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Edward
Luce: ‘A lot of people have been wondering whether Putin (above) has
lost his ability to reason’ © Mikhail Klimentyev / AFP / Getty Images Before
I start, I should thank Peter Spiegel, Gideon Rachman and Richard
Waters for having filled in so well for me over the past six weeks while
I was on book research leave, which was perfectly timed. Rana, did
anything significant happen while I was gone? OK, that was the kind of
joke my proverbial uncle would crack on an off day. I have in fact been
hopelessly distracted since February 24, as I imagine has every Swampian
reading this. We
are now a month into the Russian “special military operation” that has
changed our world. A timeless rule of war is to give your opponent a way
out, particularly if he is losing but unwilling to concede defeat. That
is a rough summary of where Vladimir Putin stands on day 29 of this
war. Such logic dictates that Joe Biden and his European partners must
studiously avoid proclaiming regime change in Russia as the west’s
ultimate goal. That would turn Putin into the famed cornered rat of his
childhood with incalculable implications for Ukraine and the world. In
principle I subscribe to this logic. But the longer this barbaric war
goes on, and the more I read about Putin’s near-theological designs on
Ukraine, which stretch back much further than I had assumed, the more
sceptical I am that any kind of settlement with him could stick. All of
us suffer from cognitive bias. In the case of many who have been
sketching out potential bargains to end this war, the bias shows up in
the assumption that Putin would respond to conventional carrots and
sticks. Remove a few sanctions here, give him a piece of Ukrainian
territory there, find some ambivalent formula for Ukrainian neutrality,
and an armistice suddenly becomes visible. I’m increasingly worried that
this is wishful thinking. Of course, Putin also suffers from poor cognitive biases — Ukraine’s supposed lack of national spirit,
for example, or the effectiveness of the Russian military. He also
miscalculated the west’s resolve. But I fear he has a larger bias than
all these combined: a messianic view of his role in restoring Russia’s
historic destiny. I
recently had a long conversation with a senior European diplomat who
knows Putin well and was ambassador in Moscow earlier in his career. In
2016, he said, the Russian historic archives were abruptly moved from
its ministry of culture to the direct control of the presidential
office. This was highly irregular. From that point on, Putin
increasingly began to delve into records that far predated the Soviet
Union. We may think Putin is motivated by resentments over Nato’s
expansion since the USSR was dissolved. But according to this account —
and plenty of corroboration from elsewhere — Putin’s mind is parading in
front of the same mirror as Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great and
other Tsars. “He thinks in terms of battles, maps and historic
greatness,” said the diplomat. “It has been his obsession for years.” A
lot of people have been wondering whether Putin has lost his ability to
reason. Perhaps the impact of Covid-19 and the paranoiac longevity of
his tenure has caused him to lose his grasp on reality, they speculate.
Maybe so. Yet it is plausible that most of the 20th century’s bloodiest
dictators, including Josef Stalin, would have passed a basic sanity
test. Speculative psychology is unlikely to get us very far. In all
cases, however, ideology offers a more accessible key. Paying attention
to what autocrats say, especially when they keep repeating it, has the
benefit of being falsifiable. If Putin were a fantasist, there would be
little connection between his words and deeds. If,
on the other hand, he means what he says and vice versa, then we have
an ability from his past actions to predict what he is likely to do. By
that measure, Putin has form — and not just towards Ukraine. His
grandiosity also extends to Poland, which in 2020 he repeatedly blamed
for starting the second world war. Not many of us took it seriously at
the time. But Anne Applebaum, who has had Putin taped for far longer
than most, picked up on it at the time. Her view is that the destruction of Poland, which has been a Russian habit over the centuries, is very much on Putin’s mind. This
leads me to two concluding points. The first is that it is tempting to
make Russia’s unconditional surrender our main goal. My strong view is
that Putin’s removal should be our wish, not our declared aim. We should
maximise the chances that he will be removed from power without
proclaiming that as the outcome. Apart from stoking Putin’s messianism,
any western talk of regime change is likely to push more countries into
the Russian sanctions-busting regime, which is the opposite of what we
want. The
second conclusion is that my research into the life of Zbigniew
Brzezinski, a Polish-born American grand strategist, has felt
unexpectedly relevant in the past few weeks, which alleviates some of my
guilt for not having been writing for the FT. For Brzezinski, the
summit of Yalta — the second world war meeting at which Winston
Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt awarded Stalin a sphere of interest
over eastern Europe — was always a dirty word. It still ought to be. We
cannot return to that kind of bargain. |