In 2004, former Australian diplomat in Moscow Bobo Lo met Russian President Vladimir Putin for the first time. It was just three days after Russia’s biggest tragedy in peacetime – the horrific Beslan school siege by Chechen terrorists that left 186 children dead, some of them on their first day of school.

“I was expecting him to cancel, of course,” says Lo, now a fellow at the Lowy Institute. “Instead, he went ahead with this five-hour meeting.”

Lo’s first impression of Putin was much like the Western caricature – the cold-blooded KGB officer, the calculating chess player. “I thought he was a master manipulator,” says Lo. “He seemed to play emotions like notes on a piano. So, he’d crack a joke, then he’d be angry, then conciliatory, then firm, then soft.”

But, having met Putin many more times since, that opinion has changed. Putin is less calculated, less cautious than he once was, Lo says. He’s become more paranoid and more punitive, and that makes him more dangerous. In declaring war on Ukraine, the Russian leader’s naked emotion showed, his voice shaking with anger moments before the first missiles fell on Ukrainian cities. “He’s obsessed with Ukraine, it’s his unfinished business, his blind spot,” Lo says. “Not bringing it back [into the fold] away from the West is the great failure of his presidency. It goes to his core.”

Experts warn that now Putin has gone all-in, he has few limits left. “He cannot lose,” says Lo.

So, how far might Putin go? Is Ukraine the start of a deeper push into Europe? And could Putin’s war leave him vulnerable at home?

Why did Putin invade?

Although Western analysts have long tried to divine the thoughts of Putin, most were still shocked by the scale of the invasion he unleashed on February 24. (Germany’s spy chief was reportedly caught unawares in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, and had to be extracted in a special operation.)

The months-long build-up of Russian troops at the Ukrainian border was not a bluff, after all, but the full-scale pincer assault Western intelligence had uncovered – hitting not just the east and the south where Russia has been seizing territory since 2014, but the north too.

Putin has justified the attack through a fiction of Ukrainian aggression and a fascist regime in need of removal (Ukraine’s government is democratically elected and headed by Volodymyr Zelensky, who is Jewish). But Putin is also trying to rewrite history. Ukraine is part of Russia, he claims, an invention of the Soviet Union’s founder, Lenin. He sees Kyiv, in particular, as a key prize – the birthplace of both Ukrainian and Russian cultures and the seat of the Ukrainian government he wants to overthrow.

This kind of “mythological thinking”, as Ukrainian expert Professor Marko Pavlyshyn calls it – Putin’s “Slavophile vision for a unified empire of Russian speakers, Orthodox and friendly to an autocrat” – speaks to the President’s admiration not just for past Soviet dictators, such as Stalin, but of Russia’s former tsars. “Even the Soviets acknowledged other nationalities in their republics,” says Pavlyshyn.

There may also be a religious dimension to Putin’s aggression, making his motives harder to discern by Western analysts.

Putin, who remembers the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 as a “catastrophe”, wants to restore Russia’s standing as a world power, extending his sphere of influence in eastern Europe to keep a buffer between Russia and the West. He questions why NATO, which formed after World War II to contain the USSR, has continued to expand since the Soviet Union broke apart. In 2008, he warned that talk of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO was a “red line”, and later sent troops into both countries to seize territory. Before the latest invasion of Ukraine, he demanded that NATO not only disavow talk of Ukraine ever joining its alliance but pull back its forces from eastern Europe, effectively rewriting old boundaries agreed in 1997.

Time is a factor too. As Putin nears his 70th birthday, after more than 22 years in power, experts say his mind has increasingly turned to his legacy. “When it comes to Ukraine, all his plans have always been thwarted,” says Pavlyshyn.

Putin must have thought he had picked the right moment to invade, when he considered the US and its allies weak and distracted, says Lo. “There was the messy withdrawal from Afghanistan, the focus on China”, new leadership in parts of Europe, and a pandemic. Instead, it has been Ukraine’s President Zelensky, the TV comedian turned “extraordinary wartime leader” who has rallied his people to fight and drawn Europe’s attention to the Kremlin’s imperialist ambitions, sparking not just tougher sanctions on Russia but a drastic arming up in nearby NATO countries.

There may be a religious dimension to Putin’s aggression too, making his motives harder to discern by Western analysts. In 2018, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church split from the Russian Orthodox Church – an organisation close to Putin – in what could be interpreted as yet another “attack” on Russia, according to US intelligence scholar John Schindler. Kyiv has been called the “Jerusalem” of Russia’s Orthodoxy, where it began.

Has Putin miscalculated?

Most experts think so, but that doesn’t mean he will call off the invasion.

Lo notes that Putin had good cause to underestimate the Western reaction. In 2014, when he seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, he didn’t face sanctions until MH17 was shot down during fighting in the east, and since then, he has managed to fortify his economy, to some extent, against foreign financial penalties.

