The Biden Administration is determined to do something rare in the history of U.S. foreign policy. By trying to expose Vladimir Putin’s military tactics in Ukraine ahead of their execution, by making every attempt to declare U.S. readiness to avert war through negotiation and, at the same time, to make clear the consequences of an invasion, Biden is being shrewd and deliberative. But will he be effective?
War is not what it used to be. War no longer need be a matter of bombing raids and blitzkriegs. Putin could certainly flatten much of Kyiv and other Ukraine cities in days, but he can render them helpless through other means: cyberattacks, false-flag operations, assaults on the electrical grid, the water supply, the banking system. Targeted information––or, better, propaganda––is often as effective in modern warfare as a surging body count. As the historian Stephen Kotkin, the author of a multivolume biography of Stalin, put it recently, “You turn a country off.” Like a light switch. And, in that sudden darkness, panic and instability ensue. This, according to the Biden Administration, is the hideous scenario, in one form or another, that confronts Ukraine.
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In recent years, as Putin has modernized Russia’s armed forces and announced his intention to re-litigate the post-Soviet security arrangements of Europe, his top generals and intelligence chiefs have studied and practiced the modern art that is hybrid warfare. They displayed at least some of their new tactics, in 2014, when Russian special-forces soldiers wearing uniforms without insignia––the so-called little green men––led the occupation of Crimea. Soon afterward, in the eastern rust belt of Ukraine, they employed and armed local separatist proxies to try to hive off the regions around Donetsk and Luhansk from the writ of the government in Kyiv.
In any larger-scale operation against Ukraine, Putin could use an escalating set of hybrid tactics. Russian-backed forces are already shelling targets in the east, as Moscow’s propaganda organs blame the violence on the Ukrainian government. There are already reports of cyberattacks on Ukrainian banks and ministries. Proxies or Russian troops could seize swathes of Ukraine in stages. Russian operations could stretch over weeks and months.
In a personalized regime, it is senseless to try to divine what is in the head of the autocrat. Will Putin invade or attend a summit meeting with Biden? (The American President has agreed to such a meeting so long as Putin holds fire.) What few confidantes Putin does have do not betray confidences. Biden and his aides are trying to defuse Putin’s capacity for surprise by announcing his potential moves in advance, but that tactic, so far, has not proved to be a brake on the Russian leader’s bloody-minded determination.
Putin’s calculations are immune to the pressures of normal politics, which do not exist in Russia. He is willing to pay a high price, it seems, even a potentially ruinous economic price, to reassert Russian power in Europe. Who dares to counsel against it? There are no political encumbrances on him, no Russian opposition that demands hearing. He has made sure of that.
At the same time, Putin appears to believe that the West is exhausted after its military follies of the past twenty years and lacks the cohesion and leverage to oppose him in his own neighborhood. Donald Trump’s flagrant displays of contempt for NATO were, for Putin, a most pleasing and encouraging spectacle. And although the Biden Administration has acted in far greater concert with European allies, Putin has not relented. Perhaps the most powerful economic sanction the West could levy against Russia would be Europe, particularly Germany, stopping its purchase of Russia’s gas. There is no guarantee of that. What’s more, Putin seems to hope that a closer relationship with the Chinese will provide him a strategic and economic cushion.
Russians generally see Ukrainians as familial, as neighbors intimately linked by history, geography, language, and culture. But Putin has solved, at least in his mind, the contradiction of waging war on Russia’s Ukrainian brothers and sisters. His official media outlets blame the United States, and unchecked propaganda translates into popular opinion. “The majority say that there will be sanctions anyway, no matter what Russia is doing, and the West is only looking for an excuse to impose new sanctions,” Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, Russia’s only major independent polling agency, recently said. “We see that the majority actually hold the United States accountable for what’s going on. It’s not even about Ukraine. It’s about the United States and Russia.”
The few remaining independent media outlets in Russia have been muted. “Journalists are scared. There is a conversation on Facebook, but people are very careful,” Masha Lipman, a Moscow-based political analyst, told me. “Among the constituency of Russian liberals, there’s a general sense of despondency and intimidation. Some are in jail, many more have been forced to emigrate, so the atmosphere is not that of vocal anger. There’s a premonition of further crackdown and what it might amount to.” In Russia, the figure-skating competition at the Winter Olympics, in Beijing, seems to arouse more conversation than the conflict with Ukraine. “Maybe this is a matter of psychological self-preservation,” Lipman said. “You switch away from what might be a real war tomorrow to something that makes no sense whatsoever.”
