'Dealing' with Putin
Advice from those who know how
What do we do with a problem like Putin…
As Russia’s war of aggression rages in Ukraine, destroying anything or anyone in its path, leaders and pundits still seem to think that ‘dialogue’ a la West will bring Putin to the table and end this war. Most of the time, what Ukrainians think or desire is hardly ever mentioned, displaying a total disregard for Ukrainian agency.
In Washington last week, prime minister Draghi reiterated his support for Ukraine and its defense unequivocally, but in the grand scheme of European foreign policy, Italy and other European states hardly matter. Germany and France do.
The public and analysts look to president Macron and chancellor Scholz for their positions vis-à-vis Russia’s war of aggression. The way they are dealing with Putin couldn’t be more wrong.
On Friday, president Macron was on the phone to Putin. Again. Leaders need to maintain lines of communication, but these calls, and those of chancellor Scholz, haven’t brought Putin or president Zelensky any closer to the negotiating table. They’ve actually done the opposite: they’ve fed Putin’s ego.
How do we know? Macron has been derided in Russia. Russian TV propagandists have coined a new term- ‘Macronised’- to mean a baggering bore who calls continuously, like a jilted lover.
Instead of following the lead of the Macrons and Scholzes of the world, shouldn’t we be following those who have been dealing with Putin’s criminal regime for the past upmteen years and have a lot to teach us?
In a thread, Anders Aslund, an economist and Russia, Ukraine and Eastern Europe specialist, provides a list of oft-cited policy positions that should be discarded because they have proven to be ineffectual or align with Putin. Just chuck them. Listen to Anders.
Escalation. What Putin always does until he has won or been defeated. We must not avoid escalation but make sure Ukraine wins.
We must not provoke Putin. Putin has started this unprovoked war, but we must not provoke him? This is to call for Ukraine’s defeat.
We must allow Putin to save face. Really? Do you support crimes against humanity? Putin must be defeated.
Off-ramp. Does not exist in Putin’s terminology. He is only interested in victory.
Ukraine must negotiate with Putin. No, Putin has persistently refused to meet or negotiate with President Zelensky since December 2019. Putin has violated lots of Russia’s international agreements for the last decades, so why bother to conclude any agreement with him?
Ukraine should declare itself neutral and promise not to join NATO. Ukraine has been neutral all along and had no prospect of NATO membership. Therefore, Putin dared to attack Ukraine. The only credible security guarantee for Ukraine is NATO membership.
Ceasefire. Does not apply to Russia, only an opportunity to regroup.
International law. Does not apply to Russia, only to everybody else.
Genocide. Can only hurt Russians and cannot be carried out by Russians.
Minsk Accords. Device to undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty with the help of Germany and France while Russia gathered strength for a new assault on Ukraine.
We should not box Putin into a corner. Would you have said the same about yesterday’s Putin who was called Hitler?
We must not destabilize Russia. Putin is the main destabilizing factor in Russia and Europe. This is really an argument for the ouster of Putin.
The only conclusive outcome of Putin’s war against Ukraine is that Ukraine recovers all its territory from February 2014 and that Putin loses power in one way or the other. If Putin wins, he will proceed to other countries.
This is another gem. Scott and I spoke with Keir Giles at Chatham House very early on Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine in our regular Thursday Spaces. His thread below dates back to July 29, 2019. He provides 10 principles- solid advice on ‘how to deal with Putin’ based on years of experience with Russia and its regime. Listen to Keir.
2/ But that doesn't mean Russia is right. Some (not all) parts of that world view are disastrously misguided. But right or wrong, Russia's belief system doesn't excuse Russian behviour to other countries or to its own people.
Don’t confuse understanding Russia with excusing Russia
Russia is guided by its own distinctive sense of historical imperatives, and consequently and enduring sense of privilege to disregard commonly accepted norms of behaviour. But the conviction with which these views are expressed does not necessarily make them right, or provide an excuse when they are acted on in ways the west finds repugnant.
3/ There are no simple answers, and often no single answers, to why Russia takes any given action. Objectives can be multiple, flexible and incomprehensible by Western measures of success.
Don’t ask binary questions.
Don’t ask about Russia’s is it either this or that, either yes or no. The answer is likely to be both, at the same time, or neither or more. Dealing with Russia necessitates being comfortable with paradoxes and contradictions, and many things spoken and written about Russia are both true and not true at the same time. Consequently, when you ask whey does Russia do X, don’t look for just one answer. There will be several reasons, some of which will overlap and some of which will contract each other.
