Translated – “It is wise to study the ways of one’s adversary, don’t you think?”
Pronounced – “Mudro izuchat’ puti svoyego protivnika, ne tak li?”
Jack Ryan, “The Hunt for Red October”
The invasion currently underway in Ukraine will come as a surprise only to those who have not been paying attention for these past few years, much less the last couple of weeks when President Biden and other western leaders finally got round to sounding the alarm at the buildup of forces on three sides of a soon-to-be not terribly independent Ukraine.
But if you truly wish to understand what Vladimir Putin is thinking and why he’s launched the full invasion of a sovereign neighbour, you need to understand what sort of creature Vladimir Putin is and that underestimating him is the province of fools (16 Jul 2018).
Whilst he might currently call himself President and in the past Prime Minister (with the powers of the Presidency passed to him!) when what passes for a Constitution in Russia blocked a third consecutive term, Vladimir Putin has always been and always will be a KGB Director at heart.
And whilst you might well think that the KGB was officially dissolved years ago when the Communist Party fell, do keep in mind that the vast majority of the Комитет государственной безопасности (pronounced “Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti” and literally means Committee for State Security) is very much alive and well in the organisations that followed:
- SVR (KGB First Chief Directorate) – Служба внешней разведки Российской Федерации (pronounced “Sluzhba vneshney razvedki Rossiyskoy Federatsii“, “Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation”)
- FSB (KGB Second, Eighth, and Sixteenth Chief Directorates) – Федеральная служба безопасности Российской Федерации (pronounced “Federal’naya sluzhba bezopasnosti Rossiyskoy Federatsii“, “Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation”)
SVR would be roughly equivalent to the US Central Intelligence Agency whereas FSB is a military organisation primarily concerned with counter-intelligence and domestic/border security much like what you’d expect a much nastier marriage between the National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation with no restrictions on spying on domestic communications and citizens would be.
Either one of the old KGB First or Second Chief Directorate was a very dangerous place to work where only the most ruthless and ambitious amongst them would survive and even even fewer would find themselves as the Director. Surviving just one of those organisations would be a life-long career for those employed by the state.
Vladimir Putin not only worked in both the First and Second Chief Directorates, he would eventually be elevated to command each of them at some point and ultimately be Director of the entire KGB itself before eventually navigating the political waters to become essentially a Tsar for life in every way but the name.
Are you starting to get the picture of just how intelligent and dangerous an adversary Vladimir Putin is? And unlike Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin is not a crazed lunatic.
When I say he’s the sort of person that can follow someone into a revolving door and come out ahead of them, I truly mean it. He has a cunning ruthlessness and intelligence that is frightening and I do believe that many Western leaders and several of our Presidents have grossly underestimated those aspects of his character and thought that they could get the better of Putin only to find out to their misery how deluded they were.
Certainly, his professional career prior to politics (not that KGB wasn’t political, if anything it tended to be obsessively so not only internally but also in relations with the Politburo) would reinforce many aspects of his psyche which we might well consider to be a very paranoid point of view.
With that in mind, he does see himself as the leader of a increasingly isolated country that is surrounded on all sides by adversaries (at best) of varying hostilities (much more likely deadly enemies in his mind) who ultimately seek to destroy Russia and relegate it to a perpetual servant status.
There’s at least a few grains of truth to that paranoia.
He didn’t have too many friends amongst the NATO countries aligned to the west of Russia (including several bordering Russia itself!) even before this week’s invasion of the Ukraine and it’s pretty clear that situation got much worse. The only one I can think of that would be truly friendly to Putin is the Prime Minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán. If Orbán’s public statements consistently praising Putin weren’t enough, one only needs to look at his treatment of the refugees fleeing Syria and the ISIS territories and his extreme right-wing policies that’s made Hungary rather a pariah state in the EU and it’s not much of a stretch of the imagination that he’d be friendly to Putin’s demands.
Most of the Islamic republics to the south were former territories of the Soviet Union and were at best ignored by Moscow or invaded (Afghanistan, Georgia, Chechnya). None of them were ever truly “trusted”.
Of the ones that weren’t ignored, only Syria and Iran would be considered to be at least somewhat aligned to Russian policies (the former by money and fighting ISIS and the latter by building pipelines to allow Iran to evade international sanctions on the sale of oil by piping it north to Gazprom and Rosneft who’d then refine it and ship it west to Europe primarily through pipelines going through Ukraine).
And then there’s Putin’s current bestest buddy President Xi of China. And it’s not just because of his fraught relationship with the US and the recent Olympics in Beijing that he’s currently playing as nice as he gets with China portraying that relationship as the only effective partnership against the US and West.
What Vladimir Putin won’t tell you is that he shares the same fear of China that every Russian and Soviet leader has had well before he came to power…all those lovely natural resources in Siberia and the scary thought if the People’s Army of China were to send several million soldiers surging over that border to occupy vast territories that it would be difficult if not impossible for Russia to defend short of threatening to launch nuclear weapons which would be a Pyrrhic victory at best.
And then there’s the great enemy across the seas that has stood in the way of Russian ambitions for the last several decades leading to proxy wars, the Cold War, the Soviet Union being spent under the table and out of existence and a weakened Russia that followed often due to unfavourable petroleum revenues which Russia is exceptionally dependent upon.
The US is the one enemy that has been able to mostly contain Russia and certainly the only one that has a better than fair chance of coming out on top should a real shooting war break out.
