Putin may have been consistent in his objective of discouragin what he sees the threat from NATO expansion to Russia’s interests. But what has taken everyone by surprise is his decision to take the enormous gamble by invading Ukraine. That is completely at odds with his previous cautious strategy of limited occupations and withdrawal.
Now that it is clear that this is a huge strategic mistake that will damage Russia’s economy and relationship with the rest of the world and cause wanton destruction and loss of life in Ukraine, his reaction is to double down.
It is little wonder that there is speculation about his mental state. Senior politicians who have had good relations with him, visiting Russian and meeting him at the end of his long table have suggested that he seems a changed man. Paranoid and inflexible. No longer the shrewd geopolitical chess player probing rivals for weaknesses and siezing opportunities, expending only the resources he can afford to lose.
Putin has decided to bet the farm on the invasion of Ukraine and his speeches dwell on a lot more than the supposed threat from NATO. If anything he has United NATO and thrown away decades of Russian diplomacy that tried to steadily advance the interests of his country.
The few clues we can pick up from his speeches suggest he wants to leave a legacy of a greater Russia by annexing the parts of Ukraine that have a historic and religious significance to the old Russia. This seems something like a religious crusade.
Putin is a man in a hurry. If he has some kind of illness, this would explain his actions. But if he has some paranoid bunker fever, the question is how far he will take the world towards some doomsday scenario.
History is littered with political leaders who have decended into madness and driven their countries over a cliff of self destruction. At some point, even the most fervent supporters start to worry.
Frankly, this seems like circular reasoning to me. Putin has used military force to enforce compliance in the former USSR since he was merely Yeltsin’s prime minister in 1999. It all worked in his favor until it didn’t. When it worked, it was proof that he was a shrewd geopolitical strategist. As soon as it didn’t, it’s proof that he’s mentally deteriorated.
Yes, it does, but it’s the same crusade he’s been on for 20 years. This isn’t a recent development.
Putin is a man who’s always said that Ukraine’s status is an existential matter for Russia, and who is watching it inexorably moving towards NATO and the EU. He’s in a hurry because he genuinely probably didn’t have much time before Ukraine began formal accession talks with NATO and the EU.
Now, I buy that after 20 years of dictatorial rule, he’s become more isolated and insulated than he was, and his ability to read the geopolitical terrain has deteriorated because of that. But I really don’t buy that the invasion of Ukraine is some sort of dramatic shift for him. He’s pushed and pushed and pushed until he finally hit significant resistance.
Except that people who are in a position to know, like French president Macron who has met with Putin numerous times in the past and then again during this crisis, describe him as a changed man: paranoid, misinformed, and isolated. The reasons for this are anyone’s guess; it may just be that he badly miscalculated the invasion and the world’s reaction to it. But even without the kinds of observation that world leaders are making, it should be obvious that an unprovoked large-scale bloody attack on an innocent country, with major casualties on both sides, and then threatening nuclear annihilation against “anyone who interferes” – these are not the actions of a rational man.
ETA: Comment by Marci Shore, assistant professor of European history at Yale specializing in central and eastern Europe:
This no longer felt like a man playing a high-stakes chess game, now it felt like a scene from “Macbeth.” My intuition was that an aging man facing his own death had decided to destroy the whole world. Ukraine is very possibly fighting for all of us.
I don’t think Putin has “changed” as much as he’s “been changed”. He’s finally facing realities that he can’t ignore or have eliminated. His armed forces are ineffective, his control of the media is cracked, his economic reserves have evaporated.
We’re seeing a bully who’s been knocked down and discovered the flipknife in his back pocket is missing. He isn’t cocksure of himself anymore and everyone is looking at him and his failures.
Well, except that Putin has always maintained that Ukrainian membership in NATO is a red-line and an existential threat to Russia. The situation has changed, as Ukraine has moved further and further from Russia’s orbit, and closer to NATO and EU membership. If you grant the premise that Ukrainian membership in NATO presents a direct and existential threat to Russia, then his actions look fairly rational. And that premise is nothing new.
I think there are two things going on with claims of Putin’s mental deterioration.
One is personal observations of his in-person behavior with other world leaders. He seems increasingly isolated - literally (the whole big table thing) - as well as increasingly insulated from inconvenient facts and increasingly angry and paranoid. Is that because he’s mentally deteriorating, or because the actual facts are changing? Or, maybe more likely, both? China has dramatically overtaken Russia as a world power, COVID actually exists, Ukraine is genuinely moving closer to the West, and he seems to be losing the urban youth of his own country. He perceives the world as an increasingly threatening place, but that’s at least partially because it genuinely is, at least to his own position.
