It won’t be easy. Putin has shown himself to be adept at exploiting the politics of aggression abroad in order to boost his standing at home. It is a fact that the Russian economy has deteriorated dramatically since he illegally prolonged his hold on power; in the majority of Western democracies, such a disastrous performance would have resulted in a drubbing at the polls. Putin’s approval ratings slipped alarmingly between 2008 and 2014, when Russia officially went into recession, only for the Kremlin to launch its campaign to annex Crimea, followed by military intervention in eastern Ukraine. Almost immediately, Putin’s poll numbers soared to more than 80 per cent. But the cost of shoring up his own domestic standing has been to draw Russia into perilous foreign adventures that put the whole country at risk. The Kremlin-controlled media endlessly repeat the claim that Russia is beset by enemy forces, surrounded by a supposedly hostile West bent on destroying the Motherland. In such circumstances, it is little wonder that some people believe Putin is their only hope, a leader dedicated to defending Russia’s international clout whom they must trust implicitly.
Just like the Soviet leaders of the 1970s, Putin has increased military spending at the expense of the civilian economy, prioritising nuclear weapons that can destroy cities in Western Europe and North America over investment in health, education and social provision for his own citizens. He has used the narrative of conflict with the West to give lucrative contracts to his cronies who control the state arms industry. He announced that he has developed new generations of weaponry and presented them to the world in menacing terms. In March 2018, he gave a video presentation of what he said were new, ‘invincible’ nuclear weapons, developed in secret by Russia’s scientists. ‘No anti-missile system, either now or in the future, has a hope of stopping them,’ Putin told his audience. Images of the new missiles were projected on to a giant screen with animations of the destruction they were capable of inflicting. In one sequence, a missile was shown hovering over a map of Florida, a not-too-subtle threat that Washington was quick to condemn. ‘It was certainly unfortunate,’ said a State Department spokesperson, ‘to have watched a video presentation that depicted a nuclear attack on the United States. We do not regard this as the behaviour of a responsible international player.’ It was, though, exactly the response the Kremlin was hoping for: Washington’s discomfort was widely reported and apparently enjoyed by some Russian voters who were going to the polls just two weeks later. In an election where real opposition candidates were barred from standing, Vladimir Putin was re-elected to a fourth term in office with 77 per cent of the votes (of which only about half were the result of ballot rigging).
Russian military intervention in Syria had a similar effect. The fact is that Russian society a priori has very little interest in Syria and the Middle East, which means that Putin has a free hand to do whatever he wants there. The only problem would be if Russian soldiers started getting killed, so Putin has been clever. He has maintained the fiction that there will never be Russian boots on the ground in Syria, while pursuing his goals through the deployment of hundreds of ‘private’ troops, mainly belonging to the PMC Wagner Group controlled by his associate, Yevgeny Prigozhin.
The fiction of Russian ‘non-involvement’ was exposed in February 2018, when between 300 and 500 Wagner mercenaries with tanks and field artillery attacked a stronghold of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a largely Kurdish militia with close ties to the US-led anti-ISIS coalition, close to the town of Khasham. American advisers working with the Kurds called for US air support and a full-scale battle ensued. The attacking troops were pummelled by American artillery, fighter planes and helicopter gunships, with the Pentagon estimating their casualties at more than 100 men. It was the first direct confrontation between American and Russian forces since the end of the Cold War, with the potential for catastrophic escalation.
As international tensions rose, Putin continued to deny any knowledge of the operation or, indeed, of any Russian fighters on Syrian soil; but US intelligence reports told a different story. According to the Washington Post, covert Russian communications, intercepted by the intelligence services, revealed that Prigozhin had been authorised to carry out the attack by senior officials in the Kremlin. Prigozhin reportedly boasted to Bashar al-Assad’s Minister of Presidential Affairs that he had ‘secured permission for a … fast and powerful operation’ to be launched in early February. It would, he said, be ‘a nice surprise’ for Assad; and the Syrians, in return, promised Prigozhin that he would be properly rewarded for his services.
Having initially denied everything, the Russian Foreign Ministry was obliged to amend its story, eventually acknowledging ‘several dozen’ Russian casualties, killed or wounded in the attack. The wounded had been ‘provided with assistance to return to Russia, where they are now undergoing medical treatment at a number of hospitals’. The Kremlin’s deniability was strained to breaking point. ‘Russian servicemen did not take part in any capacity whatsoever [in the operation],’ maintained the spokesperson, ‘and no Russian military equipment was used.’ The troops were merely ‘Russian citizens who went to Syria of their own free will for various reasons … and the Ministry does not have the authority to comment on the validity or legality of their individual decisions.’
As with all the other conflicts he provokes around the world, Putin views Syria as a means to blackmail the West. The tension surrounding the confrontation and the threat it poses to global stability put the Americans on the defensive; they find themselves obliged to sit down at the negotiating table with Putin, on terms that are advantageous to him. What does Putin want from these negotiations? Ideally, he wants a return to the old days, when the world was divided into recognised spheres of influence, allowing Moscow and Washington to maintain autonomy of action in their sector of the globe, with a guarantee of non-interference in the other’s affairs. Most importantly, such an outcome would ensure the impunity of Putin and his inner circle to travel and spend their money anywhere in the world without constraints.
When Western countries dutifully came to the table after Russian interventions in Georgia, Syria and the Donbas, they assumed that Putin shared their desire to find solutions, to end wars that were – and still are – causing human misery and taking human lives. But the Kremlin’s overriding motive in talks with the US and the EU was to secure a better strategic position for itself, which frequently meant simply freezing the conflict. The confrontation in the Donbas, for instance, was carefully prolonged by Moscow as a means of undermining Ukraine’s independence. Putin pretended to the West that he wanted a diplomatic accord to satisfy all parties and persuaded the EU to include him in negotiations as a peacemaker, whereas, in reality, he was an instigator and a warmonger. The evidence of what all this was leading to is now plain for the world to see – and we are far from reaching the end of it.
The same is true in Syria. Putin has no interest in ending the fighting, because it is to his advantage to deepen the conflict and thereby secure for himself a role of global influence. By keeping Bashar al-Assad in power and tying down US troops on the ground, Putin has created the illusion that he holds the key to peace in the Middle East. But peace is not on his agenda. What he really wants is to boost his domestic approval ratings by publicly humiliating Washington and its allies in scenes that can be shown nightly on Russian television. At a time when the Russian people are suffering poverty, recession and isolation from the rest of the world, a foreign war in which Moscow is seen to be sticking it to the Western ‘enemy’ is a dog whistle call to the Great Russian sense of pride, which precludes criticism of the man who claims to be fighting for the honour of the Motherland.