Let Putin fail in Ukraine

The West should resist any calls to directly engage Russia in war, while supporting Ukraine with military and financial assistance. Let Putin reap the reward of his folly, and suffer the domestic consequences.

Putin is isolated abroad and increasingly at home

My first job after university was writing about business in eastern Europe and Russia. I remember how exciting it was writing about the region — the oligarchs, the corruption, the vodka!

I would get emails from a guy called Bill Browder, the head of a leading Russia fund. His modus operandi was to invest in a big Russian company and then expose the corruption in that company. He would call you up and talk you through a PDF outlining really incredible theft and corruption of billions in assets. The exposure in the western press would then sting the company into improving its corporate governance and, voila, the stock price would go up and Browder’s fund would get richer.

It was a high-risk strategy, but Browder was sure — we were all sure — that new president Vladimir Putin was committed to improving the rule of law in Russia and turning it into a foreign investment powerhouse.

I moved to live in Moscow in 2003. At that point, relations between Russia and the West were warm and getting warmer. Russian companies were listing on the London stock exchange, western firms like BP were investing in big Russian energy projects, western investors and bankers were making a fortune in Moscow. It seemed a symbiotic relationship, where both sides get richer.

But there were dark clouds on the horizon. Putin had supported the US-UK invasion of Afghanistan, but did not like the unprovoked regime change in Iraq. He did not like NATO’s expansion eastwards (which I wrote about in 2003, focusing on a neo-con hawk called Bruce Jackson, who more than anyone was responsible for this NATO expansion east).

Meanwhile, the West did not like what Putin was doing to oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Putin’s first term as president involved him going after the oligarchs who held power in the previous Yeltsin regime. But when he went after Khodorkovsky and his oil company Yukos, western investors lost a lot of money, and Khodorkovsky turned himself into something of a liberal martyr.

There was a debate back then — who was the real Vladimir Putin? Was he a reformer building a new Russia with better rule of law, a Russia in which everyone would be better off, or was he centralizing all power in himself and his KGB chums?

Meanwhile, I was loving my time in Russia. I joined a band, I partied hard, and I travelled around the former Soviet Union, visiting everywhere from Siberia to Tblisi, from Kiev to Kyrgyzstan. It was exciting to be there, and I liked Russians a lot. I still do. I found them to be warm, funny, loyal, cultured people, with a rather dark and absurdist sense of humour. As someone once put it, Russians are great, until they get drunk and start looking at maps.

Relations with the West started to go downhill with the ‘Rose revolution’ in Georgia in 2003, followed by the ‘Orange Revolution’ in Ukraine in 2004, and the ‘Tulip revolution’ in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. For Western audiences, these were inspiring moments of popular democratic change — middle-class activists, led by students, were rising up to peacefully protest against years of post-Soviet corruption and autocracy. But for Putin and his KGB crew, these were phony democratic uprisings orchestrated by the CIA. He felt deeply unsettled by them, because he thought Russia would be next.

It was around this time — 2004 or so — that Putin started to consolidate power and move in a more autocratic direction. His Machiavellian side-kick, Vladislav Surkov, introduced a new political system called ‘sovereign democracy’, in which the Kremlin controlled all players of the political system, including the opposition, and Russian politics became a soap opera with the script written by the Kremlin (Surkov studied theatre direction at university).

As my friend Peter Pomerantsev explored in his brilliant book This is Not Propaganda, it became hard to tell what was true and what was theatre — and that was the point. Politics was turned into a bewildering yet captivating spectacle in which the idea of truth itself was undermined. The Kremlin then successfully exported that epistemic instability into western politics via ‘troll farms’ — battalions of fake social media accounts that worked abroad to increase polarization around issues like vaccines or Black Lives Matter.

Putin started to move against any enemies or opposition. FSB agents clumsily poisoned Alexander Litvinenko in London, leaving a trail of radioactivity in their wake. They also poisoned defected agent Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, killing two other British people at the same time.

The chill of the cold war crept back into Moscow life. The American bassist in my band, a journalist, had to flee overnight when it became clear he was being set up for a KGB sting. A British diplomat in my football team also had to flee overnight, when he was exposed as an MI6 spy. The British ambassador complained he was being perpetually followed and harassed by a crowd of ‘Putin youth’. Bill Browder, once Putin’s greatest cheerleader, had to flee the country after his lawyer was arrested and murdered by the KGB. He turned into Putin’s greatest accuser, successfully campaigning for international sanctions against Russia.

Members of Nashi, the ‘Putin youth’ organisation set up by the Kremlin

Meanwhile, the 90s-era oligarchs had been replaced by a new group of oligarchs — the siloviki, or ‘security men’. Catherine Belton, one of the best journalists in Russia in my time there, chronicled how these friends of Putin’s, and Putin himself, became massively wealthy through the assets they seized. It reminded one of Animal Farm — the old corrupt system of Yeltsin-era crony-capitalism had simply been replaced by new cronies.