And this leads us to the conflict in Crimea which is not something that just sprang into being but has been years in the making.
Consider the annexation of the Crimea in 2014 (and de-facto annexation of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts). The official party line was that it was a mission to protect the ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine from persecution but make no mistake and certainly don’t believe that “referendum” that soon followed, the true prize was capturing the Crimea and particularly securing the massive naval base at Sevastopol. Without that base, the Black Sea Fleet wouldn’t have a home port with anywhere near the facilities and anchorage that were heavily built up upon during the days of the Soviet Union.
One of the things you’ll find in the Soviet (and Russian) playbook is that they will never put the opposition they take seriously into a position where they have to commit overwhelming forces to repel the invasion and takeover.
They have consistently preferred proxies to do the actual fighting when available and using so-called salami tactics involving misdirection and feints often playing multiple opponents against each other so they can achieve their objective well before it spirals out of control into World War III.
This theory was very famously explored in the episode of “Yes, Prime Minister” called “The Grand Design” where the Rt Honourable Jim Hacker finds himself in Number 10 and trying desperately to solve the unemployment and balance of payments problem at a stroke. His scientific advisor takes him through several scenarios to point out the absurdity of thinking he’d ever actually use the nuclear option starting with unrest in East Berlin and various Soviet incursions and treaty violations up to the tanks rolling through Thames Marsh and PM Hacker never drops the bomb. He ends up being convinced to divert 15 million pounds sterling into conventional forces and canceling the contract for Trident because the existing Polaris missiles are enough to make the British think they were defended (the Soviets knew they really weren’t!).
The annexation of Crimea was one of those slices of salami.
And as the people of Georgia found out in 2008 when they were invaded on the orders of Vladimir Putin, the rest of the world was good at talking but other than political platitudes, there was very little appetite to provide military support to Georgia’s legitimate government against the occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Another slice of the salami.
Sadly, this invasion of Ukraine is yet another slice of the salami and one that is unlikely to provoke a military response from NATO or anyone else but the Ukrainians themselves. Indeed, President Biden has ruled out sending US troops into Ukraine but rather has positioned them in Poland and Germany and the Baltic states (NATO allies) as the clear signal that should Putin have designs beyond Ukraine, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty is something that is still taken seriously.
Like his predecessors before him confronted with Putin’s reprehensible behaviour, there really aren’t very many weapons in our diplomatic arsenal other than imposing crippling sanctions upon Putin and his fellow oligarchs which will have the unfortunate effect of hurting the Russian people who already suffer with living under a repressive autocratic regime with propaganda sources which will certainly spin the invasion as a peacekeeping mission to resist Western instigated Ukrainian aggression against ethnic Russians.
The Russian people know full well how Putin thinks and the atrocities he commits but they live in a very different reality where the government controls every aspect of their lives and dissent is often brutally repressed and dissidents find themselves in Lubyanka prison for “interrogation” (more often torture or worse) or even worse places that probably make Kolyma (the worst of the old Soviet gulags) look like a paradise by comparison.
Pussy Riot can tell you all about dissidence in modern Russia and the police attention it can bring.
In a lot of ways, it’s not much different than the old days of the Soviet Union of which Vladimir Putin is a child that was indoctrinated in believing in the tools and designs of the totalitarian state and the paranoia of a long intelligence career which sees enemies in every shadow and every direction and truly trusts no one but himself.
Why would he change when he has worked it to his advantage over these many years?
The KGB playbook works because it will never push the United States to the point of total commitment to WW III. He will continue to employ the salami tactics at the time he feels is of best advantage to himself and this invasion is just the latest instance where he correctly judged that the West can do little more than condemn his actions and try to enclose him in an economic cage but at the end of the day when he has installed his puppet President in Kyiv as he has in Minsk, the West will have no choice but to deal with Putin on his terms.
After all, Russia was allowed to host the Olympics in Sochi in spite of the internationally condemned invasion of Georgia and several grands prix in Sochi after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Likewise, Russia hosted the 2018 World Cup in spite of international condemnation of their repressive record of human rights abuses and legislation particularly targeting LGBTQ people.
One can only conclude that the world has no problem looking in the other direction when vast sums of money are in play. To be fair, the FIA and F1 have announced that this year’s Russian Grand Prix has been canceled and several World Cup qualification matches with the Russians are in jeopardy but would it be much of a surprise to see F1 racing in St Petersburg next year or those qualification matches being played when the current furore over Ukraine dies down?
Money talks and you know what walks.
Putin knows this and he knows well enough to time his abuses of international law to perfection. And he is perfectly willing to weather the sanctions regime with the billions he’s reportedly got stashed in secret accounts throughout the world.
Will that be enough to survive the anger of the Russian people at yet another foreign adventure by their President who holds power through illegitimate elections and the force of arms and the police state?
One can dream that Putin’s regime will eventually be brought down. And almost certainly it will be though it remains to be seen if it will be through internal revolution or the fall of his party due to being strangled economically and spent under the table which we saw in Russia when the Communist Party faded into oblivion.
Well, the Communist Party itself did. The apparatchiks like Putin who were living like Tsars as members of the party carried on and have managed to hang onto power 30 years on but they’re largely getting to the point where the passage of time is going to effect change whether Putin wishes it or not.
Until then, I can only offer this glimmer of hope to the Ukrainian people who have bravely taken up arms to resist the overwhelming force invading their country…
“When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.”
Mahatma Gandhi