Before the crack of dawn on February 24, Russian bombs and missiles began to fall on Ukrainian cities and military installations. The worst fears of those in the West who warned of an impending war between Ukraine and Russia appeared to be coming true. And for the first time since World War II, interstate warfare had returned to the European continent. 

Standing behind the proverbial trigger was Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. For months, the United States warned that Russia was massing hundreds of thousands of soldiers along Ukraine’s borders for an attack aimed at cutting short its path to greater integration within Europe and away from Moscow. For all the Kremlin’s fierce denials and mockery of U.S accusations, Putin acted like a man with his mind made up about going through with a ruinous war. In his first speech after the war began, President Joe Biden was clear in describing it as a willful choice to go on the attack.

“This is a premeditated attack,” Biden said at a press conference last Thursday. “Putin is the aggressor.  Putin chose this war.  And now he and his country will bear the consequences.”

After a week of fighting, Russia’s soldiers have failed to take and hold a major Ukrainian city and Ukrainian officials, as well as international media outlets, have gleefully highlighted their struggles on the battlefield. At the same time, the United States, together with the European Union, Canada and Japan have announced rounds of broad sanctions aimed at Russia’s banks, its oligarchs, and Putin himself.

By Monday, the Moscow Stock Exchange saw one of the worst collapses in history as sanctions tore into equities and the Russian ruble sharply depreciated in value. Segments of the Russian public have also taken to the streets to decry the war, prompting the Kremlin to respond with restrictions on domestic media and threats to charge protestors with treason. 

These risks, particularly the economic consequences of a war on Ukraine, were not entirely unexpected in the Kremlin. But why, knowing the damage it would invite upon itself, would Putin take this step? 

Ian Kelly, a retired U.S. ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and Georgia, could not understand the strategic logic behind Putin’s decision. In a phone interview with New Europe, Kelly remarked that the choice appeared self-defeating because it only invited deeper isolation of Russia on top of economic losses it will struggle to recoup. 

“What does he [Putin] get out of this but the opprobrium of the international community?” asked Kelly. “He is in a totally irrational situation – this is a disaster for Russia.” 

Indeed, Putin’s decision to go to war sent a shockwave across the Russia-watcher community, particularly those in Russia itself. Russian political and military analysts viewed the massing of military forces along the Ukrainian frontier as part of a coercion strategy aimed more at forcing concessions from the West and Kyiv, not a prelude to war. Independent news outlets similarly were doubtful that Russia would willingly engage in a war with Ukraine up to the final weeks before the fighting actually started.

Yulia Latynina, a columnist with Russia’s Novaya Gazeta newspaper, wrote a week before the war began on February 18 that she believed Putin’s build-up along the Ukrainian border was a bluff. However, after the seemingly choreographed evacuation of the Donbas separatist regions that day, she said her view changed for the worse.

“I was sure that Putin was bluffing. Now my confidence has dropped almost to zero, because the main, key element has appeared in the script – a total lie,” she wrote on her Twitter account after the evacuations began amidst accusations by the Kremlin and their separatist proxies that Ukraine was prepared for a military offensive in the Donbass. 

It may take a while before a concrete account of how Putin came to his choice to invade Ukraine emerges, but the decision itself appears to have been made well in advance. Like the pre-planned evacuation order by the Donbass separatists, Putin’s televised meeting of Russia’s Security Council on February 21 where his ministers and advisers was itself prerecorded and some comments by officials in attendance were deliberately cut out, according to the independent Russian news outlet Meduza. 

At that meeting, each of Putin’s advisers from Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu strongly endorsed the move to invade. Others like SVR chief Sergei Naryshkin and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin were supportive, but they did not visually nearly as voracious in their endorsements, seemingly to Putin’s annoyance. But behind the spectacle, the meeting laid bare the changes in how the Kremlin itself executes decisions after two decades of Putin’s rule.

Nikolai Petrov, a senior research fellow on the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House in London and an expert on the Kremlin’s decision-making process, called the meeting itself “unusual”. Petrov noted that it did not necessarily show signs of dissent within the upper echelons of the Kremlin about the choice, but instead they displayed concerns about how to manage the consequences of decisions they likely had little role in influencing. 

“I think that it is not exactly the case that they disagree with Putin, but a different story,” Petrov told New Europe, referring to the less equivocal members of the Security Council. “It shows these guys are directly responsible for dealing with the decisions being made and the consequences.”

“That is why they did not look that certain or decisive as those who do not bear any responsibility, regardless of the decision and who would like to just demonstrate their loyalty to Putin,” he added.

It is unlikely any Russian minister would like to be seen as publicly disagreeing with Putin on national television yet the meeting itself represents a caricature of how the Kremlin and Putin himself have changed in the last decade. 

After over twenty years in power, Putin has cycled through a variety of factions, faces and forces that starred in different seasons of his rule. But after the shock of the 2011 protests at Bolotnaya Square against his return to power, Putin has grown to rely on a narrower circle of advisers, often younger with less clout, as well as his security services who both share his conspiratorial anxieties about the West and an inclination to tell him what he wants to hear. At the same time, Putin has grown even physically more isolated since the COVID-19 pandemic began making visitors wait two weeks in advance before a meeting, costing more experienced or capable hands time with the boss and time to execute his will. 

According to a Telegram post by Tatiana Stanovaya, CEO of Moscow-based analysis firm R.Politik, the Russian elite was caught off guard by Putin’s decision to wage war. In a second post by R.Politik after the war began, it reported that the choice to invade Ukraine was made within a narrow circle by Putin’s military advisers, who promised him a “jewel-like” operation that promised a rapid collapse of the government in Kyiv and its military. Instead of the swift victory, Russia has been forced to tighten its censorship regime at home to prioritise official narratives about the war to minimize its bloody reality. 

Petrov explained that the changes within the Kremlin and with Putin personally expose the institutional weakness of his current system. Without a “quasi-system of checks and balances” that existed in the past, he said that Putin has become simultaneously more limited but also freer to make his own decisions. 

“No more does Putin need to find a balance between interests of major groups,” Petrov explained. “Now he can make his own decisions without taking them into account.” 

As this relates to Ukraine, it is uncertain how or if Putin can alter the path he has taken. 

The West has firmly put its support behind Ukraine with President Biden refusing to even speak to Putin and Ukraine itself continues to hold out against Russian forces. At home, Putin does not yet appear immediately threatened by the discontent of his citizens or the grumbling of oligarchs. His neutering of a meaningful political opposition and the continued need for his patronage within the business elite as sanctions bite ensure that Putin can weather this crisis for at least some time. 

More importantly, Putin himself has made clear that he perceives the fight for Ukraine in messianic terms and frequently denigrates Ukrainian statehood. He also has a fervent desire to right what he perceives as the wrongs that were inflicted on Russia, including the idea that the US humiliated Moscow after the Cold War. 

“The problem is that personal responsibility is diminished and you feel that you are acting on behalf of History, which is right by definition,” Stanovaya wrote on Telegram on February 22. “With such a vision, you can go very far without much remorse.”

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By: Nicholas Waller
Title: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the purest manifestation of everyone’s worst fears about Putin
Sourced From: www.neweurope.eu/article/russias-invasion-of-ukraine-is-the-purest-manifestation-of-everyones-worst-fears-about-putin/
Published Date: Fri, 04 Mar 2022 21:00:05 +0000

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