Putin’s confrontation with the West over Ukraine follows a familiar cycle in Russian history of loss and reassertion. After the First World War, Russia’s sphere of influence contracted significantly. Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia became independent. Ukraine, too, declared independence in 1918; and, although that independence was short-lived, the experience lived long in the memories of Ukrainians. In the Gorbachev era, it would resurface and play a central role in the fall of the Soviet Union.
In early 1989, as a Moscow-based correspondent for the Washington Post, I travelled to western Ukraine, to the city of Lviv. Alienated by decades of Moscow rule and thoroughly disgusted by the Kremlin’s indifference to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, small groups of pro-independence activists were taking their cue from the Popular Front movements in the Baltic states. “Right now we are not a strong movement, we don’t have anything like the organization you see now in the Baltics,” Vyacheslav Chornovil, a former political prisoner, told me at the time. Chornovil and his dissident allies calculated that no Soviet leader, even a relative liberal like Gorbachev, could tolerate dissent in Ukraine as readily as in the Baltic states or Georgia and Armenia. “The Soviet Empire knows that, in the end, it can always survive without the Baltics or the Transcaucasus—it’s only a few million people here and there, after all,” Stepan Khmara, a physician and a human-rights activist, told me. “Moscow could even do without Eastern Europe, because it turns out that this is a very expensive military buffer zone. But Lenin knew it from the start: The empire cannot survive without the Ukraine. There are just too many people, too many resources, here. It will inevitably be a fight. The question is: when?”
As it happened, Gorbachev declined to do real battle with the independence movement. The newly formed People’s Movement of Ukraine, known as Rukh, flourished. In September, 1989, Adam Michnik, a Polish intellectual and a leader of the Solidarity movement, came to Ukraine to speak at Rukh’s first congress. In his speech, Michnik cried out, “Khai zhyve Ukraina!” (“Long live Ukraine!”), and the crowd responded with cheers. The movement gained extraordinary momentum. A few months later, more than four hundred thousand Ukrainian men and women, imitating demonstrations in the Baltic states, formed a human chain stretching from Lviv to Kyiv.
On December 1, 1991, Ukraine held a referendum on independence; ninety per cent of the voters supported it. The center could not hold. The leaders of Russia (Boris Yeltsin), Belarus (Stanislav Shushkevich), and Ukraine (Leonid Kravchuk) met alone at a hunting lodge in Belarus. The conclave was high-spirited—Yeltsin, especially, drank to startling excess—but it could not have been more consequential. The three leaders agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was infuriated, but he had no recourse. On the night of December 25, 1991, he resigned, and the Soviet flag came down from the Kremlin for the last time. Ukraine was a sovereign nation once more. By 2009, the image of Chornovil, who died in 1999, was on a Ukrainian postage stamp.
Putin regards these events not as a liberation from the burden of empire but, rather, as the “greatest geopolitical tragedy of the twentieth century.” He has no nostalgia at all for Communist ideology; what he mourns instead is the loss of Russian power and centrality. And, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the diminishment of Russian territorial and imperial grandeur was far greater than it was following the First World War. The Kremlin, which had once held sway over Eastern and Central Europe and fourteen Soviet republics beyond Russia, was now distinctly less powerful.
Many Russians, not only Putin, saw this as a humiliation, especially so when, over the next twelve years, seven Eastern and Central European countries and the three Baltic states joined NATO. Yeltsin, who had succeeded Gorbachev in the Kremlin, would occasionally complain to Bill Clinton and European leaders about the growth of NATO, but he had no capacity to do much about it. Moreover, the leaders of those newly independent states, having experienced long decades of Soviet subjugation, wanted to join Western institutions as a matter of security and economic prosperity.
