Putin told you so

How and why the West misread the Russian strongman’s intentions.

Text Konstantin Eggert, DW editor

Vladimir Putin considers himself to be an honest man. He likes to tell his opponents: “I warned you, but you did not pay attention to my words.” Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is just the latest in a series of his actions that took the West by surprise. By the time this piece is published, he might well make good on his threat to strike NATO convoys delivering military aid to Ukraine or even use tactical nuclear weapons (although I do not believe he will). This was not destined to be so, if over the years Western political and business leaders were not so naive, cynical or weak (and sometimes all three) in their dealings with the Kremlin.

Much was said already about corrupting Western business and political elites with “special deals”, relentless propaganda and inventive use of social media to influence Western public opinion. But maybe the biggest miscalculation of most Europeans and Americans was to treat Vladimir Putin and his circle as a kind of new version of the Soviet Politburo — authoritarian, for sure, but rational, cautious because of Russia’s nuclear arsenal, more or less representative of their country and defending its national interests.

This approach totally missed two important differences with the Soviet era, not even mentioning the brief Yeltsin period of flawed democracy. Putin’s system has at its core the secret police, the ex-KGB in its post-Soviet edition. It is not — as it happened before — an accessory to the Communist party or the elected president, but the country’s topmost and ultimate authority itself. This is the first such regime in history. It considers trust — between citizens, communities or states — ephemeral and superficial. It looks at everything through the prism of a zero sum game: politics is either about total gain or total loss.

No compromise is possible. All this means that politics is turned by this regime into a never ending series of special operations where no word is safe to keep and no agreement is permanent.

I warned you, but you did not pay attention to my words.

Another mistake was to disregard the simple but frequently overlooked fact. As opposed to Russia’s rulers of the past: Putin and his inner circle not only rule Russia — they also own it! The nation’s oil and gas, diamonds and arms factories, coal and platinum, steel and copper are either directly controlled by the Kremlin or nominally belong to the so called oligarchs who hold these assets at Putin’s discretion. Russia’s most prominent political exile billionaire Mikhail Khodokorvsky learned this the hard way. Between 2003 and 2013 he spent 10 years in jail and a penal colony for daring to disagree with the president. Russia’s rich got the message and remained fully obedient and totally loyal ever since.

This arrangement means that Putin and his cronies are not concerned with Russia’s real national interests, at least not as priority, but first and foremost with the survival of the regime and its vast economic and financial assets. Everything else is subordinated to this goal.

The Russian regime measures friend or foe alike on a simple “strength-weakness” scale. This results in either “respect” or “contempt” for the other party. Any offer of a compromise — so natural for a Western mind — means only one thing for the Kremlin: a sign that it can increase its demands, whatever they are. One may say this is not unlike the mafia attitude. This is a valid observation. Secret policemen and organized crime have a lot in common in their psychological outlook — suspiciousness and secretiveness are their main traits. In their world, for example, 80-million strong Germany is weaker than the Czech Republic. Because the government in Prague was bold enough to expel the majority of Russian diplomats in the wake of a suspected sabotage of a major arms depot by Russian agents. It also banned the Russian state owned corporation Rosatom from taking part in a tender to build a nuclear power plant in the country. At the same time German authorities took ages to react to the assassination in central Berlin of a Georgian citizen that Moscow deemed a “terrorist” with no economic consequences whatsoever.

It took Putin’s full scale assault on Ukraine in February 2022 for Berlin to finally say goodbye to the “Nord Stream-2” pipeline — which the Central Europeans, the Baltic States and the US long deemed a threat to Europe’s energy independence and an economic weapon against Ukraine. In the same vein, Putin took careful notice of Barack Obama drawing a “red line” at the use of chemical weapons by Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria — only to forget about it when these weapons were indeed deployed against civilians. “Weak” was the Kremlin’s verdict. In September 2015, Russian fighter jets, special forces and the “Wagner Group” mercenaries went into Syria to bail Assad out of his troubles.

Another mistake was to disregard the simple but frequently overlooked fact. Putin and his inner circle not only rule Russia — they also own it!

President Joseph Biden made the same mistake in 2021 when he treated Putin as if he were Leonid Brezhnev or Mikhail Gorbachev — undemocratic and unelected, but still a responsible and wholly rational leader of the world’s number two nuclear superpower. In response to Moscow provocatively massing its troops along Ukraine’s border in a threatening fashion, Biden invited Putin to a summit in Geneva last June. “Weak” was the conclusion again. Ukraine is now paying the price for Washington’s miscalculation.

Putin always saw and will continue to see unpredictability as a tool to be used against adversaries. With Russia’s GDP being comparable to that of a mid-sized European Union country like Spain, low industrial productivity, omnipresent corruption, demographic decline and mediocre armed forces, unpredictability (combined with pervasive lies made into an art form) is pretty much the only real weapon the Kremlin has in its possession. But in true mafia fashion, Putin likes to send cryptic warnings of his impending action — only to feign surprise later.

US president George W. Bush evidently misunderstood Moscow’s threat of a so-called “asymmetrical response” to the US recognition of Kosovo’s independence in February 2008. Russia’s invasion of Georgia and de facto occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia breakaway regions followed in August 2008.

When in summer 2021 the Russian strongman published a 5000-word article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” most foreign observers were baffled. “A president of a country acutely suffering from a major epidemic can not have the time to concentrate on obscure historical details of 17th century Russian-Polish rivalry or suchlike!” was the nearly universal response of the majority of Russia watchers. Today it is clear — this long treatise laid an ideological foundation for the February 24 invasion. It rationalized Putin’s desire to effectively eliminate Ukrainian statehood and finish what he started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and invasion of Donbass.

Even before Russia’s invasion of Georgia, Central European and Baltic states continuously voiced alarm over the Russian regime’s real nature and objectives. They were mostly ignored, especially by western Europeans. This convinced the Russian leadership that the West was weak and had entered a phase of irreversible decline. February 24, 2022 finally vindicated those warnings. It jolted the EU into real and tough action. This was probably the first time that the West played Putin’s own unpredictability trick on him. The Kremlin was evidently unprepared for this unpleasant surprise. Sanctioning all of Russia’s elite — including the rare step of blacklisting even foreign minister Sergei Lavrov — suggests that the real nature of Russia’s ruling kleptocracy finally became clear, its lies finally called. For Putin with his perceptions of chronic Western, especially European, weakness this is a very rude awakening.

Putin’s only hope (if he survives these challenges) is that the US, the EU and their allies will not have enough patience to see through their tough policies, that they will eventually be distracted by another crisis. “Ukraine fatigue” will kick in, “engagement” with Russia will reappear on the agenda, powerful business lobbies will spring into action, and things will eventually become better for the Kremlin. It is the West’s next challenge to ruin these calculations.

Konstantin Eggert

MBE is a columnist for Deutsche Welle and host of DW’s Russian language interview program Trending.