For several years, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s 520-page updated 2015 biography of Vladimir Putin, Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin, sat on my bookshelf, started but unfinished. It’s really well researched book, it’s just . . . long, detailed, and not fun reading.
But I picked it up again, looking for perspective on the current Russian aggression towards Ukraine – and the last chapter delivers it by the bucketful. (You can find a large portion that last chapter here.) One observation indicates that the Biden administration’s desire to build a “stable, predictable relationship” with Vladimir Putin was always a fool’s errand:
Putin has only a handful of contacts with U.S. and European insiders and thus a very incomplete grasp of what motivates or drives Western leaders. Finding himself too far outside their political perspectives and interactions, Putin falls back on his (and Russia’s) age-old threat perceptions. He looks for, and finds, plots and conspiracies. The plots he finds are consistent with his logic. They make sense in terms of his frame of reference—as seen through his filters of the Cold War, the KGB, his time in Dresden, and the prevailing political views of conservative and patriotic Russia circles. This does not mean that the plots exist or that his views are correct. Putin’s “too-far-outside,” other-world, perspective is a source of weakness in this respect, not strength. Vladimir Putin has spent a great deal of time in his professional life bending the truth, manipulating facts, and playing with fictions. He is also, we conclude, not always able to distinguish one from the other, his tools for doing so are often inadequate. This is a source of danger in Russia’s relations with the West.
. . . The West will find it hard to change his views. Putin has no reliable interlocutors in the West from his perspective, only a handful of intermediaries. And he simply does not trust anyone. Any effort to persuade him that he has misread the situation in some definitive, black-and-white, way will likely be seen as a ploy. Restoring a degree of trust is not impossible, but it will be extremely difficult. In the meantime, the West will have to deal with the reality of Putin’s views: the fact that he does think differently from his U.S. and European counterparts. He does see the West as a threat to him and his system.
In the end, Putin will never gravitate toward a “stable and predictable relationship” with the U.S. because his whole identity is defined as the defender of Russia against a nefarious, encroaching West. If the West isn’t really nefarious and encroaching . . . what would Russia need a man like Vladimir Putin for?
As for Ukraine, Hill and Gaddy accurately predicted that Putin wanted the de facto restoration of the Soviet Union’s borders through “spheres of influence,” where eastern European countries bordering Russia would be left technically independent but not really capable of defying Moscow:
So what about the conflict in Ukraine that Putin sparked in 2014? What does he want; and what might he do next? As he laid out in his August 2014 speech in Crimea, Putin seeks a “New Yalta” with the West in political and security terms. As he defines Moscow’s sphere of influence in this new arrangement, that sphere extends to all the space in Europe and Eurasia that once fell within the boundaries of the Russian Empire and the USSR. Within these vast contours, Putin and Russia have interests that need to be taken into account, interests that override those of all others. For Putin, Russia is the only sovereign state in this neighborhood. None of the other states, in his view, have truly independent standing—they all have contingent sovereignty. The only question for Putin is which of the real sovereign powers (Russia or the United States) prevails in deciding where the borders of the New Yalta finally end up after 2014.
The perspective of Hill and Gaddy is that even if Putin does not want to launch an all-out invasion of Ukraine, he will never permit a condition akin to “peace” to exist on the Russian–Ukrainian border:
. . . until a “new Yalta” is thrashed out, Russia and the West will remain at war. They will be fighting a new war that is fought everywhere with non-military as well as military means. Ultimately, in pursuing his goals as the Statist, Putin remains a pragmatist. In figuring out how to prevail in this war, Putin knows that Russia does not have the economic or military resources for the old Soviet (and Russian) mass-army, total mobilization approach to defending its interests. Given the contemporary balance of forces, Russia will always lose in such a conflict. The United States, NATO members, and other de facto U.S. allies have a collective GDP more than ten times that of Russia’s as well as more conventional arms. Putin needs to avoid a good old-fashioned twentieth century war (even a small one) and accomplish his goals without resorting to total mobilization. Twenty-first century wars involve targeted non-military efforts. They are the least disruptive to the normal functioning of the Russian economy even though they can also be very damaging.
In Ukraine and elsewhere in Russia’s neighborhood, Putin wants the West to sue for peace without jumping into the military war phase. The 2014 war is essentially a big (war) game of “chicken.” Based on the West’s past performance in Georgia, Putin anticipated that the West would blink first in Ukraine, baulking at the high costs of the confrontation, which he laid out very clearly with his offensive defense. Ukraine would burn in the east and the flames would fan out further and further. On the very occasion of their anniversaries, the conflagrations of the twentieth century would be reignited in the same territories in the twenty first. The Cold War decades would end with another hot war, not a cold peace. This game of chicken will be a long one. . . . As a result, there is no definitive endgame. Putin will keep on playing as long as he perceives the threat to exist. Even if he does secure a “new Yalta” deal in some form, he has no intention of abandoning his new warfare, because it is his way of deterring threats. In Vladimir Putin and his team’s conception of the new twenty-first century warfare, there are no real declarations of war, and thus no real peace settlements—only partial ceasefires.
It’s hard for any administration to do longer-term planning in foreign policy, but it seems clear that the Ukraine crisis is not going to be wrapped up in a couple weeks or months. (If the crisis does end quickly, it is probably because it ended badly: “Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley told lawmakers that Kyiv could fall within 72 hours if a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine takes place.”)
Joe Biden wants to reassure and rebuild the NATO alliance, and simultaneously pivot to Asia in order to focus upon the threat of China. It is going to be exceptionally difficult to do both, and not much in Biden’s first year suggested he’s brought the foreign policy A-Team with him.
Oh, and there’s one more ironic wrinkle in Hill and Gaddy concluding Putin would always be a destabilizing, aggressive, boundary-pushing force, and Biden concluding he could reach a “stable and predictable relationship” with Russia. From Rolling Stone’s May 2013 interview with Biden:
Considering how busy you are, do you have time to read books? If so, which ones would you recommend?
I make the time because it’s important. Let’s see. There is a good book titled The River of Doubt, by Candice Millard, about Teddy Roosevelt’s exploration of the Amazon in Brazil. I knew nothing about this. My goodness, let’s see. There’s Mr. Putin, by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy. Insightful. He’s an interesting man. Anyone who’s traveled with me to Afghanistan knows why I love this book: War, by Sebastian Junger.