For Putin, October was a good month
Among Vladimir Putin’s most conspicuous traits is a predator’s keen sense for his enemies’ weaknesses. He rarely fails to take note, and in October, he had plenty to take note of.
October was probably the best month for the Russian president since he unleashed his bloodsoaked invasion of Ukraine 20 months earlier. If the discrete events that broke his way constitute a trend, Kyiv faces a menacingly greater chance of losing the war — a scenario that would pose enormous risks to the U.S.-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization, not to mention the lives of millions of Ukrainians.
That should seize the West’s attention.
In the first few hours of Oct. 1, Moscow time, Congress voted to keep the U.S. government running, but only after a scaledback $6 billion package of military and civilian aid for Ukraine was stripped from the legislation. That reflected Kyiv’s crumbling support among House Republicans and was a portent of more to come.
Just the day before, Putin had received good news from Slovakia, a small European country with the potential to cause big mischief. It elected a new government whose prime minister, pro-Russian populist Robert Fico, has suggested he would further block European Union military and economic assistance to Ukraine. He’s not doing so for now — instead he is proposing conditions — but he represents a partner for the EU’s other pro-Russian populist leader, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, and together they could obstruct future help for Kyiv.
A week after Fico’s electoral victory, Hamas murdered 1,400 Israelis, diverting the world’s — and Washington’s — attention from Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine. Israel’s brutal reprisals in the Gaza Strip handed Putin a propaganda cudgel to use against the West in the Global South. Why, went the specious argument, was the West outraged at the carnage in Ukraine but indifferent to it in Gaza? (Never mind that in each case the wider war had been triggered by the aggressors, Hamas and Russia.)
Amid those events, Ukraine’s military counteroffensive, launched in June, sputtered to a halt as it faced dug-in Russian forces, soggy autumn weather and a worrying shortage of recruits. Moscow’s troops launched their own attack on the eastern Ukrainian town of Avdiivka, taking enormous casualties and reminding the world that the Kremlin remains willing to use its bottomless supply of fresh soldiers as cannon fodder.
The war’s deadlock suits Putin’s strategy to exhaust Ukraine and outlast the West. It bore further fruit on Capitol Hill when Republicans elected a new House speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana, who has voted repeatedly against funding for Ukraine. Immediately after being sworn in, he said he would block President Joe Biden’s effort to tether a new $61 billion aid package for Ukraine to a new weapons package for Israel.
At the moment, U.S. support for Kyiv remains in doubt; without it, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has told congressional leaders flatly, Ukraine will lose the war.
A final bouquet for Putin was delivered at the end of October, when a new poll in France put Marine Le Pen, an extreme nationalist with long-standing ties to Russia, atop the pack of plausible candidates in the 2027 French presidential election. Though Le Pen has condemned Putin’s invasion, she has also opposed arming Ukraine — and her party for years relied on a multimillion-dollar loan from a Russian bank, paid off just this fall.
Putin sees and encourages these signs of Western wobbling, and history suggests they spur him to pursue his dream of Russia’s imperial restoration.
A decade ago, Putin watched when President Barack Obama drew a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war, then did nothing when Syrian President Bashar Assad called his bluff. Six months later, Putin sent Russian troops into Crimea, which is part of Ukraine, and illegally annexed it.
Putin was also watching when Biden ordered what became a chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan in August 2021. Six months after that, he unleashed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Not all the October news was good for Putin; in Poland, a rightwing government whose steady backing for Kyiv had begun to waver was defeated. The new government, which might take power before the end of the year, is likely to reaffirm Warsaw’s solid support for European aid for Ukraine, which has now surpassed U.S. backing.
Much of the West remains resolute behind Ukraine’s aspiration to become a full-fledged member of the European club of free and democratic nations, which is exactly what Putin cannot countenance.
But the Russian dictator is playing the long game, attuned to every fissure in the transatlantic alliance. And the greatest potential crack of all — a potential election victory for Donald Trump, who is no friend of Ukraine’s — looms just 12 months off. That, for Putin, could be game, set and match.