While some commentators have accused the West of antagonising Putin by bringing more ex-Soviet republics into NATO, Lo sees the invasion as a story of Putin’s hubris, not his insecurity. “This is not the action of a man feeling weakness. This is a man feeling supremely good about his chances,” he says.

“What the Ukrainians have done is create a different reality where Europeans have finally had to confront the problem of Russia.”

Bobo Lo

More damning, says Pavlyshyn, is the apparent failure of Russian intelligence that led Putin to underestimate Ukraine. “It [suggests] this mythology is something he actually believes in, and his advisers are afraid to challenge that view.”

When Putin announced the attack, Pavlyshyn recalls the fear that gripped him in Australia for his parents’ homeland. “But in a way I’d been caught up in the mythology too, of the Russian conventional war machine as enormous, extremely well-led, practically invincible, after such successful campaigns in Georgia and Syria. That’s now unravelling before our eyes.” He points to widespread accounts of soldiers stranded without fuel or food, or surrendering.

Ukraine’s army, meanwhile, is vastly outgunned by Russia, but it has also grown since fighting began in the east in 2014. Ukrainians have held off Russian advances on key cities with remarkable success, even as Russia steps up more destructive bombing raids. This has embarrassed the West into enforcing much tougher sanctions than ever before, says Lo, such as kicking out some Russian institutions from SWIFT, the payment system connecting the world’s banks, and even banning Russian oil and gas imports. “None of that would have happened, especially not so fast, if Ukraine had folded quickly like everyone expected. [The West] would have just had to, quote unquote, be pragmatic and deal with the Russian occupation. What the Ukrainians have done is create a different reality where Europeans have finally had to confront the problem of Russia.”

Finland and Sweden, for instance, are now reportedly contemplating NATO membership, and even the famously neutral Switzerland has slapped sanctions on Russia. Germany has not only called off the major Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia and reversed its previous refusal to send weapons to Ukraine, but has also drastically ramped up its defence budget “departing from a major plank of German foreign and defence policy” since World War II, says Lo.

Meanwhile, many Russian soldiers were expecting to be welcomed as liberators by Ukrainians, Pavlyshyn says. But instead, whole towns are coming out to stand down tanks or berate troops. “Some people are even taking down streets signs and putting up signs reading ‘go f--- yourself’.”

Ukraine, a country with its own distinct history, has been close to Russia in the past, Pavlyshyn says, but that changed with the seizure of Crimea and now, under invasion, the “brotherhood” Putin speaks of is evaporating fast. “The view of Russia as the enemy is now almost universal. Putin accuses Lenin of having created Ukraine, but he has created Ukraine [today]. He’s created a unified country attached to every part of its own territory, and its people. I’m not sure he understands, but I think that is possibly his most impressive achievement.”

How far might Putin go in Ukraine?

Putin, who has already been accused of war crimes in Ukraine, may look to capitalise on wins in the south by forging a channel between his forces in the east and the southern base of Crimea. The size of Kyiv makes it a difficult city to take, and its historical significance to both Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church means he may be more reluctant to bomb it into submission than other key cities.

“But I think there are no limits for Putin now,” Lo says.” He cannot afford to lose, there is no draw option here. Even a so-called peace agreement that gives Ukrainians something of what they still hold would be considered a loss, however it’s spun in the Russian media as ‘Putin the Merciful’. Even if he achieves a partial victory, it won’t be enough. Since losing’s the absolute worst outcome for him, all the stuff we would regard as intolerable, genocidal even, he [may] think of as legitimate.”

Pavlyshyn no longer thinks Ukraine’s military can be defeated quickly but agrees that Putin will not pull back without a win, and Zelensky will not cede Ukrainian territory. “Unless there is a kind of palace revolt [against Putin] which seems unlikely, then the only thing is to offer him some kind of way out which can be spun, not as a military defeat but [as] the achievement of peace in our time or whatever.”

Putin may have been counting on installing his own puppet regime and then withdrawing to a large degree from Ukraine, but Lo says a big occupation will be necessary to keep his puppets in power. “It’s one thing to win the conventional war, but how do you manage the insurgency? For example, the US effectively won the war in Iraq, in Afghanistan, then lost the insurgency. You have more than 40 million Ukrainians.”

Ideally for Moscow, Zelensky would have already fled the fighting, Lo says. Now, even if the Ukrainian leader is killed, he expects this will only inflame the country’s resistance further.

Putin has traditionally been thought of as a clever opportunist, an ex-KGB officer and judoka. But Pavlyshyn says emotion appears to be driving him now towards a costly and bloody occupation. “No one can see inside his head but we thought that there might be method in his madness. It’s beginning to look as though there’s madness in his method.”

Could Putin invade other countries or spark a bigger war?

While no country has committed troops to defend Ukraine, many have been sending weapons, and calls are growing for NATO to establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine – which would help save civilians from Russian bombing but risks a wider war.

