Putin is already defeated and shouting at Russians, not us

Above all, the thing to remember is that Vladimir Putin didn’t expect it to turn out like this. By now, seven months after he gave the command to attack, eastern Ukraine was supposed to be formally annexed to Russia following the necessary plebiscites.

A pliant Vichy regime in Kyiv would curse the dead-or-fled Zelensky as a fool and get on with the business of rooting out “Nazis”. The West would fulminate and sanction for a while but a rejuvenated Trump, rising partly on the back of Biden’s humiliation, might say it was all Europe’s problem and promise to hold a “best-ever” meeting with the victorious Russian president. Gas and oil would once again flow freely westwards, passing the money going the other way.

So Putin’s address yesterday was the address of a defeated man. As such it was one of two speeches he could have made. The speech ungiven, of course, was the one that began to prepare the Russian people for a Kremlin peace initiative. We can imagine some of its rhetorical components: the blood shed, the danger of escalation, Russia’s historic commitment to world peace, how most objectives have been met with cast-iron guarantees of autonomy for the gallant Donbas, yadayada.

But of course not. Instead we got the only other possibility: the doubling down. There was the illusion of limited victory, embodied in the promise of fake votes in the “liberated territories”, the “whatever-it-takes” rhetoric of more soldiers and the suggestion of incredible but unused weapons.

Crowds gather to view destroyed Russian tanks and armoured vehicles on display in Kyiv, Ukraine. Picture: Getty Images.

However, there was really only one new proposition in the speech. It was that a number of Russians – up to 300,000 – could now expect to be conscripted to serve in Ukraine. The question being, if things were going according to plan, why would such conscripts be needed?

Putin’s explanation was the geopolitical equivalent of the old football lament, “we wuz robbed”. According to Putin it wasn’t the much-derided Ukrainian Nazis who had stopped the special operation being smooth and fast but the nefarious West. Not only had Nato supplied weapons to Zelensky, it had, Putin claimed, been running the whole war. Which of course was unfair and has led to losses which necessitate this unpopular call-up. This demonstrates who Putin’s audience was and who it wasn’t. He almost certainly doesn’t believe what he’s saying and western governments know it’s not true. And as the current meeting at the UN shows, even among the most pedantically non-aligned nations Putin has lost the room. It’s the Russian people who need convincing. So it was necessary to migrate the threat from being one made by Ukrainians against the peaceful folk-dancers of Luhansk to one being made by the West against Russia itself. “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, to defend Russia and our people we will use all means we have,” he said, before adding uncertainly: “This is not a bluff”.

Of course, it’s this bit that has received most attention outside Russia because it’s the section that contains the word “nuclear” in proximity to the promise to meet an invasion of Russia (which no one is proposing) with all the force at its disposal.

Russian Yars RS-24 intercontinental ballistic missile systems move through Red Square during the Victory Day military parade. Picture: AFP.

Even this warning to his people, that external aggressors were poised to invade or destroy them, was undermined by his own emphasis that “we are talking about partial mobilisation: that is, only citizens who are currently in the reserve will be subject to conscription”. But who with the enemy at the gates only partially mobilises?

No, the claim Putin made that Nato was using “nuclear blackmail” against Russia – blackmail which might backfire on the alliance – has to be seen almost entirely in the context of selling that mobilisation to his own citizens. If people over here are frightened by his words, then that’s just a small bonus for Putin.

The fact is, as he knows, no one in the West is threatening the use of nuclear weapons, just as no one is threatening as much as a verst of Russia’s internationally recognised territory. Yet I can hear (and to an extent feel myself) that terrible worry about a 1914 descent into continent-wide carnage, except this time with nukes.

What if Putin, using the mad autocrat’s declension after fake referendums, declares eastern Ukraine to be territory integral to Russia? And therefore any Ukrainian attack there to be an invasion, and any western weapons used in such action deemed to make the suppliers party to a full act of war? Are Nato countries then fair game for attack, and do the terrible weapons get to be used, up to and including nukes? Sleep easy. In the first instance western weapons have already been used by Ukraine against bases in Russia. Second, if you were Russia, who would you attack? Poland? In that case expect your planes to be shot out of the sky and your bases destroyed. Maybe you could invade the Baltic states? Well, yeah, does it look like they can’t defend themselves?

A Russian rocket boat takes part in the 'Vostok-2022' military exercises at the Peter the Great Gulf of the Sea of Japan. Picture: AFP.

What would you attack these enemies with? Your special forces which, like your military operations, don’t look quite so special any more? Cruise missiles? You’re running out. Thermobaric weapons? Done that.

So battlefield nukes? Presumably, in the nightmares of many, these are used on Ukrainian forces. But to what tactical effect? The user becomes the first country to drop a nuclear bomb since Nagasaki.

Such threats, said Putin in his speech, were a double-edged weapon. The wind, he said, could change and blow the other way. The deep irony of this is obvious, since the only person who ever mentions possible use of nukes is Putin himself. And he’s right. It’s a threat which is potentially far more dangerous to the maker than the target.

At the UN, after Putin’s speech, Joe Biden addressed all of us and President Zelensky followed him. Whoever on God’s earth Putin was talking to in Moscow, despite the tone of the coverage over here, it wasn’t us. There would be little point. The number of benighted self-blamers in the West has shrunk with every Russian atrocity until it’s down to its hardcore of Stalinists, career pacifists and hard-right isolationists. Even that skittish beast, the western voter who will want to ditch Zelensky to avoid a winter of hardship, turns out to be largely imaginary. Of course it’s how people like Putin imagined us – decadent, sexually deviant, timid and unwilling to make sacrifices for freedom. But when democracies come together and mobilise, they are formidable. And the autocrats end up in a bunker shouting at their own people.

The Times