Putin Is Not the Problem, Russia Is

Western naivete and navel-gazing helped create our current de facto war with Russia, and Western denial keeps making it worse

As someone who has been warning about the threat to the West posed by Vladimir Putin and his Russia since long before that position was considered acceptable in polite society, I allow myself the occasional I Told You So moment, in moderation. Once in a while, I channel my inner Kingsley Amis, the waspish English novelist who, when his friend the eminent historian Robert Conquest decided to reissue his foundational work The Great Terror, about Stalin’s genocidal habits, is alleged to have suggested a new title: “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”

It's nice when another writer notices that I warned everyone about Putin’s threat to the West back when that was considered a risibly paranoid take among the great and the good. Over at The Dispatch, David French recently observed that I had warned everyone about the revanchist religious-nationalist ideology underpinning Putin’s aggression against Ukraine way back in 2014. Yes, I did.

It gives me no pleasure to have been right about this, given the humanitarian catastrophe caused by Putin’s renewed aggression against his neighbor, Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War Two, to say nothing of the possibility of “Armageddon” emerging from this conflict, to cite the incautious words of the American president.

What can be stated with confidence is that nobody knows how to end the Ukraine War. This is always the problem: wars are easy to start and difficult to stop. Any cursory reading of military history teaches this, but the political class everywhere seems blind at times. Certainly, Putin has created a disastrous military conundrum for himself, his regime, and Russia. His belated effort at a pseudo-mobilization, after months of pretending there was no war being waged against Ukraine, merely a “special military operation,” devolved into the disorganized, drunken debacle that is a hallmark of Putinism. At present, Russia lacks the military means to subdue Ukraine. In the spring, perhaps it will, if the Kremlin manages a bona fide mobilization, yet we are facing the prospect of a long, bloody winter without resolution.

That said, Kyiv is no more capable of ending the war than Moscow is. Although Ukraine has displayed considerably more public spirit, combat capability, and political mettle than Russia has in this war, Ukraine’s “theory of victory,” in as much as it can be defined, seems distinctly aspirational. The Kremlin has been practically begging for peace talks with Washington – it will not parley with Ukraine – yet Kyiv has no interest in any ceasefire which doesn’t involve the removal of Russian forces at least to their start lines in late February of this year. Therefore, diplomacy is not being given a chance.

In its place, Ukraine envisions that victory in this war will come with the collapse of Putinism itself. In a strange irony, Putin launched his invasion to force “regime change” in Ukraine and eight months later it’s Kyiv that requires “regime change” in Moscow to end the war. Ukrainian hopes here seem as wish-based as Putin’s were last winter. Since the Ukrainian military isn’t marching on Moscow (which didn’t work for Napoleon or Hitler either), Kyiv’s plan, such as it is — let it be noted that it’s the apparent plan of NATO and the Biden administration too – appears to be that Russians simply tire of Putinism and overthrow the regime.

Which could happen. It happened in Russia in 1917 and nearly so in 1905, both caused by rambunctious home garrisons revolting over a losing war. Moreover, as a Chekist to his core, Putin is acutely aware of possible internal threats to his regime and his person and will be difficult to get rid of in any palace coup. If fomenting regime change in Moscow was easy, the West would have done this years ago.

Let the case of Serbia in the 1990s provide insight. The unpleasant regime of Slobodan Milošević only fell to a popular uprising (which got discreet Western help) in October 2000 after a decade of economic collapse, massive corruption, political violence (regime opponents in Belgrade had a habit of getting gunned down just as Putin’s enemies mysteriously fall out of windows), hard-hitting Western sanctions, and no less than three losing wars: Croatia and Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, with the latter involving 78 days of punishing NATO bombardment of Serbia. It took all that for Serbs to get rid of Slobo, and it matters that Serbia is a small country lacking serious military power, unlike Russia, the world’s biggest country in size, which possesses five thousand nuclear weapons.

Then there’s the difficult reality that overthrowing Milošević didn’t change everything. Slobo got sent to The Hague to face war crimes charges (he died there in 2006) and Belgrade enacted mostly superficial reforms. However, regime change didn’t change the country. Today, Serbia remains nearly as far out of the Western orbit as it was in 2000, being the only European country that has sided with Russia against Ukraine diplomatically.

Westerners imagine that overthrowing Putin will fix our Kremlin problem by transforming Russia into a modern, less aggressive, more congenial country. Let me state plainly that there is no reason to think that. While Putin’s successor might be a pro-Western democrat of liberal inclination, there at least as great a chance that it will be a nationalist strongman who hates the West more viscerally than Putin does. It bears noting that a lot of “antiwar” sentiment in Russia at present comes from right-wing nationalists who hate Putin for making such an embarrassing hash of the war. They do not oppose the idea of using military force to bring Ukraine back under Moscow’s control, they merely want it done more effectively. Just as Serbia remains Serbia, Russia will remain Russia.

