In his crazed fantasy mind, Putin thinks he’s avenging the mistakes made by Lenin and Stalin
● Defence Secretary tells MoS he fears Ukraine will descend into guerrilla war ● He admits his young children are anxious about unfolding crisis
HELL hath no fury like a dictator not taken seriously. We have laughed too often at the posed action-man photographs of Vladimir Putin, stripped to the waist while fishing, or flexing his pectorals on horseback or following other manly activities in the great outdoors. In Western democracies it is very hard to take such posturing seriously.
Yet it was a grave mistake to have underestimated the danger that he presented.
Russians would not have been so blind to such threats to themselves, for there are many examples in their history of such a fatal error. Perhaps the most striking was the way that Leon Trotsky and other Bolshevik intellectuals dismissed Joseph Stalin as a pock-marked Georgian gangster until it was too late. Putin is not another Stalin, but he has managed through propaganda and the education system to change Russian opinion dramatically over the past five years, doubling the proportion of those who regard Stalin as a great leader to 56 per cent.
This convinced Putin of the necessity to project himself as a strong leader, too. And ‘strong’ in Russian history means ruthless.
Yet to categorise Putin simply as a born-again Bolshevik would be very far from the mark.
In his bizarre and rambling treatise last week immediately before his declaration of war on Ukraine, Putin’s anger against Lenin was
very clear. He blamed the Bolshevik leader for having introduced into the constitution of the USSR the idea that the national republics were all equal.
This, Putin has said, ‘planted in the foundation of our statehood the most dangerous time-bomb, which exploded the moment the safety mechanism provided by the commanding role of the Soviet Communist Party was gone, the party itself collapsing from within’.
Thus Lenin’s overconfidence in world revolution eventually allowed Ukraine to seize its independence in 1991 when the USSR fell apart.
This was the event that led to Putin’s famous lament that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geo-political tragedy of the 20th Century.
Putin has convinced himself that a separate Ukrainian identity is totally artificial because the country is inherently part of ‘the same historical and spiritual space’ as Russia. We are a ‘single people’, he declares. The fact is that he is living in a crazed fantasy world of the imperial past when he declares ‘a hostile anti-Russia is being created in our historic lands’.
In his view, no population from the old Tsarist empire has the right to follow its own path.
Putin’s other belief, that the West was largely to blame, came from the rash ambitions of the United States, Nato and the EU in the first decade of the millennium to promote democracy everywhere. It was a dangerously naive crusade.
Putin also saw that a democratic and independent Ukraine, even a corrupt one then, would become a threat to his own kleptocratic and increasingly dictatorial regime.
To him, it was a treason against Russia for Ukraine to desire to become part of the EU.
He also continued to resent bitterly those former Soviet satellites that had joined Nato to guarantee their freedom. He saw Nato’s incremental expansion eastwards since 1999 as a deliberate threat aimed at Russia. This was part of that atavistic Russian fear of encirclement and the idea that the whole world was against it.
Putin is simply following the Stalinist
policy of the last century. ‘We do not intend to occupy Ukraine,’ he stated when declaring war. He may still insist that he has no plans to incorporate Ukraine into Russia, but he is almost certain to adopt Stalin’s mode of operations in 1945 when the Red Army swept across central Europe.
Just like Stalin, Putin evidently intends to install his own puppet government of quislings in Kyiv.
One can be sure that Russian special forces and military intelligence service have lists of those Ukrainians they wish to eliminate in one form or another so that the country can be turned into a satellite state, as central European countries were in 1945.
It is not history that repeats itself. Instead, all countries are, to a certain degree, prisoners of their past. But Russia, more than any other nation state, suffers from
He sees the Soviet Union’s collapse as the 20th Century’s biggest tragedy
An unstable dictator with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal
the way its leaders tend to trap their country, as well as neighbouring victims, into a tragically repetitive cycle.
Putin’s invasion of Ukraine finally revealed how much his anger has grown as he is surrounded by a gang of Kremlin yes-men. It was telling that his phobia about catching Covid-19 led him into an even tighter isolation, with no outsider permitted to approach him.
