Far from restoring Russia’s greatness, the president’s war has reduced it to a third-rate power
Deep in the recesses of the Kremlin, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has been poring over maps of Ukraine.
We cannot, of course, know what drives this reclusive, ever more paranoid despot. His spectral presence haunts the nightmares of millions, but his own personality is a void — humanity’s black hole.
Of one thing we may be reasonably certain, however. As he looks back over the past 300 days since February 24, he is tormented neither by guilt nor remorse for the terrible human consequences of his “special military operation”. That this year, fateful for him, has also been fatal for perhaps a quarter of a million other people, does not trouble him in the least.
If we know anything at all about the Russian president, it is that he is unburdened by conscience and immune to compassion – a cold-blooded killer who increasingly resembles his predecessor Joseph Stalin.
His abysmal descent is reminiscent of the murderer Raskolnikov in Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, whose yearning to be a Napoleon leads him to think himself entitled to kill.
Raskolnikov ultimately repents and gives himself up to justice – but Putin cannot seek repentance, let alone punishment, for his crimes because he identifies them with the necessities of the Russian state. In his bleak moral universe, all crimes are justified by raison d’état and his duty to Russia even excuses genocide.
This is the man, after all, who personally ordered the poisoning of Alexander Litvenenko, Sergei Skripal and Alexei Navalny.
He has had countless others assassinated: in 2022 alone, about 20 oligarchs died in suspicious circumstances. He has had blocks of flats blown up and airliners shot down. He has never shown the slightest compunction about sending thousands to their deaths in Chechnya, Georgia, Syria and, since 2014, Ukraine.
Such a man considers that his grandiose end – the rebirth of the Russian empire at the expense of Ukraine’s existence and his own immortality – justifies literally any means. Even by Putin’s sanguinary standards, though, the butcher’s bill in Ukraine has been horrendous.
At least 100,000 Russian troops have been “eliminated” since the invasion of February 24, according to Western and Ukrainian estimates. Losses in equipment have been even greater: most of Moscow’s battlefield arsenal of tanks, ammunition and missiles has gone.
Sanctions have devastated an already anaemic Russian economy. One senior British official has suggested that it will take Russia 30 years to rebuild its former economic and military strength.
Most damaging of all, perhaps, has been the evisceration of Russia’s reputation as a superpower. A string of defeats in pitched battles from Kyiv to Kharkiv, the heroic resistance of Mariupol and the success of Ukrainian counter-offensives have revealed the Russian armed forces as hollowed out and incompetently led, with obsolete weaponry and low morale.
The sinking of the Moskva, the blowing up of the Crimean Bridge, the fall of Kherson and the drone attacks on key Russian airfields are devastating blows to Putin’s personal credibility. The hail of Russian missile attacks on liberated Kherson since Christmas Day reveal his impotent rage.
The resistance of the Ukrainians was unexpected by both Russian and Western intelligence. Putin, like many tyrants before him, made the mistake of believing his own propaganda.
What could and should have been predicted, though, was the qualitative superiority of the armaments supplied to Ukraine by the US, Britain and other NATO powers. This war, it soon emerged, is being fought between digital Ukrainian and analogue Russian forces.
Even though most of the arms and armour used by Kyiv is no longer state of the art, much of it having gathered dust in Nato warehouses for decades, it is still more sophisticated than the Russians’ obsolescent, sometimes Soviet-era kit.
The conquerors who once occupied half of Europe and threatened the other half for 40 years have now been cut down to size. All this has happened, not merely on Putin’s watch, but as a direct result of his megalomania.
The assault on Kyiv last February was Putin’s moment of hubris. Nemesis, in the shape of Volodymyr Zelensky, is now in hot pursuit. On paper Putin’s big battalions may outnumber Zelensky’s, but they are being outgunned, outfought and outthought.
Admittedly, the destruction inflicted by the Russian war machine has been colossal – unprecedented in Europe, indeed, since 1945. The Ukrainians may have suffered an even greater combined death toll of combatants and civilians, besides many more wounded and traumatised.
Several million Ukrainians have become refugees and up to three million, mainly women and children, have been taken to Russia, most of them against their will, to a fate still unknown. The cost of reconstruction, already at least $1 trillion (£830bn), is rising by the day.
