Is Putin mad, brilliant or somewhere in between?
After more than 20 years in power, Russia’s leader could be in danger of letting his inner Bond villain run amok, says Mark Galeotti
One might wonder why Vladimir Putin has not yet appropriated an extinct volcano for himself as his lair. After all, Monday’s meeting of his security council saw him in full Blofeld mode, lacking only a white cat and a pool of piranhas to channel his inner Bond villain.
An assembly of the most powerful and fearsome of Putin’s officials were left fearful and squirming as what could have been a sober and honest discussion of policy on Ukraine instead devolved into a savage ritual of collective incrimination and submission – and all on national TV.
In the vaulting confines of St Ekaterina’s Hall in the Kremlin, they sat like guilty children in detention as Putin, ensconced behind a desk, called on them, one by one, for their views. Everyone knew there was only one right answer. Not even the hawkish security officials close to Putin seemed at ease. No wonder: foreign intelligence chief Sergei Naryshkin was treated to a demeaning public reprimand when he became flustered. When he said he “will support” recognition (of the independence of the separatist regions of Luhansk and Donetsk), Putin curtly pressed him: “Will support, or do support? Tell me straight!”
What the meeting demonstrated – beyond that Putin enjoys the petty privileges of rank – is that there are serious doubts whether this leader, who once prided himself on his detailed attention to the homework of his position, is really aware of the realities of his and Russia’s situation. In short, is he losing touch with the world as the rest of us understand it?
After all, for the best part of two years, Putin has been kept in a biosecurity bubble of such severity that people scheduled to meet him spend a fortnight in guarded isolation, and even then have to pass through a tunnel fogged with disinfectant and bathed in ultraviolet light. Beyond a relative handful of his closest aides and friends, everyone has become a twodimensional figure on a screen to him, his country a foreign land experienced through the TV news.
No wonder he seems more isolated, even paranoid. Even without Covid, long-serving leaders don’t age well, and it is becoming increasingly clear that – like so many autocrats – Putin is becoming a caricature of himself.
I was once told by a former Russian spy that they had learnt you “do not bring bad news to the tsar’s table” – and, certainly, the scope for him to be presented with inconvenient truths has shrunk, the circle of those to whom he listens has narrowed, and the gap between him and his closest officials, let alone his people, has widened.
After 20 years in power, he is less willing than ever to be disagreed with and appears to believe himself indispensable. He may occasionally flirt with the idea of stepping down, but that seems to be becoming less, not more, likely over time. In part, this is a matter of trust. In a system without true rule of law, it would mean handing power over his and his friends’ fates and fortunes to a successor. Putin is not a man to trust easily, at the best of times.
He seems to have internalised the belief that to be weak is to be vulnerable; to trust is to be weak. He was presumably reminded of this in January. Nursultan Nazarbayev, the dictator of neighbouring Kazakhstan, had granted himself a position that gave him status and immunity from prosecution for life, while he handed over the actual running of the country to a hand-picked successor… who then turned on him, forcing him to step down. That was a lesson Putin would hardly have failed to notice.
There is also the question of legacy, something that seems now to obsess Putin. His public appearances, like this week’s television address announcing the recognition, are larded with simplistic and often downright inaccurate historical parallels, all intended not just to justify his actions, but to place him within a pantheon of Russian “greats”.
Yet even he must know that this is a hard sell now.
He will be 70 in October, and despite the staged demonstrations of his manly prowess – the artfully filmed footage of him hiking with his defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, or taking a dip in an icy river, the implausible number of goals he scores in ice hockey matches against his underlings – Russians themselves are tiring of him and his willingness to mortgage their futures for his.
As for his place in history, Putin has gone from the man who saved Russia from the anarchy and irrelevance of the 1990s, to the man who “lost” Ukraine. He defends his policies with a televised address in which he dwells on 1920s Bolshevik nationality policies, Ukrainian privatisation and Nato perfidy, at a time when ordinary Russians are worried about their standard of living.
The 2014 annexation of Crimea was genuinely popular with Russians across the political spectrum. Such was the momentum of the moment, though, Putin let himself get involved in an undeclared intervention in the Donbas.
I was living in Moscow at the time, and the confidence within the security apparatus was as palpable as it was misplaced. Six months, I was told; six months, and Ukraine will have been forced to accept its proper place in Russia’s sphere of influence and it will all be over. It was a terrible miscalculation on Putin’s part – but who was going to tell him that?
Eight years later, Ukraine is arguably more unified and more defiant than ever, the Russian economy is stagnant, and its people more and more dissatisfied.
So, put together, the current crisis is born out of neither madness, nor some geopolitical brilliance beyond our ken. In its own way, it is a tragedy penned by a 21st-century Shakespeare.
An ageing monarch, feeling his time drawing to a close, broods on his legacy as the leader who committed himself to “lifting Russia off its knees”. He comes to believe it will all depend on Ukraine, the cradle of Slavic culture and the Russian Orthodox Church – and whether he goes down in history as the tsar who regained it, or lost it for ever.
Mistrustful and awkward, with few friends and confidants, he finds himself surrounded by a claque of yes-men and opportunists, who have learnt that the safest thing to do is to flatter his prejudices and applaud his whims. No one is willing to tell him that he has time and again misjudged the Ukrainian people, and that his pressure does no more than drive them further away.
In this context, Putin’s actions make a perverse sense. To characterise him, as some are, as insane or delusional, is to fail to see that he has his own perverse logic. In spite of everything, he seems genuinely to believe that Kyiv will bend the knee of its own accord, or because the West pressurises it to do so to make this crisis go away.
In that case, this would seem to be the ideal moment to try to assert Russia’s regional hegemony, while its military modernisation is at something of a high-water mark, and the West is still in the process of reorientating its forces away from far-flung counterinsurgency and towards being able to face down a mechanised peer army. Meanwhile, Europe is divided and Joe Biden’s administration looks both weak and eager to pivot away from Europe. In all this, Putin’s views are shared by many within the Russian elite – even if they have misgivings about what he is doing with this opportunity.
Besides, Putin believes in giving himself options. He could simply “freeze” the conflict now, giving him a permanent beachhead for future action, while watching Ukraine and the West brace for an imminent attack that will not come. He has seen presidents and prime ministers come and go and knows that, while today the West may be focused on Ukraine, it will lose interest or be distracted soon enough.
Or this could be the start of the full-scale war the West has been fearing and predicting. It could be tomorrow, it could be next week – the point is that Putin retains the initiative.
He is not Blofeld, no geopolitical mastermind, but nor is he insane. He is a remnant of the last true Soviet generation, unable to come to terms with the end of his old world, unwilling to understand the new. Yet that old world bequeathed him both nuclear weapons and an assumption that Russia must be a global power or it is nothing, so we need to try to understand his view of the world, even as we battle it.
Mark Galeotti is an honorary professor at University College London, and author of ‘We Need To Talk About Putin’. His latest book is ‘A Short History of Russia’ (Ebury)