Conflict could spill over the border in other ways, too. If a major attack on a Ukrainian city also caused damage in a nearby NATO country, the alliance could come to its defence. And many suspect Putin also has ambitions beyond just Ukraine. Moldova and Georgia are not part of NATO either and have both already had parts of their territory seized by Russian-backed separatists. Kremlin ally Belarus stoked fears further this month when it displayed a battle map showing an arrow pointing to Moldova.

“As long as Putin sits in the Kremlin, you can kiss order in Europe goodbye.”

Bobo Lo

Even those already in the NATO alliance, or countries traditionally close to Russia such as Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary, are sounding the alarm. “If Putin is not stopped he will go further,” warned Gabrielius Landsbergis, foreign minister of Lithuania, which has declared a state of emergency. Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki agreed: “Tomorrow Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, as well as Poland, could be next in line.”

Lo says a wider conflict in Europe is now very possible. He sees particular potential in the Baltic Sea region, where Russia’s militarised exclave of Kaliningrad sits between Poland and Lithuania, and in the Black Sea, where countries such as Bulgaria, Turkey and Romania come into play. Whatever happens in Ukraine, the relationship between Russia and the West will never be the same. “There may be an accommodation with Russia in due course but, as long as Putin sits in the Kremlin, you can kiss order in Europe goodbye.”

What about nuclear weapons?

Putin’s decision to put Russia’s nuclear defences on standby earlier this month has been widely viewed as a warning to the West – a sign of his willingness to escalate the crisis. While the US has refused to respond in kind by raising its own nuclear alerts, analysts say the mere fact that he has invoked them increases the risk of a miscalculation.

Already Russian forces have seized Chernobyl, the shuttered site of the world’s worst nuclear power meltdown, and attacked Ukrainian nuclear facilities, including Europe’s largest nuclear plant, Zaporizhzhia. Some Ukrainians worry Russia could use the radioactive sites to hold the region hostage. Lo says we don’t need to panic about a nuclear winter just yet. “He has ground left to cover with conventional weapons before he gets to nukes.” (The White House has now warned Putin may deploy chemical weapons.)

But experts agree a scenario where short-range battlefield nukes are deployed in Ukraine is not off the table after Russia changed its policy to allow their limited use as “defence”. This marks a major departure from the thinking around nuclear weapons since the Cold War, where mutually assured destruction kept weapons locked away.

Could the war backfire for Putin at home in Russia?

Some Russia experts predict that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine will ultimately cost him his hold on power. While previously Putin has been accused of using war to distract from domestic woes, Lo says there hasn’t been a “rally around the flag” moment this time. In fact, Russians have been braving arrest to protest against the war by the thousands (and some high-profile Russians have spoken out too). If many Russian soldiers die or citizens find themselves increasingly cut off from the world due to punishing sanctions, that public disquiet could reach a dangerous new pitch.

Still, Lo thinks “it’s survivable” for Putin. While the West and Ukraine have dominated the global narrative, cutting through Kremlin disinformation, Putin’s propaganda is largely winning within Russia. If people are against the war, many believe it is the fault of Ukraine and the West. Censorship has reached unprecedented new heights, akin to China’s, as the Kremlin shuts down remaining independent media and social media sites and arrests dissidents.

The history of Russia has generally seen regime change come from within the elite itself, Lo says, rather than through popular uprisings. “The people are important, of course, but if things get to a serious threat of nuclear weapons, or he [Putin] keeps turning Russia into another North Korea [pariah state] someone in his inner circle could do something. That’s at least a possibility now. Of course, who’s going to stick their head over the parapet and pay the price? Is there enough co-ordination among the elites? I mean, you do think about the last days of Stalin [when the leader’s sudden illness and death caused a brief but frenzied power struggle].”

Russia’s oligarchs and elites are already feeling the pinch of Western sanctions, but their influence has been limited since Putin became president and radically reorganised the state into his own “power vertical” with himself at the top. Most officials around Putin were reportedly surprised by the February 24 invasion, with only his “narrowest circle” aware of the plans. Some Russian politicians who voted in favour of the initial recognition of breakaway territories in Ukraine’s east have since said publicly they thought it was to ensure peace in the east, not to bomb Kyiv.

Meanwhile, those close to Putin are divided, says Russia-based international relations expert Dr Pavel Luzin. “There is no consensus towards the future among the Russian elites any more”, he says, especially as sanctions begin to paralyse the government.

He sees the possibility of a Russian defeat in Ukraine too, which could also threaten Putin’s survival. The president lacks a deep power base beyond his old intelligence community, Luzin says, comparing such a situation to Muammar Gaddafi’s weakened hold on power after the country was defeated in Chad in 1987.

Whatever happens, Lo thinks the invasion has done Russia only harm. It’s reclaimed its spot as public enemy number one, but not as a superpower. “Russia tends to fight wars because they have so few instruments of projecting real influence left. One of the only silver linings to this tragedy may be that the world transitions faster to renewables so it can [sever] its dependence on Russian oil and gas – but there’s not really any. It’s one of the most appalling tragedies in my lifetime.”

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