Still, it’s certainly plausible, as several posters have argued, that two decades of being an autocrat have taken their toll, and his ability to accurately read other world leaders and assess his own risks have actually deteriorated. I won’t actually argue against that.
But the other thing going on with claims of his mental deterioration is the sometimes unspoken - and sometimes spoken - corollary that his invasion of Ukraine is some kind of dramatic departure from his previous behavior, an unpredictable phase change, the actions of a dramatically and recently changed man. And therefore it’s nobody’s fault that they didn’t see it coming. That’s what I’m really pushing against in this thread.
Circling back to this:
The reaction of a lot of folks to Putin’s behavior, some political leaders and prominent analysts, and a few on this very board, remind me of reactions of a lot of folks to the behavior of an abusive spouse.
A man tries to control his wife, where she goes, what she wears, who she’s friends with. He hacks her computer, and plants spyware on her phone. He talks about how he’ll never let her leave him. About how he’d rather they both be dead. He physically assaults her. He buys a gun. He loads it in front of her and points it at her. He threatens to kill her. And he does this over and over and over again.
And observers just say, “lot’s of people say all kinds of stuff. ‘I’m going to kill her’ has been uttered in anger a million times that never went any further.” When the abuse gets too blatant, the police intervene to separate them, and give the husband a talking to. They may even haul him off to spend the night in jail to let him cool off. But he never faces any really significant consequences.
And then when the wife leaves him, everyone is shocked - shocked! - when the husband actually carries through on his threats and kills her. Why, nobody could have foreseen that. He must have just snapped. Clearly, he mentally deteriorated in the last couple of years, and that’s why nobody saw it coming or took any really significant actions to intervene.
It was expected that Putin might try to take more territory in East Ukraine, but instead he decided to go for a full invasion with the much larger objective of eliminating the Ukrainian military and de-Natzifying its politics (whatever that means).
There is not much evidence that Putin has spent the last twenty years planning such an ambitious undertaking. His army, despite being very large and having had many years engaging the Ukrainian army, seem unprepared and seem to be falling back on huge artillery firepower. This has the capability of destroying much of the precious historic sites in Ukraine that Putin thinks is so important to include in in a greater Russia.
So how do we explain this?
Maybe his generals were too nervous to give him the advice that he did not want to hear. Maybe they spun him an optimistic yarn about ‘decapitation missions’, ‘surgical strikes’, the derring-do of ‘special forces’ and the poor state of the Ukrainian army compared to that of Russia.
This sort of thing has happened before. Bush was persuaded by Rumsfelt that an invasion of Iraq could be done on the cheap. But then the US had the monumental shock of 9/11.
Ukraine has been kept at a distance by the EU and NATO for fear of antagonising Putin.
Russia has had no such shock, unless I am missing something.
This leads me to think that Putin has simply flipped. Suddenly abandoning the chess game, knocking over the table and getting into a brawl.
I’ve said before that I feel this invasion is primarily about Russian domestic politics.
Putin has been in power a long time and is getting old. There are undoubtedly people maneuvering to be his successor. Some of them may be thinking about forcing the transition by removing Putin from power. Putin is probably feeling pressure he wasn’t feeling ten years ago.
Starting a war diverts attention away from this succession. Putin can use a military victory as a prop to make himself look strong and still in charge (and unless the invasion ends up being a total fiasco, he can define whatever outcome is achieved as a victory). People tend to rally to a national leader during a war. International opposition to the invasion stirs up nationalist feeling in Russia and has the same effect. And Putin can wrap himself in the flag and proclaim that his political opponents are enemies of the state who are undermining the war effort by attacking him.
Has there been any evidence that Putin was losing his grip on power?
The Russian economy was healthy from Oil and Gas revenues, the media tied down, much of the population believe the propaganda, his main political opponents in prison…
No. That’s why I think he was emboldened to throw the dice on such a strategically risky venture. He’d nailed down political and media rivals and by all appearances NATO and the EU were in disarray and the whole world was economically and psychologically weakened by two years of pandemic. This moment was the best one for pulling this off. Alas, just because the odds are better doesn’t mean the odds are good.
If Putin isn’t concerned about the possibility of losing power then he would indeed have mentally deteriorated.
Because that risk is something he has lived with for years. It’s not like Putin can claim some institutional basis for being in power the way the President of the United States or the Queen of England can. Putin himself destroyed democracy in Russia so he can’t claim electoral legitimacy. Putin is in power because he was strong enough to take it. And that means he stays in power only as long as nobody else can take it from him.