Here a new Estonian report provides important insights. Bearing the jaw-dropping title, “Human Life Has No Value There,” this is a collection of interviews with Baltic counterintelligence officers who know their big, bearish neighbor only too well. Its contents, detailing the deep cruelty which marks Russian political culture, will be jarring and upsetting to Westerners, but these views are commonly held among intelligence officers in the Baltics states, as well as in Poland. They point to the inevitable conclusion that Putin is a symptom, not a cause, of the current crisis since the core problem is Russia itself. Some quotations jump out:

As they admit: "You can’t beat Russia with reason." ... an intrinsic element of Russian society is pokazukha: pretending everything is fine while reality is anything but. It also applies, at least partly, to Russian intelligence, no matter that it’s a powerful system employing thousands.

"I fought them," he says, "because I knew that as soon as you submit to their will, you become their slave. But if you strike back, then you might even earn their trust.”

That is precisely how Baltic counterintelligence officers refer to Russia – not ‘it’, but ‘they’. The war in Ukraine is not Putin’s war. The cruelty is not Putin’s. The rapes, murders, gouged eyes, hangings, and burned corpses aren’t special tactics employed by Russia’s leader. It is Russia as a whole.

“The majority of Russians are to blame,” says Sinisalu. Western colleagues sometimes have a hard time believing this. “They’re certainly more naïve and optimistic than we are,” says one Baltic counterintelligence officer.

“When we tried explaining to our partners that Russia can’t be trusted, they denied it,” another adds, visibly resentful. Georgia, the Crimea – nothing changed. “And here we are in 2022.”

This downbeat assessment contains truths which Westerners need to pay attention to. We must admit that our Eastern NATO partners, above all Poles and Estonians, warned Washington and Brussels for 15 years that Putin wasn’t bluffing, that the Kremlin would engulf Europe in flames if Putin wasn’t resisted, only to be ignored when not mocked and dismissed as paranoids. The blindness of Western elites regarding Putin starting at least in 2007, when the Russian leader bluntly trashed NATO at the Munich Security Conference and “somebody” cyber-pillaged Estonia, must be admitted and learned from.

Ukraine is being torn apart in 2022 for many reasons, above all Russian aggression based in a congenital inability to view its neighbor as a real country, yet Western leaders bear some responsibility too. Certainly, the West turned a blind eye for far too long to increasingly outrageous Russian behavior – assassinations abroad, aggressive espionage and cyberwarfare, election interference and propaganda – that Western and American elites ignored (including the Democrats who today are obsessively anti-Putin: their pre-2016 track record on appeasing Putin is not flattering).

The West is horrified that Russia is waging war on Ukraine without much concern for civilian casualties, which NATO politely calls “collateral damage” when we do it. It’s commonly stated that Putin is fighting Ukraine with Stalinist brutality. Happily, that’s not literally true, yet it cannot be denied that Russia is pummeling Ukraine in a fashion that Western militaries no longer deem acceptable. However, nobody who witnessed the brutality of Russian military operations in Syria or in Chechnya (the latter being their own country) can be surprised that Putin’s forces employ firepower without much concern for civilian life.

The great missed opportunity here came in the 1990s, when after the Soviet collapse it was possible in Russia to admit Communist crimes openly. Secret archives opened, revealing horrors perpetrated on an industrial scale. However, this never turned into any real lustration; instead, the opposite happened, and by the end of that tumultuous decade Russia was in the hands of a KGB man who admired the bloody old system. Putin quickly shut the archives and banned open discussion of Soviet crimes. Here the West bears some blame. We never pressed Russia to come clean and create new, democratic systems based in the rule of law.

We had considerable leverage in the 1990s, yet the West didn’t use it effectively. This wasn’t like Germany after 1945: we didn’t occupy Russia, we couldn’t force change and historical honesty on them, but we had more influence than we want to admit now. The West squandered that opportunity, for many reasons, including laziness, myopia, ignorance (most Westerners barely know their own history, much less anybody else’s), plus the awkward truth that many Western liberals had downplayed or denied the vast extent of Communist crimes during the Cold War and therefore saw no reason to discuss them after the Soviet collapse.

Whatever happens in Ukraine, however Putinism ends, as it eventually will, Russia will remain “old vagabond Russia” in Trotsky’s memorable phrase, until systemic change comes to that troubled society. Here’s an easy benchmark. Putin restored the former Soviet holiday of December 20 as “Security Workers Day,” which was more honestly termed Chekist Day in Communist times. This commemorates the 1917 founding of the Soviet secret police, called the Cheka at its birth (it became the KGB decades later), one of the most murderous organizations in human history. This would be like Germany today having the Gestapo’s birthday as a state-recognized holiday. As long as Russia commemorates December 20 with anything other than shame and horror, that country remains a problem for everyone.