list: