Putin’s War: Attachment 1

Attachment #1: President Vladimir Putin 

His measure. “What kind of person is Putin?” is the question on the minds of millions of people around the world, and one that needs some attempt in answering. 

While I’ll provide a very devastating profile of Putin (and will stick strongly to it) the average Russian citizen probably sees things differently – well, it likely did before the war. When Penny and I travelled through parts of Russia in 2014, particularly around some of the small towns near Moscow, and then by boat to St. Petersburg on the Volga, Svir & Neva Rivers, we had many chances to talk to locals and also guides. Under Putin, Russia’s economic situation had stabilized, living standards had risen, and even life expectancy climbed. He was admired, it seemed, and given credit for the changes.

But a very troubling picture, in reality emerges, when one does some digging. Journalists around the world are searching for adjectives that capture what we see unfolding in front of our TV screens, and in our papers. Phrases spinning amongst the media regarding this 69 year old former spy who has ruled Russia since 2000 include: barbarous; evil; brutal; a KGB thug turned mafia godfather; a killer and extortionist; depraved; sangfroid; complicit; “greyness, grievance and the greed of corruption”. Diplomacy seems impossible with a despot and a pathological liar who gives promises he never means to keep. He tends to view anything short of force as an expression of weakness.

He is a man who has changed Russia’s constitution to allow himself to remain in office until at least 2035; a schizoid dictator with an enormous nuclear arsenal and a compliant elite; a small man at the end of the forty-foot table who says he is conducting an anti-Nazi mission; a man who has said that the destruction of the Soviet empire was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century; a scared little man sitting in a bunker (that from Alexei Navalny); a man who is isolated in the Kremlin harbouring his grievances alone; a man so obsessed with being a historical figure like Stalin that he has placed a huge statue of Prince Vladimir, the creator of Russia, at his Kremlin gate; a man who is COVID-phobic and sees few people; a small grim man taking his place with Lenin and Stalin. That’s just a brief sampling.

In interviews he has said the Soviet empire had been his wealth and pride, and when it fell, he took it hard. “I wanted something different to rise in its place,” he said of the lost Soviet influence in eastern Europe. As Andrew Jack predicted in his book “Inside Putin’s Russia”, the “contradictions of economic liberalism and political authoritarianism will eventually clash”.

There is a strange religious side to Putin that is not talked about a good deal. In the July 19, 2013 issue of The Atlantic they talked about “Ukraine, Russia and Belarus celebrating the 1,025th anniversary of the Christianization of Kievan Rus, a medieval state that existed between the 9th and 13th centuries, which, depending on one’s historical and political stance, is seen as the precursor of these three nations. In Russia, the celebration of this important anniversary included the release of a documentary entitled The Second Christianization of Rus. This film, along with other recent events, shows how the political culture of modern Russia is tilting towards Byzantinism and Eurasianism, the political trends that juxtapose Russia and the West and emphasize the role of Eastern Orthodox Church in the construction of Russia’s identity. While Byzantinism portrays Russia as a political and cultural heir of the Byzantine Empire, Eurasianism allots Russia a messianic role in connecting the East and West. Both schools of thought isolate Russia from the world.

In The Second Christianization of Rus, the title speaks for itself: the years after the fall of the Soviet Union are portrayed as the time of the great religious revival in Russia, i.e. the return of the Russian Orthodox faith. Putin, talks throughout the film about the “significance of the Eastern Orthodox Church for the building of Russia’s new spiritual identity”. Putin says that “as a child he was baptized by his mother secretly from his father and that this event affected him for the rest of his life.” “There was a spiritual vacuum after the fall of the Soviet Union… true values are religious values… the return to religion marks the natural revival of the Russian people,” he says in the film.

The Economist, in a devastating analysis of Putin, wrote for their March 26 edition “According to the inexorable logic of authoritarianism, Mr Putin’s domestic repression grew ever more severe. He became more isolated, both diplomatically and among his advisers. He threw off moral constraints in his military campaigns. The nationalist rhetoric hardened into an apocalyptic ideology, which reached deep into history and cast Russia as a bulwark against the decadent West.”

