The Ukrainian government, says Putin, is no more than ‘a tool in foreign hands’, being used to wage war on Russia. In the face of such injustice, Russia will not stand idly by.
The machinations of the anti-Russia project and its Western authors are no secret to us. We will never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia. And to those who would undertake such an attempt, I would like to say that this will result in the destruction of their own country.
It is worth pausing to consider what psychological impulses lie behind Putin’s decision to write his July 2021 article, which appeared like a bolt from the blue. If you read it carefully, its language is very much in the tradition of the pseudoscience that Stalin and Brezhnev used to come up with. On closer analysis, though, we can see it as a natural result of the evolution of Putin’s views on Ukraine and a conscious political provocation that betrays his very concrete, real-world intentions.
At first, Putin had no strong opinions about Ukraine – like most Soviet and Russian people, he simply didn’t think about it because it didn’t impinge directly on the daily life of their country. Ukrainian independence was no great tragedy; he probably regretted the loss of Crimea, but it wasn’t something worth fighting for. As the Putin regime evolved, however, he began to realise that ‘post-imperial nostalgia’ could be a useful tool to deploy at times of economic decline. He based his imperial idea on a couple of ideological tropes: the concept of a Slavic brotherhood of the three nations – Russia, Ukraine and Belarus – which Putin borrowed from Solzhenitsyn; and the old Slavophile movement, which venerated the Russian empire and believed that owning Ukraine was vital to keeping the empire going. These were the deep-seated historical stereotypes that got him into thinking that Ukraine is an inseparable part of Russia – and now, as a result of Putin’s rhetoric, there’s a good part of Russian society that believes it, too. Putin’s thesis represents a deep historical prejudice that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
Putin’s discovery of these post-imperial possibilities might have remained a matter between him and his conscience if history hadn’t intervened. When the Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych, Putin saw it as an attack on Russia’s sovereignty, a personal slight that kick-started the transformation of his personal beliefs into a national policy. And the essence of this policy is that Russia must control Ukraine at all costs. So, annexing Crimea clearly wasn’t the end of things: it was just an intermediate step on the path to the full-scale invasion of 2022.
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.
There is, however, a difference: in former times, Russia held the whip hand, while China was the weaker party, economically, politically and militarily. Moscow could therefore manipulate the relationship to its own advantage. But that has changed. China has outstripped Russia in all respects, making Putin’s gambit decidedly risky. His hope is that Russia could find a strategic and civilisational solution to its struggle with the West by offering to become China’s junior partner. It has been done before – Putin’s role model is the great Russian prince, Alexander Nevsky, who agreed to kowtow humiliatingly to the rulers of the Horde in return for their support against the West. But Putin is in a weak position if he thinks he can use economic talks with the Chinese as a counterbalance to deteriorating relations with the USA and Western Europe. My own experience of working with Chinese companies taught me that the Chinese are tough negotiators. We supplied them with several million tons of oil per year, helping to construct rail border crossings to transport it, and we reached agreement on a pipeline to China from Angarsk in Siberia. In all our negotiations, the Chinese were quick to exploit every advantage they held over us. The only way we could get a fair price for our oil was by demonstrating to them that we had the capacity to sell it on the European market where rates were higher, so the Chinese could not demand a cut-price deal from us. Putin does not have that luxury. If he wants to sell to China to spite the West, Beijing is not going to be generous in the terms it offers. The Chinese offers so far have been remarkably bad. According to the leading Russian oil and gas analyst, Mikhail Krutikhin, Gazprom’s sales in 2021 went for an average of $170 per thousand cubic metres of gas, compared with the European gas price of $270 per thousand cubic metres. Rosneft’s sales of oil were similarly uneconomic. Putin has failed to learn the lesson that China and Chinese companies will never fail to take advantage of the geopolitical follies of a would-be trading partner. Not only has Putin agreed to unprofitable commercial contracts, he has also made concessions in the historic border disputes on Russia’s eastern frontier, ceding territory to China on the Amur and Ussuri rivers.