Why Putin Will Never Agree to De-escalate – Foreign Policy

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Argument: Why Putin Will Never Agree to De-escalate
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As Ukraine accelerates its counteroffensive across several sections of the front, a rational person might conclude that 2023 must surely be the last year of Russia’s war against its neighbor. Russian military resources are depleted, Moscow’s long and bloody winter offensive in the Donbas has yielded meager results, and Russian society longs for the return of prewar stability. Logic dictates that the Kremlin has no better option than to seize any opportunity to cut short its disastrous war, saving face as far as possible by clinging to the shreds of its territorial gains. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed this line of thinking at a press conference this week, when he said that a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive could have the effect of “causing Putin to finally focus on negotiating an end to the war that he started.”
As Ukraine accelerates its counteroffensive across several sections of the front, a rational person might conclude that 2023 must surely be the last year of Russia’s war against its neighbor. Russian military resources are depleted, Moscow’s long and bloody winter offensive in the Donbas has yielded meager results, and Russian society longs for the return of prewar stability. Logic dictates that the Kremlin has no better option than to seize any opportunity to cut short its disastrous war, saving face as far as possible by clinging to the shreds of its territorial gains. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed this line of thinking at a press conference this week, when he said that a successful Ukrainian counteroffensive could have the effect of “causing Putin to finally focus on negotiating an end to the war that he started.”
Such calculations, however, are based on rational cost-benefit analysis and underestimate the extent to which this war is the personal project of one man: Russian President Vladimir Putin. He started it single-handedly, based on his own distorted perceptions and disregarding the opinion of Russian society and ruling elites. He has continued to wage it for more than a year, defying all common sense, and there is no indication that he will ever wish to stop it. Indeed, continuing the war brings him numerous political benefits, while stopping it would offer him little but new risks.
There is no doubt that Russian elites and society largely share Putin’s resentment of the West, disregard for Ukrainian statehood, and belief that Russia is a great power entitled to use military force against other states at will. There is little sympathy for the plight of the Ukrainians among Russians of all social standing, and even less appetite for turning Russia into a democratic and responsible member of the international community. Still, many Russians significantly diverge with Putin on how much they are prepared to sacrifice in the standoff with the West.
With all the caveats about conducting opinion polls in authoritarian states, surveys indicate that steadfast popular support for Putin does not preclude the majority of Russians from perceiving their current situation as extremely stressful and welcoming immediate peace talks with Ukraine—whatever that may mean, as it’s unclear how many Russians would support giving up any of the conquered territories. Private conversations among the Russian elites also reveal major discontent with the mounting costs of the war and no understanding of its purpose. Still, the invasion goes on according to Putin’s wishes, and no one in Russia has the means to override his will.
For Putin, the invasion presents an easy way to implement the goals he had struggled for years to realize in peacetime. This has always been Putin’s trademark style of ruling: He believes that direct attempts to steer the leviathan of the Russian state are futile, and instead prefers to force the system to adapt to crises and faits accomplis he himself created.
There is little sympathy for the plight of the Ukrainians among Russians of all social standing, and even less appetite for turning Russia into a democratic and responsible state.
With the invasion of Ukraine, Putin has honed this managerial approach to perfection. With one decision, he created enough momentum to send Russia hurtling in the direction of developments he has long wanted to see. Take the reorientation of Russia’s foreign trade to make it less dependent on the West, which Putin has aimed for since 2014. Eight years of devising strategies, elaborating policies, and taking various piecemeal steps all achieved less than one year of all-out war. In 2022, the country’s trade turnover with Europe more than halved, while trade with China grew by more than 40 percent and grew 2.6 times with India.
For years, Russia’s businesses and inept bureaucracy struggled to develop the infrastructure needed for cooperation with Asia. But the war has led Russia to mobilize its resources and finance a range of Asia-oriented transport projects, from a railway link to the Indian Ocean via Iran and Azerbaijan (which had been discussed since 2005) to a new gas pipeline to China, which is now within reach after more than a decade of talks. Decreasing Russia’s dependency on the U.S. dollar and Western financial system has been the government’s priority since the 1990s, but it took a full-scale war to reduce the share of Russian exports paid in U.S. dollars or euros from nearly 90 percent in January 2022 to below 50 percent in December of the same year.