4/ Filtering the signal from the noise in Russian official pronouncements is critical. But also very hard, because the noise is incessant and deafening.
Don’t be distracted by bluster, bravado and bluff
Just because Russia makes a lot of angry noise about your plans or proposals doesn’t mean that Moscow will not be prepared to live with them when they are implemented. Russia defaults to threats and feigned outrage in order to improve its negotiating position, because the WEstìs response shows that this sometimes works. Listen instead for changes in tone that indicate real concern.
5/ President Putin is not the whole problem. He is enacting Russia's traditional means of dealing with challenges, not inventing them from scratch. A change of attitude from Russia would require far more than a change of leader.
Don’t forget that Russia does not consist of just one man.
The current leader in the Kremlin at any one time is not the problem if he is driven by persistent Russian beliefs and imperatives. The country and its leaders respond to internal and external challenges in ways that remain consistent over centuries: course corrections that accompany a change of leadership tend to be temporary aberrations.
6/ You may be appalled by current Russian state behaviour at home and abroad. But remember this is a country where industrial-scale deportation and murder of its own citizens and those of occupied countries is the norm through history.
Don’t just hope for change.
Change in Russia is rarely as deep as it appears, and certainly not always for the better; so it is dangerous to assume a change political in Russia is desirable because it will necessarily be an improvement. Russia’s current behaviour towards other countries and its citizens is reprehensible. But by historical standards, Russia is still in a period of unprecedented liberalism. It would be hard for things to get better, but it would be very easy for things to get far, far worse.
7/ From Syria to Salisbury, Russian actions cause astonishment and revulsion in the West. But there is little reason to think Russia cares much for the approbation of countries that it sees as adversaries.
Don’t expect Russia to respect values & standards that were invented elsewhere
You can’t embarrass Russia over its behaviour at times when it places no value on its reputation. Naming and shaming has limited effect. It is important to name by continuing to call attention to Russian actions and holding Moscow to account for them, but don’t expect Russia to feel the shame. What western liberal democracies think, or believe, or would like to happen is not a deciding criterion when Russia considers which course of action to choose.
8/ Remember Russia sees concessions and compromise as weakness to be exploited. Cooperation and good-neighbourly relations for their own sake are not an incentive to Moscow.
Don’t hope to appeal to Russia’s better nature.
Russia sees compromise and cooperation, with no immediate benefit to state and leadership interests, as unnatural and deeply suspicious. This places strict limits on the potential for working with Moscow even on what may appear to be shared challenges.
9/ There may be opportunities to cooperate with Russia in the future, but they will be conditional and fleeting. And even if common interest is found, the West will probably not like Russia's desired end state or its means to get there.
Don’t assume that there must be common ground
It’s natural to search for these shared challenges, assuming there must be some way we can work with Russia on mutual interests. But there is a reason this search does not bring results, despite being conducted intensively throughout the almost 3 decades since the end of the USSR. Whenever it appears that Russia and the West could work together on a problem, it quickly becomes clear that not only Moscow’s understanding of the issue, but also its preferred solution and the methods it would favour to deliver it are entirely incompatible with Western norms, values and even laws.
10/ Too often the post-Cold War period is taken as a benchmark for Russian behaviour. But that was anomalous in so many ways. Russia is returning to its historical comfort zone of hostility to the West (and to its own population).
Don’t think whether you can choose to be at war with Russia or not.
Sometimes de-escalation, taken to its logical conclusion, equates to surrender. At the same time, Russia will never be at peace with you. Normal relations with Russia include fending off a wide range of hostile actions from Moscow. This is the default state throughout history, and Western nations should by now be realising this is the norm.
Taken together, these ten principles could help the West avoid repeating past errors in dealing with Moscow. This in turn would provide the basis for a relationship with Russia that is less hostage to misunderstanding and surprise.
He’ll listen to reason…
In the lead up to February 24, the parade of Western leaders to Moscow and the incessant phone calls from president Macron, chancellor Sholz and others tell us more about their Russo-centric biases towards Ukrainian-Russian relations than what could have been realistically achieved in these meetings with Putin if anything at all.
Their actions tell us that they believed that by treating Putin as a ‘normal’ leader, he would listen to reason, and could be persuaded somehow to return to the negotiating table. “Putin would be crazy to invade Ukraine”, they repeated night after night.
When all evidence gathered from intelligence indicated Putin was ready to strike, they continued under the illusion that he was using his troops as leverage for his negotiating position, a bluff. Add to this the idea that even if Putin were to attack, Kyiv would lay down its arms, and quickly. The war would last but a few days. French intelligence certainly thought so, but they weren’t alone.