In the course of its war of annihilation and occupation of large parts of Ukraine, the Russian Army has left behind convincing evidence of thousands of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The possibility that military and political leaders, up to and including Putin himself, may end up being arraigned before a court in The Hague has raised the stakes in this conflict. Neither side can afford to lose. No Russian autocrat has ever gone on trial as a war criminal – and for Putin, with his exalted sense of historical destiny, such a fate is unthinkable.
Yet none of these moral and criminal considerations weighs as heavily with Putin as one simple fact: he miscalculated on the grandest possible scale. His attempt to wipe Ukraine from the map and to turn Ukrainians into Russians has been a spectacular failure.
Strategically, too, Putin’s gamble has already ruined Russia’s status as a superpower. Far from weakening Nato, the war has given it a much-needed shot in the arm.
Sweden and Finland are joining the Atlantic alliance, abandoning generations of neutrality and forcing the Russians to divert new forces to protect their northern flank.
After decades of isolationist complaints about the failure of Europe to share the burden of its own defence, the US has reinforced its political commitment to the continent and its military presence there. The Europeans themselves have been shaken out of their pacifist complacency and are rapidly rearming for the first time since the Cold War.
Russia’s regional and global prestige has plummeted, as even its allies turn the tables on the Kremlin. Putin himself, who has a habit of treating other leaders with contempt, has been repeatedly humiliated by his Turkish, Iranian and other Asian counterparts.
He has been made to wait by Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, President Sadyr Japarov of Kyrgyzstan and the Emir of Qatar, while in November it was the turn of the Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokaev to signal disrespect.
Even Putin’s most reliable acolyte, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, broke with precedent by forcing Putin to visit him in Minsk last month rather than making his usual pilgrimage to the Kremlin.
Despite speculation about a joint spring offensive against Kyiv, he has so far firmly resisted pressure from his Russian patron to let Belarus be drawn into the conflict.
Lukashenko hopes to follow in the footsteps of Francisco Franco – the Spanish dictator who refused Hitler’s entreaties and survived in power for another three decades – rather than emulate Mussolini, who entered the war and was ultimately executed by partisans.
As for Xi Jinping, Putin’s most important ally, the Chinese president has been conspicuous on the war only by his silence.
While China has backed Russia at the UN and profited from Western sanctions by buying cheap Russian energy, Xi has offered no significant military or diplomatic support.
Shocked by protests against his draconian zero Covid policy, Xi fears that his own rule might not survive Western sanctions. So he too is keeping his distance from Putin, the man with whom he “bonded” on the eve of the invasion. It turns out that their Sino-Russian partnership “with no limits” in practice stops short of Xi coming to Putin’s rescue.
Even in Russia itself, as the promised blitzkrieg turned into a series of defeats, Putin’s popularity has suffered a blow. Though public opinion on the war is difficult to measure, the evidence is clear that most Russians no longer believe in victory.
Since the partial mobilisation in October, a growing proportion of the population say that they know personally men who were mobilised but then killed or wounded in action.
In other words: the Kremlin’s propaganda is no longer working because people have other sources of information about the appalling conditions at the front, the failure to provide adequate training, modern equipment or even basic necessities such as clothing, food and water.
The army’s abject failure has exposed Putin’s dictatorship for all to see as the corrupt, cruel, criminal edifice that it has always been.
So how did it all go so very wrong for Vladimir Putin? He seems to have made four decisive blunders, all of which arose from numerous lesser errors of judgement and fundamental character flaws.
Putin’s first blunder was to treat Ukraine not as an independent, sovereign nation but as a wayward colony, a “little Russia” that had drifted into the orbit of the West but could be reeled back into Moscow’s sphere of influence by a combination of bribery and brute force.
The former tactic of corrupting the elite worked until 2014, when protests in Kyiv’s Maidan Square led to a brutal crackdown and the revolutionary overthrow of the pro-Russian President Yanukovich.
Putin’s response was to escalate the use of force by annexing Crimea and occupying large parts of Donbas. Bribery failed again in the 2019 election when an unknown actor ousted the incumbent oligarch. As it became clear that Volodymyr Zelensky would not be bought, Putin reverted to force.
A key part of this analysis was that Ukrainian nationalists had once fought the Soviet Union and therefore could be depicted as Nazis. Hence the official line that this unprovoked onslaught was not a war of conquest but a “special operation” to “liberate” Ukrainians from a Western-backed Nazi regime.
That this analysis was not merely malign but misconceived has now been comprehensively proven by events, but Putin still clings stubbornly to the extremist ideology of ethnocentric nationalism that has underpinned his rule for nearly a quarter of a century.