A former oil mogul and political prisoner, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, has warned the West it must face down Putin now or prepare for something worse. Part of the problem is that “Western leaders have never had to deal with thugs… Putin was raised in the KGB, an organization that relied on force and disregard for the law…A bandit will always remain a bandit…It is a drastic mistake when he is seen as a normal statesman.”

A Russian reporter who once thought that “Putin’s cunning was undeniable,” now sees him as “immoral and irrational”. Bill Browder also has some hard earned opinions about Putin. He authored the book Red Notice that tells the true story of Sergei Magnitsky. At the conclusion of his book Browder said that the whole Magnitsky affair “cost Putin something much dearer than money: his aura of invincibility. Humiliation is his currency – he uses it to get what he wants and to put people in their place. In his mind, he hasn’t succeeded until his opponent has failed, and he can’t be happy until his opponent is miserable. In Putin’s world, the humiliator cannot, under any circumstances, become the humiliatee.”

At the conclusion of the book by Heidi Blake with the extraordinary title ”From Russia With Blood: The Kremlin’s Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin’s Secret War on the West”, the author describes the presiding judge presenting his oral summary to do with a very public case. It involved the killing, by a poisonous radioactive isotope, of Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and the KGB after speaking critically about what he saw as corruption within the Russian government. The judges findings were unambiguous. He laid the blame for the killing squarely at the door of the Russian state security agency; he then followed with “I have further concluded that the FSB operation…was probably approved by Mr. Patrushev, the head of the FSB. And, also by President Putin.” After years of denials and diplomatic discretion, this was an unimaginable watershed: a British judge had pointed an accusing finger straight at the Kremlin.

Just before Litvinenko died (in 2006), he made a passionate statement about Putin: “You may succeed in silencing me but that silence comes at a price. You have shown yourself to be as barbaric and ruthless as your most hostile critics have claimed. You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value. You have shown yourself to be unworthy of your office, to be unworthy of the trust of civilized men and women. You may succeed in silencing one man but the howl of protest from around the world will reverberate, Mr Putin, in your ears for the rest of your life. May God forgive you for what you have done, not only to me but to beloved Russia and its people.” I can’t find anything better to summarize the readings I have done and the emotions I feel about what is currently happening in Ukraine than the words of this man.

A punch line to my description of Putin is a quite extraordinary December 28, 1999 manifesto by the man himself, called “Russia at the Turn of the Millennium.” In it he says Russia “For the first time in the past 200 to 300 years, is facing the real threat of slipping down to the second and, possibly even third, rank of world states…Russia needs strong state power and must have it. I am not calling for totalitarianism. History proves all dictatorships, all authoritarian forms of government, are transient. Only democratic systems are lasting.” Two decades later he pays little heed to his words.

Putin’s demands. As Putin ordered his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine on February 24th, he did not conceal his war aims. He wants to turn that neighbouring country of 44 million people into a neutral, demilitarized satellite. He wants NATO to withdraw its forces and equipment from Bulgaria and Romania. He has threatened Finland and Sweden who are suddenly scurrying to join NATO, saying they will “face some military and political consequences” if they join. Moscow did say early on in the war that its “special operation” aims not to occupy territory but to destroy Ukraine’s military capabilities and capture what it calls dangerous nationalists. Putin has made clear that he doesn’t see Ukraine as a sovereign nation and that he would rather destroy it than let it exist as a free European nation.

Putin views the expansion of NATO as a serious restructuring of the historical space in which Russia has been the dominant power. He is working to secure Russian hegemony and to push-back against this expansion. Putin recently, strangely enough, started writing essays about Russia’s past. In July 2021, he published a 5,000 word essay advancing his selected version of history (clearly part of a lead up to the invasion). He has insisted that Russians and Ukrainians are of the same Slavic nation with Russia having the natural right to be in charge of the whole family. 

