After six months of bloody and terrible war, what
exactly does Putin want from Ukraine?
Philip
Short
Russia is trying to demonstrate that Nato is powerless
to stop it. Whether it succeeds depends on the west’s political will as energy
prices soar
Mon 22 Aug
2022 11.42 BST
Nearly six
months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there is still widespread
disagreement in the west on Vladimir Putin’s motives.
This is of
more than academic interest. If we do not agree why Putin decided to invade
Ukraine and what he wants to achieve, we cannot define what would constitute
victory or defeat for either of the warring sides and the contours of a
possible endgame.
At some
point, like all wars, the present conflict will end. Geography condemns Ukraine
and Russia to live beside each other and that is not going to change. They will
eventually have to find a modus vivendi. That also applies to Europe and
Russia, although it may take decades before the damage is repaired.
Why, then,
did Putin stake so much on a high-risk enterprise that will at best bring him a
tenuous grip on a ruined land?
At first it
was said that he was unhinged – “a lunatic”, in the words of the defence
secretary, Ben Wallace. Putin was pictured lecturing his defence chiefs,
cowering at the other end of a 6-metre long table. But not long afterwards, the
same officials were shown sitting at his side. The long table turned out to be
theatrics – Putin’s version of Nixon’s “madman” theory, to make him appear so
irrational that anything was possible, even nuclear war.
Then
western officials argued that Putin was terrified at the prospect of a
democratic Ukraine on Russia’s border, which would threaten the basis of his
power by showing Russians that they too could live differently. On the face of
it, that seemed plausible. Putin hated the “colour revolutions” that, from 2003
onwards, brought regime change to former Soviet bloc states. But Ukraine’s
attractions as a model are limited. It is deeply corrupt, the rule of law is
nonexistent and its billionaire oligarchs wield disproportionate power. Should
that change, the Russian intelligentsia may take note but the majority of
Russians – those fed on state propaganda who make up Putin’s political base –
would not give two hoots.
The
invasion has also been portrayed as a straightforward imperialist land grab. A
passing reference to Peter the Great earlier in the summer was taken as
confirmation that Putin wanted to restore the Russian empire or, failing that,
the USSR. Otherwise sensible people, mainly in eastern Europe but not only,
held that Ukraine was just a first step. “I wouldn’t be surprised,” a former
Swedish minister told me last week, “if, in a few years, Estonia and Latvia are
next in line.”
Given that
Putin once called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical
catastrophe of the 20th century”, that may seem to make sense. But he also
said: “Anyone who does not regret [its] destruction has no heart; anyone who
wants to see it recreated has no brain.” Leaving aside the fact that the
Russian military is already hard-pressed to achieve even modest successes in
Ukraine, an attack on the Baltic states or Poland would bring them into direct
conflict with Nato, which is the last thing that Moscow (or the west) wants.
In fact,
Putin’s invasion is being driven by other considerations.
He has been
fixated on Ukraine since long before he came to power. As early as 1994, when
he was the deputy mayor of St Petersburg, he expressed outrage that Crimea had
been joined to Ukraine. “Russia won Crimea from the Turks!” he told a French
diplomat that year, referring to Russia’s defeat of the Ottoman empire in the
18th century.
But it was
the possibility, raised at a Nato summit in 2008, that Ukraine should become a
fully-fledged member of the western alliance that turned his attitude toxic.
Bill Burns,
now the head of the CIA, who was then the US ambassador to Moscow, wrote at the
time in a secret cable to the White House: “Ukrainian entry into Nato is the
brightest of all red lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In my more
than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from
knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest
liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in Nato as
anything other than a direct challenge to Russia’s interests … Today’s Russia
will respond.”
Successive
American administrations ignored Burns’s warning and Putin did respond. In
2014, he annexed Crimea; then he fomented a separatist revolt in the Donbas;
finally, in February of this year, he launched a brutal, undeclared war to
bring Ukraine to heel.
Nato
enlargement was merely the tip of the iceberg. Many other grievances against
the west had accumulated in the two decades Putin had been in power. By the end
of 2020, when planning began for a renewed push against Kyiv, the wheel had
come full circle. The young Russian leader who had so impressed Tony Blair and
Bill Clinton, who had backed George W Bush to the hilt after 9/11 and who had
insisted that Russia’s place was with Europe and the western world, had slowly
morphed into an implacable adversary, convinced that the US and its allies were
determined to bring Russia to its knees.
Western
politicians dismiss that as paranoid. But the problem is not western
intentions, it is how the Kremlin interprets them.
Putin’s
goal is not only to neutralise the regime in Kyiv but, more importantly, to
show that Nato is powerless to stop him. If in the process he extirpates
Ukrainian culture in the areas Russia occupies, that is not collateral damage:
it is a bonus.
Whether he
succeeds will depend on the situation on the battlefield, which in turn will
depend on the extent of western support over the autumn and winter, when energy
shortages and a soaring cost of living risk putting Ukraine’s western partners
under intense strain.
Moscow does
not have to achieve a great deal for Putin to be able to claim victory. It
would be enough for Russia to control all of the Donbas and the land bridge to
Crimea. He would certainly like more. If Russian troops take Odesa and the
contiguous Black Sea coast, it would reduce Ukraine to vassalage. But even more
modest gains would show the limits of US power. It is possible that Ukraine,
with solid western backing, will be able to prevent that. But it is far from
certain.
The war in
Ukraine is not happening in isolation. While Russia is contesting the US-led
security order in Europe, China is challenging it in Asia. A geopolitical
transition has begun whose results may not be fully apparent for decades. But
the post-cold war order that has governed the world for the past 30 years is
drawing to a close. From its demise, a new balance of power will emerge.
Philip
Short has written authoritative biographies including Putin: His Life and
Times, Mao: A Life and Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare, following a long career
as a foreign correspondent for the BBC in Moscow, Washington and other world
capitals
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