His ideology has been used to justify the barbarism of the war from the outset – a barbarism that made the compromise between occupied and occupiers an impossibility.
By framing the war as the purification of Ukraine from an unholy alliance of Nazi traitors to the motherland and agents of the decadent, Russophobic West, Putin ensured that this would become a war of extermination.
It has indeed been conducted with all the bitterness of a civil war, the fanaticism of a religious persecution and the vindictiveness of a punitive expedition.
It was Putin’s decision to deploy a number of private armies alongside his regular forces – most notoriously the mercenaries of the Wagner Group, who have left a grisly trail of carnage wherever they have fought.
Reinforced by scouring Russia’s penal colonies for the desperate and the pitiless, Wagner now numbers some 50,000 men, a quarter of the units in Ukraine.
Their founder and commander, Yevgeny Prigozhin, is himself notoriously a violent ex-convict who has exploited the president’s patronage to build a racketeering empire, evading sanctions by importing arms from North Korea.
Equally ramshackle is the Chechen horde under their warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, also better known for his cruelty than his competence. Neither Prighozin nor Kadyrov co-operates well with the Russian military, any more than the militias of the separatist puppet states of Donetsk and Luhansk.
In order to execute his sacred mission, Putin has assembled a gallery of rogues and psychopaths. But as Alexei Navalny points out, they are also useless soldiers.
Prime responsibility for the strategic and tactical failures of the Russian campaign must, however, be laid at the door of a dictator who vainly tries to micromanage his military as much as his civilian subordinates.
From the conscripts to the generals, nobody trusts his superior, least of all the supreme commander. Many would rather surrender than die for Putin. If a Russian soldier’s life is held so cheap, why should he sell it dearly?
By contrast, the Ukrainians have been innovative on the battlefield in order to spare their troops as far as possible. Though unforgiving of collaborators, they appear to have generally treated prisoners well.
Their morale has remained high, reflecting their technological and operational superiority. Superficially the conflict resembles a 20th century war of attrition, but it also has similarities with classical wars, such as those of the Greeks and Persians.
Putin’s second fatal blunder was to assume that he could divide and conquer. Europe and America, he believed, were too selfish, their interests too divergent and their elites too ready to appease Russia to make a united response to his aggression more than a remote, theoretical possibility.
He was encouraged in this assumption by the chaotic exit from Afghanistan in August 2021. If the West could scuttle ignominiously from a land for which so much blood and treasure had been sacrificed over 20 years, what chance did Ukraine stand of rallying support?
Putin was fortified in his delusion by the frantic efforts by the likes of Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz to dissuade him from invading. Even Joe Biden wavered, failing to mount effective deterrence and then offering to airlift Zelensky out, as if he were a mere client of the US president. “I need ammunition, not a ride,” was the Ukrainian’s immortal response.
There are still Westerners, on both Left and Right, who have fallen for Putin’s propaganda line. In the UK, elements of the hard left regard Ukraine as a right-wing issue, perhaps because of Boris Johnson’s advocacy. Among voters, however, there is still a broad consensus here in favour of Ukraine.
In the US, the ideological split is the opposite: Biden has welcomed Zelensky to Washington, while Trump’s supporters, such as the Fox TV host Tucker Carlson, have backed Putin.
Polls suggest that a majority of Republican supporters now think the US should cut back its support and broker a compromise, while most Democrats want Ukraine to be given the tools to finish the job.
The Biden administration has so far been generous with defensive weapons but wary of enabling Ukraine to strike back at Russia.
In Europe, public opinion is even more timorous and leaders sometimes risk resembling Lenin’s “useful idiots”. Chancellor Scholz, for example, speaks of “differences of opinion” with Putin; both he and Macron have implied that they would be quite happy to do business with the present Russian regime, once the status quo ante is restored.
Yet Nato has remained united behind Ukraine’s refusal to make territorial concessions, in part owing to the determination of its eastern members, particularly Poland and the Baltic states, to ensure that Russian aggression should not be rewarded, lest they be the next to suffer.
The British, too, have led the pro-Ukrainian faction of Nato from the start. Under Johnson and Liz Truss, Britain was second only to the US in the scale of its military aid. Rishi Sunak has been less hawkish, allowing the Germans to overtake us by that measure, but he too has visited Kyiv to pledge his support for what he believes is a just war.