The increasingly irrational behaviour and his rambling monologues, which clearly embarrassed his own Security Council in that broadcast just before the invasion of Ukraine began, presents a terrifying possibility. An enraged Putin is a very dangerous beast who risks extending his war on Ukraine to the Baltic states and beyond.
He is an unstable dictator with the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world, but who can rein him in?
was briefed that morning about an attack on a kindergarten.
He says Putin’s plan is to become a ‘disastrous tsar’, but that he must not be allowed to succeed. He is scathing about the world leaders who stood by when the Russian president annexed Crimea in 2014.
‘Collectively, the West after 2014 was guilty of appeasement. Collectively, the West is paying the price for letting a bully take.’
Wallace, 51, attacks French President Emmanuel Macron for having Putin as a ‘guest of honour’ at Jacques Chirac’s funeral in 2019. He recalls sitting not far behind the Russian leader and thinking that – after the Salisbury Novichok attacks – he shouldn’t be there.
‘It was not long after Salisbury, and we were in a cathedral. His minders stood on the balls of their feet. I thought, why is a man who murdered a British citizen sitting as one of the guest of honours in Western Europe?’
So what can be done now? At this stage, it appears, not much. The night before we meet, Ukraine’s president said his country had been left to fight alone. ‘We can’t do everything we want for Ukraine,’ Wallace says, pointing out the risk of a full-scale war with Russia if a Nato ally steps into Ukraine.
He dismisses calls from backbench Tory MPs to introduce a nofly zone over Ukraine. In typical Wallace plain-speech, he says these suggestions are ‘crap’, adding: ‘Do you know how you impose it? You shoot down Russian jets – leading to war in Europe.’
Of his fellow Conservatives backing no-fly zones – including Defence Select Committee chairman Tobias Ellwood and former Cabinet Minister David Davis – Wallace says they ‘go around TV studio spouting this stuff, without any consequence for the world we have to live in’.
He is acutely aware how frightened people in the UK are of an escalation into a full-blown war with Russia, with its ‘huge stockpile’ of nuclear weapons which Putin has modernised. Asked what his message is to parents whose children ask them if we are heading towards a world war, the Minister says: ‘I’m afraid today, World War Three will last about an hour. Which is why we spend all our time avoiding World War Three.’
He says his three children are anxious about it and that the power of social media ‘makes us all frightened’. He adds: ‘Ukraine, which is actually a long way away, is beamed into our televisions, and on social media and TikTok. And I would say first of all, as I do with my children, we have to make sure we help regulate what they watch. As a Government and as a parent. Young minds are terribly anxious.’
He says he spoke to his children on the phone on Thursday but hasn’t seen them throughout the unfolding crisis. He had cancelled his half-term family holiday because the situation in Ukraine was rapidly deteriorating.
The next stage of the conflict will, Wallace believes, move to insurgency and guerrilla warfare. Will the UK help with this?
‘I think we’re taking it a phase at a time,’ he says. But he adds: ‘Britain – we stand up to bullies. Our job
World War Three will last about an hour – which is why we should avoid it
in the UK is that Putin must fail. He has to fail in challenging our values and our European security architecture. He has to fail for what he’s done in Ukraine. Whether he will fail next week, next month or in a decade, he has to fail.
‘It could take a decade. But the West is big enough, wealthy enough, sophisticated enough to pay that price if it needs to. And it should pay that price. Freedom isn’t free.’
Wallace says we are witnessing ‘a dawn of a new border of Europe’, the ‘ripples’ of which will arrive on Nato’s shores. Echoing his colleague, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, Wallace says that Putin won’t stop at Ukraine – adding that as well as concern over the Baltic states, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan could be next.
‘Watch out,’ he tells those states, ‘because he doesn’t really think you are all independent either.’
Asked if the UK could use cyber attacks against Putin, he says: ‘There are lots of tactics against Putin, I’m not going to comment on each individual one,’ before adding that he means the options are ones to use against adversaries in general, not any specific one.
As for the West facing cyber attacks, Wallace says everyone should start taking more precautions. ‘We are all over-dependent’ on technology that leaves us open to attack, he warns.
Checking our virus software is up to date should become routine, he says. ‘We make sure our cars are serviced because we’re very dependent on that. We should do the same towards our telephones and our computers because we are very, very dependent on them. We should take it incredibly seriously.’