Putin’s game of roulette over Ukraine

How to keep Russia’s ruthless leader in check without triggering a war.

Russian President Vladimir Putin appears relaxed during a meeting with Russia's national team ahead of the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. Picture: AFP

The crisis confronting Europe, over the fate of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin, has deep roots going back centuries. But it also is based on the reactionary nationalist politics and thuggery by which Putin has kept himself master of Russia for the past 22 years. The historical roots need to be understood. They leave open, in principle, constructive solutions to the current tensions. Putin’s thinking and actions are another matter.

In 2005, a year after the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, Putin made a remarkable statement that takes us to the heart of how he sees Russia and geopolitics. “It should be recognised,” he declared, “that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the (20th) century. For the Russian people, it became a real drama. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. The epidemic of disintegration also spread to Russia itself.”

At times it is suggested that Putin, an ex-KGB officer, seeks to rebuild the Soviet Union. But it’s not that simple. In fact, he has declared that anyone who sought to do such a thing would be brainless.

Rather, as Steven Lee Myers pointed out in 2015 in The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin, he seeks to restore “something much older, richer and deeper: the idea of the Russian nation, the imperium of the ‘third Rome’ ”. That’s a notion that took shape in the Russian heartland after the fall of Constantinople and the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries.

In that sense, the mind of Putin is comparable to that of reactionary, populist political leaders and demagogues elsewhere. His problem is that a less reactionary, more democratic, nationalism inspires those in Ukraine, the Baltic States and small countries such as Georgia to want to protect their independence from Russia.

Putin and his followers may believe in the great mission of Moscow to dominate the Slavic lands and their peripheries. A great many others wish to be free of precisely that Russian chauvinist dream. And NATO has been fostering those wishes. That’s what is in play right now. As a consequence, things are finely balanced and Europe – Old Europe, as former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld condescendingly used to dub it – is on the brink of war.

The deep historical background is, therefore, important to recall at this juncture. Moscow, or the Duchy of Muscovy, as it used to be called in pre-Romanov times, is more than 1000 years old.

But 1000 years ago it was not the dominant state in what would later grow into the Russian Empire. Between the ninth and the 13th centuries, that state was Kiev Rus, a state with its capital in Kiev (the present capital of Ukraine), which stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Between the 13th and 16th centuries, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania took its place and at its height was the largest state in Europe. Though steadily shrinking, it lasted until 1795, like Poland, when it was partitioned between Russia, Prussia and Austria. In its heyday, it included present-day Lithuania, Belarus, parts of Ukraine, Latvia, Poland, Russia and Moldova. Putin and his Russian nationalist followers may dream of Russia as the natural cultural and geopolitical leader of the Slavic world. Others have different histories and dreams. The people of Ukraine and Lithuania are among them.

But the problem with Putin is not simply his overweening nationalism. It is not his ideology that is the most objectionable thing about him. Russia, after all, does have a rich culture and a proud past. The problem is that he rules as a kleptocratic despot and a menace to everything the liberal democracies put in place after World War II in an effort to prevent a recurrence of fascism and the catastrophic upheavals it triggered between the 1920s and the ’40s. There is a great deal about Putin that is redolent of ’30s fascism.

The many faces of Vladimir Putin, as seen on cups for sale in Saint Petersburg.

Unfortunately, with Russia, as with China, the liberal democracies have been very slow to wake up to how serious the challenge to their order and expectations has become. Ukraine has become a test case of the willingness and capacity of NATO and the EU to stand up when it counts.

Putin is calling their bluff and has been working assiduously for years to undermine their unity, their confidence and their nerve.

He also has been defending his dominance in Russia through the suppression of all meaningful opposition and the assassination of critics at home and very brazenly abroad, as Heidi Blake documents in From Russia With Blood: Putin’s Ruthless Killing Campaign and Secret War on the West (2019).

Putin already has pulled Georgia and Belarus into his orbit. He has annexed Crimea from Ukraine by force and fraud. He has been blatantly interfering in and pressuring Ukraine, and the push-back from the West has been equivocal and half-hearted. Given the disarray in Washington in recent years, the detachment of Britain from the EU, the decay of resolve in Germany to remain the backbone of NATO and its dependence on Russian oil and gas, things are at a precarious point.

Meanwhile, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has suppressed the democratic movement in Hong Kong and is threatening Taiwan. Moscow and Beijing behave in similar ways and are talking closely about how to break the US-led world order. There is growing speculation that they may co-ordinate their moves and invade Ukraine and Taiwan simultaneously, catching the overstretched and war-weary US and its wavering allies in disarray. That’s how troubling the geopolitical situation has become, 30 years after the end of the Cold War.

