The Russia Conundrum

Putin has little or no hesitation about the use of military force. Spurred on by the military General Staff, he has long accepted that everything that is happening is now the first phase of the Third World War. When he massed Russian military forces on Ukraine’s borders in the spring of 2021, it may have begun as a bluff; he may have intended to use the show of intimidation as a means to extract concessions from NATO and the West. But if he had genuinely wanted to negotiate with the Americans, it was unlikely that his public proposals would have been so blatantly unacceptable. Putin was demanding a block on NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia, and a ban on NATO forces in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, both of which the West had always made clear it was not prepared to accept.

The reality of the situation was very different. The fact is that Putin and part of his entourage genuinely believe that all the problems inside Russia and in the countries surrounding it are the result of hostile American special operations. Putin genuinely believes – and genuinely fears – that if the Americans have missiles in Russia’s neighbouring states against which even the bunker in which he now hides will provide no protection, it means they intend to use them. He has a deep-seated conviction that everyone wants to tear Russia apart and gobble up its natural resources.

Such a distorted view of the world convinced Putin that the only solution is the creation of a belt of buffer states around Russia. And for this to work, the Americans must be made to recognise Moscow’s right to dominate this ‘zone of influence’ and to hold sway over the sovereignty of countries located in it. The problem for Putin and his associates was that they did not know how to get Washington to sit down at the negotiating table and agree to Russia’s demands. Economic levers, the type of ‘energy blackmail’ that can be used against Western Europe, have very little impact on the United States. Putin tried to cause trouble in the US elections as a mechanism to influence its politicians there, by creating havoc and chaos among the electorate, playing on their fears for their personal security or political corruption. Those methods might work in some countries of Western Europe, but in the United States threats and provocations result not in fear, but in reciprocal antagonism.

For all those reasons, Putin concluded that apart from the never-ending threat of the nuclear arms race, his most effective bargaining mechanism was the instigation of international conflicts. The Kremlin fomented political and humanitarian crises in Syria, in Libya and in Venezuela, followed by the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. There were, though, significant downsides. The Russian public may have approved of the bloodless annexation of Crimea by the Kremlin’s ‘polite little men’, but having their sons called up to serve in a foreign conflict against a fellow Slav nation is considerably less attractive. And then, there are the practical questions that arise from it. The Kremlin can occupy Ukraine, but what does it do next? How does it feed the population? And, God forbid, what happens when local partisans start to fight back? When sabotage begins? Ukraine is not Chechnya: there are 30 million people in mixed Russian-Ukrainian families currently living in Russia and neither they nor anyone else has any appetite for war.

What do ordinary Russians think? Regardless of the truth or otherwise of such claims, the Russian people have been endlessly told that NATO is a danger; but for the Russian in the street, it hardly matters whether the flight time of a US missile is 20 minutes, as it is now, or 5 minutes, as perhaps it might be if it were launched from Ukraine or Eastern Europe – in either case, the end result is the same because, unlike Vladimir Putin, they don’t have a bunker to run to.

Putin is weaker than he makes out, and his solution for domestic weakness is almost always aggression abroad. He knew the adverse consequences that military intervention in Ukraine would have on East–West relations, and while he says he is prepared to weather that storm, he has begun work on an insurance policy. Throughout its history, when Russia has encountered difficulties in its relationship with the West, it has threatened to make common cause with China. Stalin used the triumph of Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949 to put pressure on the newly founded NATO alliance. Brezhnev, Chernenko and Andropov all flirted with Beijing when relations worsened with Washington. And Putin is making the same move today.