Diplomacy is preferable to war, but it is always grounded in negotiation and compromise rather than victory and defeat. Successful negotiators grasp the other side’s motives and objectives. Yet, much Western analysis of recent events in Ukraine has lacked any such understanding. Ad hominem attacks on Vladimir Putin’s character or sanity will not help. Comprehending his motives just might.
When congratulated on the Red Army’s capture of Berlin during World War II, Soviet leader Josef Stalin replied, “Yes, but Czar Alexander got all the way to Paris.” Putin probably does not intend to reach Paris, but he clearly wants to replace Europe’s post-Cold War political order with something new and very different from either the Soviet Union or Czarist Russia.
Putin, like many Russians, feels humiliated by the status quo. Just as many Germans did after World War I, he believes that Russia was never really defeated in the Cold War and thus deserved a better postwar settlement. He is not completely mistaken. Unlike World War II, the Cold War was not followed by a Marshall Plan to rebuild the losing side and bring it into the community of nations. Instead, Russia was kept at arm’s length politically while its economy collapsed into hyperinflation that destroyed the savings of the middle class, which is what happened in Weimar Germany.
Putin is also a realist who reads history. In 1807, Russia’s czar, Alexander I, and Napoleon Bonaparte signed the Treaty of Tilsit to “ensure the peace and tranquility of the world.” Five years later, Napoleon invaded Russia. In 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact. Two years later, Adolf Hitler invaded Russia. That invasion left an indelible scar far deeper than most Americans realize as 40 Soviet citizens perished for every American in World War II.
NATO’s claim to be a purely defensive alliance is suspect to Moscow, not only because of historical betrayals but also because Western military interventions in the Balkans and Afghanistan hardly seem defensive to Putin. NATO’s broken promise, real or imagined, that it would not expand east only adds to his concern.
Putin is indeed trying to construct an empire — just not one that looks like the Soviet Union. As a former KGB officer, he understands all too well the inherent weaknesses and contradictions that doomed that superpower. Nor is he a romantic trying to restore the czar’s vanished realm. Putin is a coldly rational strategist determined to create a modern, secure, 21st-century Russian empire, and for over 20 years, everything he has done in terms of domestic, foreign and defense policy has been focused on that goal.
Putin has achieved a great deal. His new empire stretches from Poland to Alaska and from the Arctic Ocean to Syria. It includes Russia, Belarus and Crimea. The war in Ukraine is intended to bring more of that country under his control. However, Putin’s vision often confuses us because it differs from our traditional concept of a centrally controlled empire. Instead, Putin’s Russia resembles many ancient empires with numerous levels of interaction between the center and its client states. Russia is linked with Belarus by a union treaty and strong economic and military ties, which are becoming ever deeper. The former Ukrainian province of Crimea was formally absorbed by Russia in 2014. Donetsk and Luhansk are quasi-independent Russian protectorates, as are Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia and Transnistria in Moldova.
Russian client states in the territory of the former Soviet Union are organized into two regional alliances. A military alliance called the Collective Security Treaty Organization has six members: Russia, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. The economic alliance called the Eurasian Economic Union includes the same countries, except for Tajikistan. Thanks to Russia’s intervention in its civil war, Syria has become Russia’s latest client state. In a remarkable demonstration of fealty to Moscow, Syrian President Bashar Assad has offered 40,000 troops to support Russia’s conquest of Ukraine. Thanks to Syria, Putin now has a powerful naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean. Even Czar Alexander never got that far.
Putin’s new empire is neither a revival of the centralized czarist system nor the federalized Soviet Union. It is something completely different, a multinational defense and economic union resembling NATO and the European Union, with Moscow playing the roles of Washington and Brussels. Even without its client states, Russia is self-sufficient in food, energy and armaments. As one of the world’s largest wheat, oil and weapons exporters, it has far less need for U.S. dollars than nations importing these goods. Even harsh Western sanctions are unlikely to dissuade an empire builder whose parents lived through the 1941 siege of Leningrad during which 800,000 Russian civilians died, including many from starvation.
Even cut off from Western markets, Putin’s Russia will remain a great power with its own resources, ambitions and nuclear arsenal. It is a nation we will have to deal with and one that, for our own sake, it would be wise to understand.
David Rundell is the author of “Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads” and a former chief of mission at the American Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Retired Ambassador Michael Gfoeller is a former political adviser to U.S. Central Command. Both are partners at Arabia Analytica.
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