As the gathering broke up, Kraft held out his hand for the ring, but Putin put it in his pocket and abruptly left. Putin evidently assumed it was a gift, but Kraft was astonished by Putin’s actions. Kraft appealed to the chairman of Citigroup, who helped arrange the meeting, and even to the White House. He was told it would be best to say it was intended as a gift. Kraft objected strenuously that it was not a gift. He was told repeatedly that it would be best if he gave the ring as a present. Kraft eventually acquiesced and four days later issued a public statement that the ring was a “symbol of the respect and admiration that I have for the Russian people and the leadership of President Putin.”[6] Putin’s actions gnawed at Kraft for years. “Kraft had another ring made, and the original went into the Kremlin library, where gifts to the head of state are collected.”[7]
Few believe there was any misunderstanding. Putin stole the ring. His open, unapologetic theft of a Super Bowl ring is a microcosm of his brash, thuggish inclination to grab what he wants without fear. Whether a ring or a realm, Putin takes what he wants and gets away with it.
Putin’s success in his raw expansionist aggression has emboldened him to keep moving forward. Putin invaded Georgia and “took Crimea with barely a shot fired. He flooded Eastern Ukraine with agents and weaponry.”[8] When he annexed Crimea, protests in Russia against him stopped, and his personal approval ratings shot up from 60 percent to 80 percent. Putin seems to have a sense of invincibility and destiny. In September 2014, Putin boasted, “If I wanted, in two days I could have Russian troops not only in Kiev, but also in Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Warsaw and Bucharest.”[9]
Putin knows that military power is key. In a Russian documentary in 2015, Putin said, “A well-known person once said, ‘You can get much farther with a kind word and a Smith & Wesson than you can with just a kind word.’”[10] In keeping with that philosophy, he’s arming Russia to the teeth.
While Western European nations are busy slashing military budgets, Russia is spending more than ever. Russian military spending increased 25.6 percent from 2014 to 2015, an increase of $20 billion in just one year. Since he took power in 2000, Putin has boosted military spending twentyfold.[11] Uniformed manpower has declined in every Western European nation since 2011, while Russian personnel increased 25 percent to more than 850,000. Putin’s goal is one million combat-ready troops by 2020.[12]
Douglas Schoen, an influential Democratic campaign consultant, writes, “Over the next decade, Putin plans to acquire and develop four hundred new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs); more than two thousand next-generation tanks; six hundred modernized combat aircraft; eight nuclear ballistic submarines; fifty warships;… and about 17,000 new military vehicles.”[13] Russia already has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal but “added thirty-eight nuclear missiles in 2014 and another forty in 2015.”[14] Russia’s nuclear storehouse is staggering.
Putin wants military parity, if not superiority, to the United States, and the gap is closing. If Putin serves three full terms as president, as he’s allowed by law, he can rule until 2024. He has many years left to achieve his goals. And who knows if he will relinquish power in 2024? If he does step down, he may simply hand the reins over to a puppet to serve on his behalf, as he did in 2008 with Dmitry Medvedev. Putin’s grasp on Russia is strong, his reach immense, and his ambition boundless.
When President George W. Bush met with Putin for the first time (in 2001), he said he “looked the man in the eye” and “was able to get a sense of his soul.”[15] Bush has been chided, even mocked, for this remark, but he had the right idea. There’s something in Putin’s soul, as with every person, that drives him. What powers Putin?
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born on October 7, 1952, in Leningrad. The city was still scarred by the German siege in World War II and languishing in deprivation and fear. Putin’s father sustained injuries in the war that left him limping in pain the rest of his life. Putin grew up in cramped communal quarters, mesmerized by the power of the Soviet state. He fulfilled his dream in 1975, joining the KGB. Since that time, Putin has been a Soviet man.
The Soviet empire dissolved on December 25, 1991. Vladimir Putin has never gotten over it. The New Yorker article “Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War” captures the essence of Putin’s humiliation over the fall of the Soviet Union and his drive to bring back the glory days:
Putin’s resentment of the West, and his corresponding ambition to establish an anti-Western conservatism, is rooted in his experience of decline and fall—not of Communist ideology, which was never a central concern of his generation, but, rather, of Russian power and pride….
Posted [as a KGB agent] in one of the grayest of the Soviet satellites [East Germany], Putin entirely missed the sense of awakening and opportunity that accompanied perestroika, and experienced only the state’s growing fecklessness. At the very moment the Berlin Wall was breached, in November, 1989, he was in the basement of a Soviet diplomatic compound in Dresden feeding top-secret documents into a furnace. As crowds of Germans threatened to break into the building, officers called Moscow for assistance, but, in Putin’s words, “Moscow was silent.” Putin returned to Russia, where the sense of post-imperial decline persisted. The West no longer feared Soviet power; Eastern and Central Europe were beyond Moscow’s control; and the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union were all going their own way. An empire shaped by Catherine the Great and Joseph Stalin was dissolving.[16]
Fareed Zakaria adds,
To understand Putin, you have to understand Russia. The last hundred years for that country have seen the fall of the monarchy, the collapse of democracy, the great depression, World War II with its tens of millions of Russians dead, Stalin’s totalitarian brutalities, the collapse of communism, the breakup of the Soviet Union, and Boris Yeltsin’s years of chaos and corruption.[17]
Many events have played a formative role in Putin’s view of the world, but the collapse of the Soviet Union seems to have scarred and shaped him more than anything else. In 2005, in his annual state of the nation address to parliament, referring to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he said, “First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”[18]
Putin is bent on rebuilding the Soviet Union and restoring the glory of imperial Russia. He wants Russia to regain lost territory and dominate the nations that brought about the Soviet dissolution. Part of restoring this greatness is securing allies. In his efforts to restore the greatness of mother Russia, Putin is tirelessly scouring the globe in search of willing allies. He’s obsessed with elevating Russia’s international influence.
Putin has spearheaded the formation of a Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). The main goal is to merge the former Soviet republics into a unified economic and political confederation. Many believe this is Putin’s attempt to restore the Soviet Union. Thus far, the union includes just five states: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Russia. Russia is trying to create an alternative and counterbalance to the European Union. Commentator Areg Galstyan writes, “In other words, Moscow is trying to institutionalize its influence in the Eurasian space, collecting fragments of the collapsed Soviet empire.”[19] Once again, Putin’s desire to restore the empire is his driving motivation.
6
Steven Lee Myers,
7
Ibid. See also Masha Gessen,
9
Douglas E. Schoen with Evan Roth Smith,
10
Evan Osnos, David Remnick, and Joshua Yaffa, “Trump, Putin, and the New Cold War,”
18
Associated Press, “Putin: Soviet Collapse a ‘Genuine Tragedy,’” NBC News, April 25, 2005, http://www.nbcnews.com/id/7632057/ns/world_news/t/putin-soviet-collapse-genuine-tragedy/#.WRyOF2jys2w.
19
Areg Galstyan, “Is the Eurasian Economic Union Slowly Coming Apart?”