So far, then, Putin has neither divided the West nor conquered Ukraine. It is still possible that, as the front line approaches the Crimean peninsula, the Western allies will fall out among themselves or with Kyiv over whether to support Zelensky’s uncompromising demand for a restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty within its pre-2014 borders, including Crimea. But the fantasies of Western disintegration that frequently emerge from the Kremlin are ever more implausible.
More likely is that Putin’s post-Soviet axis of authoritarian states, the Collective Security Treaty Organisation, and even the Russian Federation in its present form, will not long survive the end of his reign.
Putin’s third cardinal blunder was to assume that he had an omnipotent ally in the shape of “General Winter”. The weather would win the war for him, not so much by freezing his enemies on the battlefield, as in the case of Napoleon’s Grande Armée and Hitler’s Wehrmacht, but by leaving their economies at the mercy of his pipelines.
Putin’s plan relied on his missiles to knock out the Ukrainian grid, leaving the population without power, water and sanitation.
At the same time, he counted on his stranglehold over energy supplies – especially gas – to bring Europe to its knees, once the cost of domestic and commercial heating had plunged the democracies into an unprecedented economic and political crisis.
What made Putin’s calculations seem so fiendish was the fact that Western Europe has been financing his onslaught on Ukraine by paying for Russian energy at prices inflated by the war.
So confident was he that Nato members would abandon Ukraine once their own peoples began to protest that he sabotaged his own pipelines: Nord Stream 2 was blown up, with many in the West pointing fingers at Russia, and Nord Stream 1 was switched off.
This stratagem succeeded in temporarily driving up European prices. Yet Putin’s cunning plan was thwarted by the Germans, who not only reverted to coal and nuclear energy but hugely increased their gas storage facilities and stockpiled enough fuel to get through the winter – which has so far been blessedly mild.
Meanwhile Ukraine, with a little help from its friends, has been able to preserve most of its population from hypothermia. Ukrainian cities such as Kyiv, Odessa and Kharkiv have suffered severe power cuts, but emergency generators have so far kept services functioning.
Ukrainian forces have received millions of items of winter kit from the UK, Canada and other allies. Instead, it has been the poorly equipped Russian recruits who have been left to shiver in their trenches, as the Ukrainian military keeps up relentless pressure on the occupiers. General Winter has switched sides.
Putin’s fourth and fatal blunder was his failure to take seriously the man who has become his nemesis. Zelensky’s outstanding leadership was underestimated by Russian and American intelligence, though not by MI6.
Whereas Johnson always treated him with respect and quickly bonded with the Ukrainian president, Biden took months to establish a close rapport, while Macron and Scholz have yet to do the same.
Putin still refuses even to use Zelensky’s name, in public at least. He sees himself as a world-historical figure, to be compared to the great architects of empire. Yet Zelensky’s name will be remembered long after Putin’s is forgotten.
Past Russian despots left substantial legacies: Ivan the Terrible created the Tsardom and made Moscow supreme; Peter the Great built St Petersburg and opened Russia to the West; Catherine the Great conquered Crimea and made Russia a great power; Alexander I defeated Napoleon.
Even the worst, Stalin, left the Soviet Union more powerful than he found it, at a great cost in blood.
But Putin? He has robbed Russians of the modest liberties they gained under Gorbachev and Yeltsin. By denying the world Ukrainian grain, he has reverted to Stalin’s tactic of using famine as a weapon of mass destruction. After nearly a quarter of a century of his rule, Russia has joined Iran as a marginalised, impoverished and reviled rogue state.
In 1991, before the rise of Putin, I interviewed one of the great Soviet dissidents: Yelena Bonner, the widow of Andrei Sakharov.
She had begun her human rights campaigns under Stalin, who murdered her father and sent her mother to the Gulag. When I met her she had hopes for Yeltsin, but she broke with him over Chechnya. And then came Putin.
In 2010, aged 86, she was still marching and signing petitions: “Putin must go.” At that time she said: “How does one save one’s motherland? I didn’t know then [under Stalin] and I don’t know now.”
Putin’s days are clearly numbered. If his Ukrainian debacle heralds the demise of the evil empire – not merely Soviet, as Ronald Reagan thought, but Russian too – it could be a blessing in disguise.
Will Russians learn from his legacy? We can only pray that they will indeed save their motherland, by abandoning his imperial dream forever and leaving Ukraine in peace.