Justified this war by reaching into history and comparing himself to Peter the Great, who expanded the Russian empire and founded St. Petersburg as a “window to Europe” (which ironically is now closing.) But as Aurel Braun, a political science professor at U of T, said in a June 9 Globe & Mail editorial “Undoubtedly Mr. Putin has long pined for the restoration of the Russian empire. Yet this may also risk confusing cause and excuse. Mr. Putin’s primary goal has always been to stay in power, in a personalist system as ‘president for life’ unchallenged and invulnerable. To ensure this, he has relied on myths and political magic where Russian grandeur and power play a supporting role to his repressive, absolutist rule in a system that is corrosively corrupt.”

The reality of today’s Russia is that, as Aurel Braun said, “It is a repressive, corrosive kleptocracy that is in search of an ideology. Putin’s aim is to exercise power in a way in which he and his regime enjoy international immunity and can act domestically with impunity.”

Putin appeared at a huge flag-waving rally (compulsory attendance, apparently) at a packed Moscow stadium on March 18 to mark the eighth anniversary of Moscow’s annexation of Crimea. There were three revealing aspects of this rally. First, the performance of the patriotic song “Made in the USSR,” with the opening lines “Ukraine and Crimea, Belarus and Moldova, it’s all my country.” Second, Putin paraphrased the Bible to say of Russia’s troops: “There is no greater love than giving up one’s soul for one’s friends.” Thirdly, there was a sign on the stage that read “For a world without Nazism’ under which he railed against his foes in Ukraine with the claim that they are “neo-Nazis.” and insisted that his actions were necessary to prevent “genocide”. This branding of his enemies as Nazis evoked what many Russians consider their country’s finest hour, the defence of the motherland from Germany during the Second World War.

There is an irony in Putin’s words about “denazifying” Ukraine. It is a perverse and strange phrase to accuse President Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, of running a “Nazi” state. The “Nazi” claim appears geared toward older Russians, who revere the Soviet Union’s role in winning World War II. It pops up, pejoratively, in Putin’s musings about hunting down “Banderites”, that infamous group of Ukranian nationalists who sympathized with fascist ideology (and by the way, still have a voice in Ukranian politics through the political party Svoboda, which has a neo-Nazi past.) Putin should look into his own country which tolerates the Russian Imperial Movement, a neo-Nazi, anti Semitic, armed white supremacist organization, designated by the US as a terrorist organization.

Emboldened by perceptions of the West’s terminal decline, no one in Putin’s war cabinet loses much sleep about the prospect of an open-ended confrontation with America and Europe. As Alexander Gabuev a China expert at the Carnegie Moscow Centre, says in a March article in The Economist “A new multipolar order is taking shape that reflects an unstoppable shift in power to authoritarian regimes that support traditional values. A feisty, resurgent Russia is a pioneering force behind the arrival of this new order, along with a rising China.” 

Putin feels that the West’s goal is to install pro-Western regimes in former Soviet republics, and its ultimate goal of a colour revolution in Russia itself. As America’s power wanes, its methods are becoming more aggressive. This is why the West cannot be trusted. 

He feels the best way to ensure the safety of Russia’s existing political regime and to advance its national interests is to keep America off balance. Seen this way, Ukraine is the central battleground of the struggle. Should Moscow allow that country to be fully absorbed into a western sphere of influence, Russia’s endurance as a great power will itself be under threat.

Putin’s inner circle: is made up of older, KGB males, who live the former Soviet Union mindset: Putin’s war cabinet consists of Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council; Alexander Bortnikov, the head of the FSB (the main successor agency of the KGB intelligence service); Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russian Foreign Intelligence Service; and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu. Their average age is 68 years old and they have a lot in common. Four out of five have a KGB background, with three, including the president himself, coming from the ranks of counterintelligence.

There are some internal divisions growing in Russia’s top echelons. Antatoly Chubais, the architect of Russia’s post-Soviet privatization campaign, has resigned. He has served in a variety of top posts over three decades; his latest role was as Putin’s envoy to international organizations. 

