Putin’s Gamble
By David K. Shipler
When Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine three years ago, he made several bets that might have seemed like sure things to him then. One, that Ukraine would quickly fold. Two, that the United States had no staying power. Three, that Europe was too fractured to mount effective resistance.
Ukraine has fought valiantly, however. The US under President Biden mustered huge supplies of weaponry and diplomatic support. Europe united to provide even more military aid than the US. And instead of crumbling, NATO added two new members, Sweden and Finland.
Nevertheless, Putin’s gamble finally began paying off last week, thanks to his admirer Donald Trump, who is so obviously volatile that next week might be different. Putin once labeled him unpredictable. By contrast, the Russian leader has the patience of a chess master — albeit an emotional player, as I wrote in the Washington Monthly two months before the invasion.
His long game relies on a wish and a belief: his wishful, messianic ambition to expand and restore a Russian empire, and his passionate belief that Western democracies are vulnerable to moral decay, internal disorder, and external subversion.
He is acting in both these dimensions simultaneously, and now has a willing (or unwitting) partner in President Trump.
Russia has tried to accelerate the decline of democracies by exacerbating domestic divisions with online disinformation during elections, which probably helped elect Trump in 2016. Moscow is promoting pro-Russian parties in Germany and other NATO states, a Russian interference campaign that has been joined by Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance, who have championed rightwing European parties with neo-Nazi sympathies.
Trump, apparently a propaganda victim, is parroting Russian lies by denouncing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as an unelected dictator who started the war, fictions that are embarrassing the United States. And for the first time in the 80 years since World War II, the trans-Atlantic security alliance of NATO is under attack by Washington in cahoots with Moscow. In other words, Trump’s re-election is already proving a boon to Putin’s agenda.
Putin comes to this moment leading a wounded, humiliated nation. And humiliation is a toxin, often overlooked as a factor among the military and economic forces that dominate international relations. There is nothing like lost dignity to poison a leader’s behavior.
The 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 separate countries was hailed in the West, but Putin called it, depending on translation, “the greatest [or great] geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He clearly saw it as a security problem. As the Moscow-led Warsaw Pact disintegrated, its East European members eagerly courted membership in the opposing military alliance — the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization. And NATO, pledged to defend any member subjected to attack, gladly picked them up one by one, trophies of the West’s supposed victory in the Cold War. The expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders violated multiple oral promises by American and West European leaders that the alliance would not be enlarged. Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev said he was “swindled.”
The sting of Russia’s diminished stature was administered in a derisive comment by President Obama after Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. “Russia is a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not out of strength but out of weakness,” Obama declared.
Putin’s response? To further humiliate his country by invasion and internal oppression. By aggressive means, he seeks dignity by regaining the power to swagger across the global stage. And Trump is poised to help him.
Putin’s two-track strategy — pursuing both short-term security and historical destiny — is clear from his writings and speeches, which apparently go unread in the Oval Office. They raise a question about what might restrain Putin on those two tracks. It seems obvious that only a strong counterweight to his ambitions — from Europe and the US — presents a deterrent. The war has cost Moscow dearly; its armed forces have been badly damaged, much of its manufacturing has been reoriented toward military industry, and its economic stress is growing acute. If allowed to play out longer, those elements in themselves might deter such adventures. But not if the aggression is now rewarded.
On the security track, Putin’s demands include no NATO membership for Ukraine; no European troops in Ukraine; and ideally a rollback of NATO from other nearby countries, such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (former Soviet republics), and former Warsaw Pact members such as Poland and Hungary. Trump might grant most of Putin’s wishes, including reducing the US military in Europe, with specific limits or bans on certain tactical weapon systems capable of reaching Russian territory. If NATO disintegrates under Trump’s unprecedented assault, we can imagine Putin in the Kremlin performing whatever rhapsodic acrobatics his 72-year-old body would allow.
It is conceivable that a Putin-Trump pact would carve up Europe into spheres of influence, as the US, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom did at the 1945 Yalta conference after World War II. Trump also might be amenable to chopping up the world into American, Russian, and Chinese zones of hegemony — a 21st century brand of colonial imperialism. That would betray American allies in Asia, particularly South Korea and Japan, and pave the way for China’s takeover of Taiwan.
Oddly, the supposed master of “the art of the deal” gave up three of his bargaining chips before negotiations over Ukraine even began. He, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have collectively staked out a very weak position going into talks. They’ve already said that Ukraine will not join NATO, will have to give up territory to Russia, and will not get the shield of American military support that has kept the country alive in the face of the brutal Russian onslaught.
Why forfeit your opening position before the opening? How does the tough guy in the White House think he can handle a canny fellow like Putin by caving in advance?
It can be argued, as Hegseth did, that the NATO and territorial concessions are merely statements of reality. All 32 members would have to agree to admit Ukraine into NATO; Hungary and possibly Turkey would be expected to object. Besides, admitting a member at war with Russia would mean a NATO war with Russia. As for Russian-occupied territory, the virtual stalemate on the battlefield can’t be translated into a Ukrainian victory at the negotiating table. The realities won’t produce Ukraine’s maximalist desires.
Still, those are positions to be traded away for something from Putin in return. Trump seems keen to just end the war without caring about how it ends. Carelessness will lay the groundwork for another war, and for Trump’s ignominious legacy as an appeaser without a spine.
Nothing in Trump’s emerging policy addresses Putin’s second track: his messianic yearning to recreate the Russian empire, of which Ukraine is a linchpin.
“Putin’s attachment to Ukraine often takes on emotional, spiritual, and metaphysical overtones,” wrote Eugene Rumer and Andrew S. Weiss back in 2021. Alongside his tangible geopolitical concerns, they observed, he is driven by the personal compulsions of historical fabulation and ethereal bonds to a land that he denies constitutes a country.
“By his own account,” writes Michael Hirsh of Foreign Policy, “Putin sees himself not as the heir to the Soviets but as a champion of Russian civilization and Moscow’s Eurasian empire, whose roots extend back to a much earlier Vladimir — St. Vladimir, the Grand Prince of Kyiv from about 980 to 1015. St. Vladimir was ruler of what the Russians consider their first empire, the Slavic state known as Kievan Rus — based, of course, in Kyiv, the capital of what is now Ukraine.”
The Great Deal-Maker in the White House doesn’t have a clue.