Twenty-two years ago, Putin, appointed by Yeltsin as his successor, took power, determined to end what he saw as a prolonged period of Russian weakness and humiliation. To do so, he showed scant interest in building stable, democratic institutions. What he set out to do instead was to construct a regime built around himself. With the help of rising oil prices and a modernizing energy sector, he enriched a cadre of loyal friends, oligarchs, and officials, and began to develop at least a modest-sized middle class in Moscow and other cities. Rule of law languished, the news media was kept under tight control, opposition politics and parties were repressed. His most vivid opponent, Alexey Navalny, is now in prison and facing an extended sentence.
Putin looked upon the popular uprisings and “color revolutions” around the world as examples of what can happen when authoritarians loosen the reins. In 2011, tens of thousands of demonstrators came out to Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square, chanting “Russia Without Putin!” and insisting that the parliamentary elections had been a sham. Putin blamed the U.S. (including Hillary Clinton, who was then Secretary of State) for instigating the rallies. The crackdown that followed was severe and persists to this day.
Similarly, Putin’s foreign policy is based on a reassertion of Russian power. In 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, he lashed out at what he said was Washington’s creation of a unipolar world in which “there is one master, one sovereign.” More even than the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Putin resented NATO’s bombing of Belgrade, in 1999, and criticized the alliance for installing “frontline forces on our borders.” Talk of Georgia and Ukraine joining NATO only deepened his resolve. Since then, Putin has seized Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Crimea; he has moved on the Donbas and now, potentially, the whole of Ukraine.
The oft-heard assertion that Putin is trying to rebuild the Soviet Union is excessive and incorrect. Even Belarus, whose leaders could not be more subservient to Moscow, is not a formal part of Russia. Empire is prohibitively expensive. Putin hardly wants to “own” a poor country like Ukraine. Rather, he wants to forestall any further movement there toward an unreliable and more democratic political system and integration with Western security alliances.
None of the fifteen republics that emerged as independent nations after the fall of the Soviet Union have faced a cloudless path. Ukraine’s economy is dismal, one of the worst in Europe. For years, much of the political class was phenomenally corrupt. And Russia, particularly during Putin’s reign, has ceaselessly interfered in Ukraine’s politics, putting its weight behind pro-Moscow politicians and infiltrating Ukrainian institutions with spies. But, although Ukraine is hardly a unified nation, Russian interference has had the effect of pushing it toward the embrace of the West. As recently as 2013, according to most polling, less than thirty per cent of Ukrainians favored joining NATO; after the mass demonstrations in the center of Kyiv, called Euromaidan, and the annexation of Crimea, in 2014, support for joining NATO grew. It is now at around sixty per cent.
Serhii Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard, told me that Putin’s current strategy is reminiscent of both imperial Russia and the Soviet Union. “The strategy is not economic; it’s geopolitical,” Plokhy said. “It’s based on a traditional Russian and Soviet understanding of security: you surround yourself with dependencies, with buffer states. What is new is that it’s also an attempt to reëstablish control of the post-Soviet space. It’s not the Soviet Union but a new form of control.”
Through the years, Putin has made it plain that he does not consider Ukraine to be a real country. In July, a long essay titled “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” appeared under his name. Much of the language and scholastic discourse echo, in cartoonish form, the writings of nineteenth-century Russian nationalists such as Mikhail Katkov. At other times, Putin has praised the views of the dissident novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who exposed the totalitarian structures of the Soviet regime but also, in his 1990 essay “Rebuilding Russia,” mourned the potential loss of Ukraine. Yet, when Putin notes that his views are “largely in tune” with Solzhenitsyn’s, he fails to mention that the Nobel laureate, who died in 2008, acknowledged Ukraine’s right to self-determination.
Putin may exult in being in control of events, in having the world try to divine his intentions, but he can hardly know where an invasion will lead. “The chances are very high that Ukrainians will resist in different ways and forms,” Plokhy, the Harvard historian, predicted. “They were awakened by the events of 2013-2014. There is a significant population that is loyal to the state created in 1991, to the political system, to the freedoms that came with it, to a degree that they would take up arms and risk their lives. Hundreds of thousands have been through military training. Those people now know how to use weapons.” Russia is surely the stronger force, Plokhy said, but, if it comes to war, “I would be really surprised if there were no major resistance. . . . Partisan warfare is almost inevitable.”