Objectives such as substituting Western imports with domestic products, having Russians vacation inside the country, and restoring the prestige of the Russian armed forces have been on Putin’s agenda for decades, but in the end, only war proved capable of making Russian bureaucrats, businessmen, and wider society implement them for real. Parts of the Moscow elite might still enjoy their Italian villas, Mediterranean yachts, and French delicacies, but their numbers shrink every time the West introduces another package of sanctions.
The international developments brought on by the war dovetail even more closely with Putin’s long-held ambitions. Minsk’s involvement in the aggression against Ukraine has sealed Belarus’s isolation from the West and pushed the country into unprecedented integration with Russia—with little pressure required from Moscow. Meanwhile, Europe’s loss of access to cheap Russian gas is a permanent thorn in the side of trans-Atlantic unity, potentially creating new sources of tension between Europe and the United States.
The freezing of the Russian Central Bank’s foreign reserves has flamed fears around the globe that Washington and Brussels will weaponize their currencies for other purposes. Russia’s war has also created a new bone of contention between the West and China. Many developing countries have seized on it to be more assertive toward the United States and Europe.
In reality, of course, none of these developments are as straightforward as they may look to Putin—and their costs for Russia are immense. But the key lesson he has drawn from Russian history is that if you want to achieve something worthy in such a vast and disorganized country, the cost will inevitably be high. While the losses will fade with time, the achievements will be remembered by later generations. And even if the costs are high, Putin has not found anything that can rival the war in its destructive efficiency for shaping the history of Russia and the world.
In contrast, Putin himself has little to gain from stopping the war any time soon, especially if the Ukrainian counteroffensive proves successful. Sure, ending the war would save thousands of lives, significantly relieve the pressure on the Russian economy and society, allow Russia to stabilize its international position, and so on. But for Putin personally, putting a stop to the conflict would be a disaster for his position in Russian domestic politics and history.
No matter how repressive the Russian regime has become, ending the war would inevitably prompt public reflection. There would be many questions about the invasion’s purposes, its high cost, and whether the result justified that cost. Moreover, Putin would have to face those questions in a situation where it would no longer be possible to justify harsher repression by citing the exceptional circumstances of war.
Regardless of how worn-out Russians may be, therefore, Putin will stick to his selective perception of reality, looking for reasons for and ways to further escalate his addictive crusade against the current world order. Putin has not even made any bones about his intentions: His key decisions over the past months—from tightening the military draft system to massively investing in weapons production—clearly indicate that he is bracing his country for a long war. It is hard to see how the upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive could affect these calculations, regardless of how successful it turns out to be.
No one in Russia appears to be able to stop Putin, but that is not to say they are eager to continue his undertaking once he is out of the picture. Even then, Russia is unlikely to get a democratically inclined, let alone pro-Western leadership. Rather, Putin will most likely be succeeded by a group of his henchmen who share a similar world outlook, including his view of the West and Ukraine.
Still, even if autocratic and paranoid, the next Russian leadership is bound to be less oriented toward a single man at the top. It has been a consistent pattern in Russian and Soviet history that harsh autocratic rulers purged any potential rivals so thoroughly that their departure was inevitably followed by a less powerful, more collective leadership, with none of its members able to impose their whims on all the others. By the very fact of being a collective, Russia’s rulers after Putin will inevitably tread more cautiously, elaborate decisions more thoroughly, and react more rationally, especially on the issues related to the war.
This difference may prove decisive. Given the current state of ever-increasing tensions, it is worth pondering the question of who in Russia is more likely to press the nuclear button: a lonely autocrat obsessed with historical grandeur, or a group of gray apparatchiks bogged down in their internal squabbles? The wrong answer may cost us the planet.
Maxim Samorukov is a fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and the managing editor of Carnegie Politika. Twitter: @SamorukovM
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