It seems every generation must learn that the price of peace is vigilance and collective security. Winston Churchill observed, in the preface to his history of World War II, that the war was quite unnecessary, had the Western allies only had the vision and strategic will to enforce the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and prevent the remilitarisation of Germany. But the 20 years between the first and second world wars instead were squandered. Adolf Hitler was appeased in the name of “peace with honour”. The consequence was dishonour and then war.

The Netflix drama Munich: The Edge of War, a fictional account of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia for the sake of “peace with honour”, captures rather nicely the kind of situation in which we now find ourselves with regard to Ukraine and Taiwan. Jeremy Irons plays Neville Chamberlain wonderfully well and with great empathy. The central issue then was how to understand and negotiate with or defeat the mind of Hitler. Right now, in Europe, the challenge is the mind of Putin.

Some may object that analogies with the ’30s are overdone and that Putin is surely not Hitler. Even Joseph Stalin once remarked to Yugoslav wartime partisan leader, communist politician and later dissident Milovan Djilas, “The West think I’m the new Hitler, but I’m not Hitler. I know when to stop.”

Putin is neither Hitler nor Stalin. But he is canny, ruthless and ambitious. That makes him a mortal threat to his critics and neighbours. It isn’t yet clear where he intends to stop or what would induce him to do so. The question is how to keep him in check without triggering a war that would be disastrous for all concerned.

Globally speaking, Xi is the bigger problem. But Putin is destabilising Europe, with significant implications. For those who believe ’30s analogies are overdrawn, another historical analogy may be useful: the rise of Macedon and its conquest of the Greek city-states (and then the Persian Empire) under Philip II and his son Alexander III (the Great) between 359 and 323BC. The Macedonians built a powerful military, subdued their immediate neighbours while the Greek city-states squabbled, then conquered Greece with Philip’s crushing victory in 338BC at Chaeronea. Distinguished classical historian Adrian Goldsworthy, in 2020, encouraged us all to revisit this fascinating piece of ancient history in Philip & Alexander: Kings and Conquerors. It’s a rich analogy, with many indirect lessons to offer.

In both cases, however, the key lesson is: you must hang together or you will assuredly hang separately. Philip II, in Goldsworthy’s words, “reshaped Macedonia, making it bigger, stronger and more united and also created the army from scratch and even the plan to attack Persia”. Putin set about rebuilding and reshaping Russia after the humiliations and debacles of the ’90s. He sought, briefly, to reach an understanding with the West after 9/11, but the ruthlessness and corruption of his rule and his hostility to the democratic and NATO-aligned states on Russia’s periphery soon made this impossible. What is not impossible, right now is that he will impose Russian dominance on Ukraine, with troubling implications for the rest of Europe.

How, therefore, to keep him honest? We have failed to keep Xi honest in Hong Kong and Xinjiang, and the jury is still out regarding Taiwan. Putin, on the other hand, has fewer cards to play than Xi. Russia is not a superpower in any way except for its possession of a vast nuclear arsenal, an inheritance from the Cold War. If NATO and the EU were willing to stand up to him, there are at least four things that could be done:

● The threat of sanctions against him, his cronies and his regime if he invades Ukraine.

● Relieving Germany of the need to import Russian oil and gas.

● Arming Ukraine with antitank, anti-aircraft and antipersonnel weapons of sufficient quality and quantity to make Putin think twice about invading it.

● A clear commitment by NATO and the EU to collective security and buttressing their capacities to deter Russian aggression against Ukraine, the Baltic States and the countries of eastern Europe.

The first has been threatened by US President Joe Biden. The second is something the Obama administration began to do, taking place at least to some extent. The third is happening, at least modestly. The fourth is not in evidence. Putin still may think he can prevail by a combination of bluff and incremental rather than open aggression. It’s not clear that he is mistaken.

We have a new ambassador in Australia right now who understands all too well the danger that Putin represents. Darius Degutis, the first Lithuanian ambassador to Australia, has been here just three months. His mission is to engage with Australia regarding the threats posed by Putin and Xi. Lithuania recently has established embassies for the first time in Seoul, Singapore and Taipei as well as Canberra. Its Foreign Minister will be here early next month. Things are moving, as with the AUKUS security pact. But much depends on coherence and decisiveness. Both are still deficient and the clock is ticking.

Paul Monk, a specialist in international relations and former senior intelligence analyst, is the author of Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China (2005) and Dictators and Dangerous Ideas (2018), among many other books.