Discordant voices pointing to Russian imperialism as a motiving factor were labelled as ‘alarmist warmongers’. It was stunning to see how fourteen years of Russian non-kinetic and kinetic warfare in Estonia, Georgia, Crimea, the Donbas, Syria and across democracies in the world were put aside to neatly fit into how Western leadership wanted to ‘deal with Putin’ or thought they could.
So instead of preparing for what was to come, governments across the West had to scramble to send military kit and humanitarian aid to Ukraine all because our leadership couldn’t see Putin for what he is and deal with him accordingly. It has finally dawned on most leaders and populations in the West that Russian belligerance not only poses an existential threat to Ukraine as a state and Ukrainians as a people, it also does to our entire democratic world.
If Western leadership couldn’t see or accept Putin for what he is, they were equally in the dark as to how Ukrainians would act in the face of Russian aggression. My Ukrainian friends and contacts all said they would fight to the bitter end to defend their nation; they’d pick up stones and hurl them from the rooftops if they had to but they would never surrender and live under the Russian boot. This spirit of independence and love of democracy is what had sparked the Revolution of Dignity in 2013/14 and their on-going battle in the Donbas since 2014.
But to the media and general population in the West, Ukraine’s recent battles were sketchy at best or viewed through a Russian lens. Especially in the first weeks of war, night after night, Ukrainians had to constantly correct journalists and analysts by pointing out that Ukraine had been at war with Russia for the past eight years and were called to counter Russian propaganda narratives that had seeped into Western media unchecked.
Our myopic vision of Putin and Ukrainians has come at a price: Russian genocide and war crimes in Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol, to name a few, and the destruction of Ukrainian cities and lives. It pains me to think that this could have been averted had we listened to those so-called discordant voices.
At the moment, the Ukrainian armed forces are meeting, and in some cases, repelling Russian attacks. It is very difficult to tell what is happening on the ground with clarity. What we do know is that the Ukrainian forces have won the battle for Kyiv, pushed back Russian forces around Kharkiv and are currently fighting fiercely in the Donbas. In a Sky News interview, Maj Gen Budanov, the head of Ukrainian intelligence for the Ministry of Defense, said that the Ukrainian forces will be in a position by late summer to launch a decisive counter-offensive and will win the war by the end of the year.
What then? What will peace look like?
The same leadership and pundits who got Russia and Putin wrong before the war are now weighing in on the future peace ‘deal’ between Ukraine and Russia. They are making the same mistakes as in the past because they are seeking to ‘deal with Putin’ as they always have- through ‘dialogue’, not force, and by sidelining Ukraine.
We wouldn’t expect Berlin or Paris or Washington to decide if Italy were to lose Sicily in a conflict. Why would Ukraine be any different?
Ukrainian agency…
Ukrainians will decide what kind of peace they desire and when they are ready to negotiate. President Zelensky knows he must follow what his people want, not what EU Commission president von der Leyen, nor president Biden, nor any of the bloviating talking heads populating our TV programming and social media feeds want.
Yes. The Ukrainian people. They are the final arbiters of their peace.
Should they decide that they want all their territory back- Crimea and the Donbas- that decision is entirely up to them. They’ll establish what they are willing to put on the table as negotiable (if anything at all), in keeping with the needs of their future security architecture.
Instead of futile discussions in the West on how Ukraine is to be to carved up, we should be aggressively disentangling ourselves from Russian energy dependency, shoring up our defences, clearing our information spaces of Russian active measures, closing loopholes for dirty Russian money in our economies, and open a discussion on Russian post-war reparations, and how to make them feasible.
All talk of regime change in Russia is also a wast of time. Regime change in Moscow is something that the Russian population needs to do on its own: what we should be actively persuing is a policy of containment towards Russia until it can function in our world without posing an existential threat to any one nation.
Macron and Scholz’s latest statements send a chill up my spine because instead of learning from the past, they seem eager to appease Russia and bring it back into our world. They seem ready and willing to welcome Russia as partners at the expense of Ukrainian sovereignty and our collective security. They should be the first to listen to advice from people who know ‘how to deal with Putin’.
If they won’t do that, they should be doing as little damage as possible. They need to put the phone down. keep Russia isolated, and focus on one essential goal for the moment: provide military and humanitarian support to Ukraine- independent and democratic Ukraine that is holding the line against the authoritarian onslaught in Europe.
Thanks for reading…
Mo