Putin

The sage of Cambridge Tip O’Neill’s remark that all politics is local even applies to Moscow, where Putin’s principal role is Lion Tamer of the Kremlin. Though he has to a large extent defanged and declawed the oligarchs, who make public and servile protestations of their loyalty, that does not mean that they cannot harbor grievances or hatch intrigues. He must also balance the needs and ambitions of the security and military leaders, not to mention those of the gas and oil industry on which the country’s economy depends.

Putin, a paranoid if not by nature then by profession, found himself being outflanked by a hostile military alliance that also manifestly seeks to drastically reduce his economic lifeline of gas and oil, all of which puts him in supreme jeopardy in the infighting of the Kremlin. To have failed to understand this was a cardinal sin on the part of the West. A February 2, 2015, New York Times article entitled “Britain and Europe Sleepwalked into Ukraine Crisis Report Says” states: “Britain and the European Union made a ‘catastrophic misreading’ of President Vladimir V. Putin and ‘sleepwalked’ into the Ukraine crisis, treating it as a trade issue rather than as a delicate foreign-policy challenge, British lawmakers said … in a scathing report…. The European Union had failed to appreciate the ‘exceptional nature’ of Ukraine.”

The West was surprised not only by the importance of Ukraine to Russia, but by the violence of the Russian response. So intent on building a new world order based on the rule of law, the West somehow missed the obvious fact that Russia was still a country where the rule of law counted for very little, another way of saying that the law of the jungle prevailed.

When discussing their country’s behavior, Russians will often say with a wistful, self-mocking irony: “Whereas in civilized countries…,” meaning as opposed to in Russia. Murder is an instrument of politics by other means in Putin’s Russia. The KGB renegade Alexander Litvinenko is murdered with radioactive polonium in London, the harshly critical journalist Anna Politkovskaya is gunned down on Putin’s birthday while returning home with her groceries, the lawyer Sergei Magnitsky is put to death by abuse and neglect in prison after purportedly committing the very crimes he attempted to expose, and the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov is shot dead in sight of the Kremlin while walking home from a date. Putin’s critics are frequently killed, his supporters never.

Until the Ukrainian crisis the civilized West and Darwinian Russia were able to coexist in an uneasy equilibrium of interests. Russia’s authoritarianism lite kept any of the various assassinations and injustices from tipping the balance to the breaking point. Business was done. Russian gas and oil were bought, the French contracted to build Mistral assault carriers for Russia. There were independent newspapers, a radio station, Ekho Moskvy (Moscow Echo), and a web TV station, Dozhd (Rain). And Russians had the right that human-rights champion Andrei Sakharov considered the most important of them all—the right to leave the country. Some suggested that Putin’s new, modern, twenty-first-century authoritarianism would, unlike the Soviet Union, much prefer to be rid of anyone who was at odds with the system. All the same, it remained possible to believe that Russia just might be zigzagging its own way to its own version of a free society, as George Kennan had predicted.

Still, Putin had long been suspicious of the West’s intentions toward Ukraine. He knew full well that if he were in charge of Western intelligence he would use all those pleasant and neutral-sounding NGOs to gradually draw Ukraine into the Western camp, and the EU. Membership in NATO could come later. And even without any such malign intent it is still all part of one process. As Fiona Hill, former national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia, put it: “The E.U. operates in a completely different framework, when you pool sovereignty and have the same temperature gauges, the same railway gauges and do lots of other boring things that have a profound impact. Once you do this you don’t come back. Russia looked at places like Estonia and Poland and said we can’t let this happen to Ukraine.”