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.