It is these hardened men, not polished diplomats like Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who run the country’s foreign policy. In the just mentioned Gabuev’s analysis is that on a personal level, “the world view of the hard men is an odd amalgam of Soviet nostalgia, great-power chauvinism and the trappings of the Russian Orthodox faith. The fact that the new elite in Kyiv glorifies the Ukrainian nationalists of the 20th century and thumb their noses at Moscow is a huge personal affront.”

The KGB and the Origins of Putin’s Totalitarianism: Until I read the May 7 Globe & Mail Opinion piece by Nina Khrushcheva, professor of International Afairs at The New School, I didn’t fully understand how the KGB evolved under Putin. As she tells it, in 1999 when Putin was appointed prime minister of Russia, he allegedly quipped to his former FSB (the successor agency to the KGB) colleagues, “The task of infiltrating the highest level of government is accomplished.” 

She explained how the heirs of organizations that had wrought such terror during Stalin’s rule in the 1930s and 40s managed to secure power in the 21st century. In truth, after the Soviet Union’s collapse, “the KGB was better equipped to navigate the transition to capitalism than any other Soviet institution. Its operatives were amoral, pragmatic, well connected, unfazed by irregular working hours, and adept at self-serving manipulation.” The KGB, rebranded as the FSB, survived. ”Russian leaders have always depended on the security services to maintain their power…For Putin, strengthening the state’s security organs seemed like insurance against upheavals like those in 1991, which brought the demise of what he calls ‘historic Russia.’”

Putin not only has a legal opening to lead for many more years as a result of the sham constitutional referendum of 2020, but also to “define the ideal Russian citizen: a patriot, loyal to the state above all.” This approach has brought with it a shift in the role of the security services. Putin used to listen to them, but now he dictates policy without entertaining alternative views, delegating implementation to government technocrats, led by the robotic Prime Minister, Mikhail Mishustin. 

More than ever, day-to-day power is in the hands of security organs such as the Federal Service for Supervision in Education and Science, the Federal Penitentiary Service, and the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media – all impersonal entities with a singular focus: “cleansing the political space of anything anti-Kremlin – now understood as anti-Russian – and punishing those who fail to show sufficient ‘loyalty’…They blindly pursue Mt. Putin’s goals of securing total control over Russia at all costs.”

Alexey Navalny, the imprisoned opposition leader believes that the Kremlin’s primary goal in invading Ukraine was to distract Russians from declining living standards and trigger a rally-around-the-flag effect. More fundamentally, however, “the war amounts to a final repudiation of the FSB figures who gained power during Putin’s early years, and confirmation of the dominance of Russia’s nameless security technocrats – the real heirs to the KGB.” With Putin, of course, remaining at the top.

The chilling implications of this shift are currently on display across Russia: 15,000 anti-war demonstrator detained, disbanded independent media, etc. “In this atmosphere of total repression – now likened to the Stalin era – Russians who have not fled are falling into line. About 80% of Russians now report that they support the ‘operation’ in Ukraine.”

Recent Russian military attacks elsewhere have demonstrated Putin’s lack of humanity. Russia attacked Grozny, Chechnya’s capital, in December 1994. The first assault on Grozny destroyed much of the city and killed 20,000 civilians. Its second attempt, launched by Putin in 1999, caused fewer casualties (Russia had told civilians to leave) but the aftermath was described by UN monitors as “a devastated…wasteland”.

Russia intervened in the Syrian civil war on behalf of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s dictator, in 2015. That intervention was conducted largely with air power, with ground forces playing a limited role. But its effects were not dissimilar. Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, accused the Russian-Syrian coalition of killing more than 440 civilians during a month-long bombing campaign in Aleppo, a city in north-western Syria, between September and October 2016 alone. 

In total, Russia may have killed between 14,000 and 24,000 civilians in Syria between 2015 and 2021, according to Airwars, an investigative group that tracks civilian harm in wars. In total, five million Syrians fled their country during this civil war and flooded into Europe and millions more ended up in refugee camps. The country essentially disappeared. There was an international outcry, but Russia was not crushed by sanctions, as were Iran and the Syrian governments. Putin hid its misdeeds behind his Wagner Group mercenaries.