Out of options? The West needs to be ready for Vladimir Putin’s next move

How does Putin avoid the fate of the autocrat who fails: that sudden demise when the army refuses orders, or the crowd stop being afraid, or someone comes quietly down the corridor in the night?

Vladimir Putin is running out of options. Picture: AFP.

“Everything is fine, and there is no need to worry at all,” the Egyptian foreign minister said to me on the phone in February 2011. As he spoke, the TV showed a million angry people in Cairo demanding the fall of the Mubarak regime of which he was a member. I had called him to ask for more security for our embassy and British nationals, but he was adamant that we could relax - “this was all anticipated”.

Two days later, his government was overthrown. Yet his words illustrate an important truth about autocratic governments: when in trouble they cannot admit any setback or danger, initially to others but sometimes even to themselves. At all costs they have to show their leader is fully in control, lest the slightest dent in their omnipotence shatters the entire, hollow structure of power on which they sit. They adopt a kind of institutionalised stupidity, denying reality for as long as possible.

The Moskva lists before sinking, after the vessel was hit by at least one Ukrainian anti-ship missile.

The Russian version of events in Ukraine is now an extreme and risible version of this inability to admit they are in trouble. The flagship Moskva sank under tow in stormy seas, it was said, even though the weather was fine; the retreat from Snake Island was a “goodwill gesture”; devastating explosions at Crimean bases were merely numerous accidents, and the headlong recent retreat from Kharkiv was a “regrouping”. The Kremlin will say anything rather than admit that Putin has blundered on a vast, historical scale, with a radical underestimation of the country he chose to bully and wished to annihilate.

My favourite Russian excuse is from a Moscow parliamentary commission which declared that failure to overcome Ukrainian resistance was due to Kyiv’s use of mutant soldiers, turned into “deadly monsters” in American laboratories. Such fiction comforts them more than the truth - that Ukrainian soldiers are fired up by the utterly human motivation to defend their families and their land from the pure evil of mass graves and torture that each Russian retreat now reveals.

People rest on a beach as smoke and flames rise after explosions at a Russian military air base, in Novofedorivka, Crimea. Picture: Reuters.

The depleted ranks of Russian soldiers, by contrast, are being filled with convicts offered a way out of prison and extra pay for each kilometre they advance. Seriously demoralised, they have some of the worst military leadership in the modern history of the world, with generals frequently reshuffled, killed or dismissed, and Putin himself interfering directly by giving orders to secure particular areas by certain dates, all of which are now fantasy.

In recent weeks, Ukraine openly talked up the prospect of an offensive in the south around Kherson. Many people will have wondered why they advertised that in advance. But the Russian high command took it at face value and moved some of their best troops, like the 1st Guards Tank Army, down from Kharkiv, only to find the most ambitious Ukrainian attack came in the area they had just left. Putin, the supposed master strategist, fell for the oldest trick in the book.

With even China expressing concerns and India giving him a lecture, Putin last week insisted that all was going to plan. Many Russians know this is ludicrous. One of their greatest pop stars, Alla Pugacheva, has spoken of “our lads dying for illusory aims”. Hard line so-called “milbloggers”, who wrote enthusiastically about the war, have turned on the incompetent armed forces and called for swifter destruction of Ukraine’s infrastructure.

Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev was trained in the KGB. Picture; Getty Images.

Putin will know he is in trouble. The institutionalised stupidity will last a while, but reality will force its way in. Plan A, the occupation of Ukraine, failed in February. Plan B, the control of the Donbas and referendums in occupied areas to vote to join Russia, has fallen apart in September. What is Plan C? How does he avoid the fate of the autocrat who fails: that sudden demise when the army refuses orders, or the crowd stop being afraid, or someone like Nikolai Patrushev, head of the Security Council and trained in the KGB, comes quietly down the corridor in the night?

He has three options, all of which involve great risk. He will thus avoid choosing for some weeks. He will appease the demand for more attacks on power plants, water supplies and dams. He will hope that gas prices will panic Europe, while demanding advances from exhausted troops. But on current trends, he will need to choose, and the West needs to prepare for his choice. After the denials, something is going to give.

His first option is the full mobilisation of Russia’s economy and society for all-out conventional war. Call up two million reservists, convert factories for munitions, ask for sacrifices all round. The risks for him are that this takes time, that many modern components made in the West are unavailable and popular support could collapse. The evidence that young Russians do not want to be conscripted to fight is very strong.

The second possibility is to threaten to employ, demonstrate or actually use weapons of mass destruction, such as a tactical nuclear device used against a town or military unit. This is the craziest option. It would unite the whole globe against Putin, still not win the war unless repeated many times and is the likeliest scenario to provoke an internal coup to remove him.

A Russian machine gunner controls the gate of the Belbek air base, outside Sevastopol, Crimea. Picture; AP.

The third option is to call it a day and try to live to fight again in the future. Retreat - “regroup” of course, in a massive “goodwill gesture” - to more defensible lines, offer a ceasefire and blame everyone but himself. The West, he would say, conspired against Russia. Defence minister Sergei Shoigu was not up to the job and disappears mysteriously, armed forces commander Valery Gerasimov is put on trial for treason and incompetence. Putin is lauded by some world leaders for bringing down fuel and food prices. His risk here is that the truth would dawn on Russians that they had been defeated in the present and made poorer for the future. Their president would be very vulnerable.

We do not know what choice he will make. But as Western leaders confer in New York this week they need to get ready and influence his choice. The best way to avert escalation into full mobilisation is to help Ukraine now to a speedier victory, with longer range missiles from the US and main battle tanks, including the large numbers belonging to Germany. That is also the best way to push Putin into a face-saving retreat, with the least Ukrainian territory still under his control.

President Biden has been right to speak of “severe consequences” for the tactical nuclear option but not to spell out what they are. Part of deterring that, though, is being fully ready. At the end of that long, lonely table in the Kremlin is a man whose plans are in ruins, slowly forcing him to take a bigger risk.

The Times