Then in 2008, Russia invaded Georgia, and got away with it, successfully destabilizing the country and ending its NATO ambitions. Georgia is now so cowed it didn’t even join the sanctions against Russia. In 2014, Russia invaded the Crimea in Ukraine, which is where it keeps much of its navy. Again, it got away with it, with sanctions that didn’t seriously impact Russia’s economy.

Throughout all of this, Putin’s popularity stayed strong. The Russian economy was still growing, life was obviously better than it was in the chaotic 1990s, the Russian middle class could renovate their homes and take holidays abroad. Yes, they didn’t live in a democracy exactly, but Russians had never lived in a democracy. At least they had stability and growth. Besides, Putin controlled the media and the opposition, with the exception of Alexei Navalny, an internet activist who very bravely exposed Putin’s corruption — and was subsequently poisoned and imprisoned.

The UK blustered against Putin, but the UK did very well out of Russian wealth. It poured into London banks, the London stock exchange, into British private schools and universities, into law firms and sports clubs and property and political parties. The Tories, in particular, benefitted from Russian cash.

Things got really weird in the Trump years, when the US Democratic party became obsessed with the conspiracy theory that Trump was actually a Russian sleeper-agent, who had been compromised by the KGB (how hard would it be) and was now acting on Kremlin orders. In the UK, the left embraced an even more far-out conspiracy theory that Brexit was caused by Kremlin-funded online propaganda.

Suddenly, it wasn’t clear any more what was true, or who might be a Russian-controlled stooge. Which was just as Putin liked it. Western countries descended into a culture war that was in fact, at least partly stoked by Kremlin troll farms. Online disinformation was the cheapest and easiest way to damage a western democracy.

And now Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. To what end? To prevent Ukraine from joining NATO and the EU — that much at least makes rational sense. But also, perhaps, to bring Ukraine ‘back’ into ‘holy Rus’ and create a ‘greater Russia’ that Putin has apparently become obsessed by during the pandemic.

Ukraine, Putin suggested last month, is not a real country. It’s a fake, corrupt country run by ‘drug-addled Nazis’. So Putin is doing Ukrainians a favour by bringing them back into the loving arms of Mother Russia.

This appears to be a catastrophic misreading of the situation on many fronts. Putin has seriously miscalculated Ukrainian public sentiment — and Russian public sentiment — if he thought there was appetite among Ukrainians or Russians to unite the countries. He underestimated the popularity of president Zelensky, elected with 70% of the vote, and the strength of national sentiment among Ukrainians, both in the Ukrainian-speaking west and the Russian-speaking east. He also apparently miscalculated the strength of the Ukrainian military and the weakness of the Russian military — who are so badly organized they’re communicating via cell-phones and walkie-talkies, to which anyone can listen. 20 years of corruption has apparently rotted the Red Army.

He also underestimated the unity and resolve of not just western countries but the rest of the world, and their ability to harm the Russian economy by freezing the Russian central bank’s stockpile of foreign reserves — thereby limiting the central bank’s ability to defend the rouble. It’s down 30% in the last week, and Russia’s sovereign debt has just been downgraded to junk status. One Russian analyst toasted the death of the Russian stock market on live TV. The last remaining western investors in the Russian economy — BP and Shell — are selling up, and Apple and Amazon are also turning off their Russia operations, leading defiant Russians to share videos of themselves smashing up their iPads. That’ll show them!

Now what happens? No one knows. Some voices are calling for NATO to enforce a no-fly zone over Ukraine. That would mean western planes shooting down Russian planes, and a war between NATO and Russia. That could mean a nuclear war. We should reject such calls with all our strength. However, we should provide military and financial assistance to Ukraine and keep putting pressure on Russia through tighter sanctions and international isolation.

Even if Russia defeats the Ukrainian military — as you would expect it to do with its massive numerical advantage — a Russian occupation of Ukraine is doomed to be a costly and highly unpopular failure.

The costlier and longer the war, the more insecure Putin’s position is, especially internally. Already, leading oligarchs are coming out against the war — Oleg Deripaska has spoken out against it, as has LUKoil. Putin knows his domestic situation is precarious. Even his head of intelligence appeared so shocked by the invasion he stuttered when appearing before his president.

Russia has been led into this bloody and unpopular war by a leader so out of touch he sits ten metres away from his own advisors on his ridiculous table. I think the best outcome is to let Putin fail and reap the rewards for his adventurist folly.

That, of course, is little comfort to Ukrainians giving their lives for their country today. But it is a much better outcome than a world war or possibly a nuclear war. If the West went to war with Russia, it would immediately activate Russians’ nationalist and aggrieved victim mentality. Let Russia stay in the position of bully and aggressor towards its younger brother. Let it fail. Support the Ukrainian resistance with supplies — but the West must not get drawn into a direct war with Russia. Which is all very well to say from here. But in the fog of war who knows what will happen. We are closer to a world and nuclear war than at any point in my lifetime.

If Putin is ousted in Russia — which is a very big ‘if’ — then what? What do the next 30 years look like in eastern Europe? Yet more confrontation with Russia? How can the West persuade any post-Putin regime that the West does not seek the dismemberment and destruction of Russia, that we are richer together, that we share cultural and economic links and can genuinely be friends and allies? Is that so inconceivable?