PUTIN: TRAPPED WITH NOWHERE TO GO

Throughout history there have been leaders – usually tyrants – who get caught in their own psychology. We all know Hitler took his people well past the point of knowing the war was lost – his own generals knew it was over even in late 1941, almost everyone else caught up by 1943 and Goebbel’s Total War speech, yet they let him take them down, and he believed that even close to the end he could change the inevitable result. When it dawned on him finally the war was lost, he declared that Germans deserved their fate because thy really hadn’t lived up to his expectations. The scorched earth policy was initiated but certain people like Speer, did their best to prevent it, knowing a post war Germany would need what was planned for destruction.

Putin, like Hitler has locked himself into a cycle of endless double-downs. Every loss means he must double down on his efforts to make it turn around. No matter what he loses, he must invest more, more quickly and at some stage, the investment will pay off. In his mind it has to, what else can he believe?

For many who don’t read history, the concept of such a leader is almost nothing more than a movie, a book, why would anybody be like that? It simply cannot be real. In the west the few who understand talk in the wind to bemused looking people who seem to think it can never happen – even some who believe it never did, because to them it makes no sense. To rational, politically unambitious people, those who don’t covet power and control, its seems quite ludicrous. And yet those who do want these things walk amongst us every day. Some achieve beyond their wildest dreams. Vladimir Putin is such a man.

It is vital we understand the predicament he has maneuvered himself into. His long reign stretching back to 2000, has extracted him completely from day to day realities. Notoriously unwilling to use mobile phones or computers he has no personal connection to the outside world. That got noticeably worse during Covid, with the bizarre mega sized tables and huge distances between him and whomever he was meeting. While that’s now not as bad as it was, it stuck to a degree its still uncomfortable to see. His isolation is almost complete. When he does meet anyone he trusts enough to get close its always on his terms. And who is going to tell him anything bad? The more people he fires, commit suicide, fall out of windows or die mysteriously walking home from a restaurant one night, would you risk telling him something he doesn’t really want to hear? Like many tyrants he’s become the prisoner of his gatekeepers, without actually knowing it. They filter what he sees and hears to meet what they think he wants to see and hear. Not out of maliciousness of their own, because they think they’re doing the right thing. And he trusts them probably more than anyone else.

Yet he has now decided he might be in danger because he knows two very important things. 1) People do not like it if they loose their wealth no matter how large or small. 2) People revolt when they starve.

The Russian economy is now an old banger on a steep road, pointing down hill, the brakes are almost worn out and the driver has his foot on the accelerator while looking through the rear window, seemingly oblivious to the cliff in front of him. There is no real way to stop what’s going to happen except win the war against Ukraine. The war that he knows is a mistake but cannot bring himself to admit it.

It’s now reached a stage where there’s even talk of (again) using tactical nuclear weapons to break the Ukrainian Army and speed the process up. That would be a huge mistake but the fact it’s back on the menu tells you how desperate things are – and that Putin doesn’t fear what America might do. Biden made it clear what would happen, Trump doesn’t understand the meaning of clarity.

On the one hand as the economy speeds towards inevitable oblivion, Putin thinks by tweaking that and twisting this, he can kick the problem down the road. His ministers are trying to tell him that’s not going to work, but he knows best and he wants to try. Find a way of blaming someone else and double down.

The extraordinary thing is that Stalin in 1943 was so afraid the Germans might just pull off a decisive battle at Kursk that summer, he considered talking peace with Hitler. Russia trounced the Germans and it was clear from then who was going to win.

Putin was offered the most extraordinary deal by Trump, almost a clean sweep of keeping what he’d gained, but he chose to carry on. Trump still cannot believe it, and is, it seems, slowly turning on Putin. It’s a moment in history that Putin himself I suspect, will one day not far from now, realize he should have grabbed with both hands, but his ego and self belief got the better of him. The war would go on, he doubled down.

And in the short months since the offer of the century from Trump, the Spring Offensive has more or less stalled. The Sumy offensive has even been partially turned back. The ‘buffer zone’ is nowhere near happening and probably never will. The advance on Zaporhizia has barely moved more than 3km in over a month. The summer offensive has yet to appear out of the doom, despite superficial advances.

At home the Military Industrial Complex is being hammered by drones – and everyone can literally see it. It makes Putin look weak and he tries to find others to blame. His conclusion is to ramp up the attacks on Ukrainian civilians because somehow that will change their approach to the war. Yet in the great scheme of things these attacks are minuscule compared to the carpet bombing of cities in WW2, they’re barely a drop in the ocean and will change nothing. It’s a way he can double down though, so it must be done.

The place Putin finds himself is where the candle is burning at both ends and he’s in the middle. The economy is making the domestic population increasingly unhappy, that’s moving slowly but it’s still creeping nearer. The military situation is aggravating the armed forces and that’s not such a good thing. They’re not winning, the men are treated little better than animals and act accordingly. If they were to either revolt or the war ended what would he do with them? Let alone the millions working in the defence industry whose high pay and jobs will vanish. That could prove a heady mix of former soldiers, combat experienced and ready to fight, along with starving and broke workers. Last time that happened the Czar ended up shot in the basement of the Impatyiev House in Ekaterinburg, his whole family with them. Not the way Putin wants to go.

And just to make sure he can never make the choice to give in he has his foreign minister, Lavarov, make it clear that Russia wants impossible to meet demands met, before they even talk about talking about peace. No the war must go on. Double-down again – and again if need be.

Yet the option to do so is no longer a matter of indefinite years, and that Putin doesn’t seem to see. He thinks he can tweak the system, double on down and keep forcing the war on and everyone will stay with him. Already the ludicrous nature of this approach is becoming clear.

In order to extract money for the war, business owners are being investigated and their money confiscated, their companies nationalized. The latest one this week is the manufacturer of Russia’s ICBM’s. They were targeted because they hadn’t paid their assessed taxes. The reason they hadn’t paid them is that the government – their only customer as its a limited market after all, hadn’t paid its bills and they had no money. Tax may be due based on invoices, but unpaid invoices to the very agency that collects the taxes? It’s a twisted irony and no doubt, in the Byzantine way the Kremlin handles these things, a deliberate way of forcing the situation. This is happening more and more frequently, the state rapidly nationalizing the war economy to extort money out of it and then not have to pay invoices it alone should pay.

You cannot just keep going on like this, because in the end there is always an equal and opposite reaction.

My prediction is the only way this war ends – because it’s in danger of spreading to Azerbaijan any day now – is Putin being removed. Sooner or later someone will act in tandem with others. His replacement will be no better, but they will have one major advantage – they didn’t start the war and they see no way it can continue so they can walk away from it. How that pans out is impossible to say right now. But if he isn’t removed soon, then there will be fewer and fewer people willing to do it and pick up the mess. And that eventually means revolution and the almost certain breakup of the Russian Federation as we know it.

The cycle of destruction, the implosion that Putin will bring on himself and those who followed him to the end, has one darker possibility. Putin has always been pragmatic and thoughtful, but often he’s been wrong. He has also shown mental and physical decline and if the war looks like it might take him and Russia down with it, we have his words to remember as he stood on the conning tower of a Russian SSBN, “What point is there in a world without Russia in it?”

The Analyst

militaryanalyst.bsky.social