Both NATO and the Ukrainian government have gone on record that Ukraine will not be joining NATO anytime soon. So how, exactly, is Russia’s security picture any different than it was 10 years ago? What is so special about NOW, that Putin feels an invasion is necessary NOW, when it clearly wasn’t necessary 5 years ago or 10 years ago?
Putin didn’t need to invade Ukraine while Trump was in power because Trump was simultaneously attempting to destabilize and marginalize Ukraine with a variety of diplomatic attacks as well as actively tearing NATO apart. If Trump had been re-elected, Ukraine would have been further wedged away from the West, and from the prospect of NATO membership. But with Trump gone — with NATO somewhat stabilized and the new American government making tentative overtures to renormalize relations with Ukraine — Putin clearly felt it was now or never.
Trump has said that Putin never would invaded Ukraine if he were President, and I agree with him — just not for the reason he says. It’s not that Trump was tough with Putin and would have scared him away from an invasion; it’s that Putin wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine because he wouldn’t have needed to.
Well, first off, you’d have to ask Vladimir Putin for the details of his world view.
But beyond that, I find the framing of your question curious.
Russia did invade Ukraine, just 8 years ago. It split of the Donbas region as a dependency, and outright seized Crimea. Putin has been attempting to undermine Ukrainian independence and manipulate its politics for decades.
But those efforts have failed - even backfired. Ukraine has just drifted further and further from Moscow’s orbit, and closer to the West. He’s used every play he has in his (limited) playbook, and they haven’t worked. It certainly looked like it might just be a matter of time before Ukraine formally began accession talks with the EU and NATO.
And as @Cervaise astutely points out, there was a four-year period in which the U.S. President seemed to be helping Putin to put pressure on Ukraine. But now that President is out of office, and anti-Russia hawks in both parties in the U.S. are re-asserting their influence.
Add to that the fact that Putin isn’t a young guy, he’s facing widespread discontent among the urban youth of his country, China has raced past Russia as a world power, and the future of oil and gas is uncertain but it’s currently a vital resource which Russia has a lot of.
There’s not an immediate crisis point, there’s a confluence of factors.
And getting back to my analogy upthread:
He’s always punched and threatened her, but she said she wasn’t going to be leaving him any time soon. So how, exactly, is their marriage any different now that it was 10 years ago? What is so special about NOW, that he feels killing her is necessary NOW, when it clearly wasn’t necessary 5 years ago or 10 years ago?
I had intended to bring the following up in my first reply.
Keep in mind that not just Vladimir Putin, but a lot of Russian and former Soviet officials far beyond his circle, seem to genuinely believe that during the talks over German reunification in 1990, the USSR came to an explicit and binding deal with the U.S. and NATO. The deal was supposedly that in return for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Germany and Soviet acquiescence to German reunification and NATO expansion into the former East Germany, NATO would never expand further eastward, and the other former Warsaw Pact states and Soviet Republics would never join NATO.
Within a decade, though, NATO expanded into the former Warsaw Pact, and a few years after that the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania joined.
Not just Putin, but many Russian and former Soviet officials outside his circle regarded that as a direct and deliberate violation of a binding agreement. At this point, even if Ukrainian and NATO officials loudly insist that Ukraine won’t be joining any time soon, Putin simply isn’t going to believe them.
And, again, Putin seems to genuinely see NATO expansion to Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia, and has said so for decades. He was never going to be satisfied with pious declarations of “not any time soon”. He needed iron-clad guarantees. He needed control.
He previously had pliable leaders in Ukraine. But after the Maidan Revolution, both the people and the leadership of Ukraine seemed to be slipping further and further out of his grasp. From 2016-2020, there was a sort of pause, with a loose cannon U.S. President who was undermining NATO, pressuring Ukraine, and often seemed quite pliable and friendly to Russian interests.
So, in 2021, Putin started increasing the pressure on Ukraine again.
Now, again, I’m not categorically arguing that Putin hasn’t become increasingly isolated, insulated, and paranoid, that he definitively hasn’t experienced some sort of mental decline over the past couple of decades. But from Chechnya in 1999 to Georgia in 2008 to Ukraine in 2014 to Ukraine again in 2022, Putin has displayed a consistent and escalating pattern of violent behavior. The idea that his current violent behavior is somehow a radical, unforeseeable change from his established patterns just doesn’t seem plausible to me.
With all these reports of the sorry state of readiness of the Russian military, I have this mental image of the Downfall scene, with Putin haranguing his generals from the end of a very long table.
