THE VIEW FROM THE KREMLIN WINDOW

Vladimir Putin has been running Russia for a quarter of a century. Many Russians know no other leader, they certainly don’t remember much about Putin’s puppet Medvedev. Putin played the role of Prime Minister for four years and let his protégé run things for a while. Putin toyed with the idea of stepping away altogether but simply couldn’t bring himself to do it. He returned to the Presidency in 2012 and is still there. He intends on staying there until the day he dies.

Occasionally the President takes the elevator Leonid Brezhnev had built in the Vodovzvodnaya Tower, overlooking the river Moskva. It looks south west, towards Ukraine. Its rare he gets the time or even thinks to go there anymore. He trusts few and despite the loyalty of his security services and bodyguards, of which he is largely certain, he has doubts. It’s the price of being who he is. It’s the price that all men like him who think differently pay.

He’s come here because he is angry. He had just been to the Central Bank for a briefing. It was deeply uncomfortable. It was not always like this. The money has run out, they keep telling him. His answer is simple, print more of it, raise taxes, find a way of finding the money to run the war, don’t tell me what can’t be done, tell me what the solutions are and then get on with it. Elvira Niabulina is clever, cautious, loyal and she only wants what is best for Russia, but she has something the President doesn’t like to see in anyone; a conscience. She worries about Russia’s future. He tells her that’s his job, not hers. All she has to do is pay Russia’s way and he’s given her all the power she needs to make that happen. Perhaps she’s out of ideas? There’s been plenty of murmuring in the background. They think he doesn’t know, but he knows everything.

Yet what annoyed him most today was the TV interview afterwards. The woman reporter was young, but despite his specially modified boots that he wore under his suit trousers, with a 40mm sole and an 85mm heel, she was taller than he was, it made him look small and there were strict rules about that. Even worse they had broadcast it unedited and the foreign media were identifying the chronically raised veins in his right hand, which he knew was down to age related veinous hypertension, but he hated the medication. Besides there was plenty to give him high blood pressure, not that he would ever willingly admit it.

The point in his mind was that this sort of bungle never used to happen. Now there’s something almost every day. Every single day he reads the reports on the attacks a across Russia that somehow, because of the NATO states, especially the Germans and of course the British, its always the British, Ukraine, the ungrateful former colony of Russia – and it would be again – was managing to deliver over ever increasing distances.

It wasn’t going to stop him. He made it repeatedly clear that only Ukraine surrendering unconditionally would end this war. Even he called it that now, nobody used the words ‘Special Military Operation’, even he was beyond that fantasy.

The Army was making progress at Pokrovsk. He wanted it taken. He did not care about the manpower loses and didn’t even ask anymore. There are plenty of men, just call them up without setting off any protests. He knew now that the way the war had progressed had left him with a problem in how to get the people behind him, and keep them there. Generally as long as the war didn’t come home most Russians didn’t care. The problem was it was coming home. He knew the refineries were in a mess, but couldn’t understand how they were so easily damaged, orders had been given to protect them, but it hadn’t stopped the Ukrainians.

Today’s news was even more irritating, Tuapse was now completely out of service and oil exports there had been cut to zero. Despite running everyone into the ground at Ust-Luga, it still wasn’t repaired and all he heard were excuses about sanctioned parts and a lack of skills, or that x or y had vanished in Ukraine on the front line. Excuses.

Winter was clearly on its way. The tower was freezing cold, even he could feel it. So would many more Russians. He knew the Ukrainians were attacking the power stations now, just as Russia was doing to them, because they deserved it, because they weren’t Russians, they were just the vermin that had been seduced by western ideas and money, and one apartment block, school, factory and kindergarten, theater and petrol station at a time, he would teach them the error of their ways.

This is war. Western ideas of ‘rules’ and ‘war crimes’ were a joke. They were hypocrites. They let Israel smash Gaza into the ground and barely one of them lifted a finger to stop it from happening. Then they moan over a few deaths of some civilians in an apartment block in Kyiv? Was it any wonder he didn’t take them seriously?

That’s why he liked Trump, he didn’t care, he had no morals, and a childlike fear of death. What he didn’t like was when Trump would keep repeating that Russia should have won the war in a week. He knew that, but the lies had been told, the corruption had gone far deeper than he’d ever imagined because he just didn’t think anyone below a certain level would risk it. Anyway, now his first cousin, Anna Tsivilyova was sorting out the defence ministry that would be a thing of the past. He’d put her brother and husband in the same roles at the state armaments company and the main energy generator. You can always rely on family, at least to a point.

As the biting wind made him snap back to his whereabouts, just for a moment, the President knew that he was committed now to victory. He knew that to stop or be forced to give in was not an option, not for him. He knew that if he did that Russia would do what Russia always did – sweep him away like litter in the street. He’d started this war to leave a legacy, to guarantee Russia’s future, to ensure he would forever be remembered like Peter the Great, there was no question of stopping.

If he stopped without a clear victory then the army would come for him; hundreds of thousands of armed and he knew full well, disgruntled, troops would be looking with their families, for a scapegoat, and he knew Russian history well enough to know who that would be. Well it wasn’t going to happen. He would prove everyone wrong. The West was weak, slow and dithered. His allies like the ridiculous toady Orban, the self promoting Fico, both leaders of micro states whose only real value was the mayhem they caused inside the EU and NATO, they would ensure Ukraine never got everything it wanted.

It didn’t take much to get the western nations flustered. Just set off some of the fifth columnists they thought had all long ago been dealt with and watch them wriggle and worry. A few drones, a couple of cut internet cables and they’ll be self indulgently clutching their pearls and doing nothing about any of it when it really came to it. What had they done about the jamming from Kaliningrad? Nothing. Had they seized a single grey tanker? Not for more than a few days and they let it go. Once Ukraine is defeated, Putin smiled to himself, they’d be next, after he dealt with the Moldvans and the Kazakhs. He wouldn’t forget their treachery anytime soon.

His mother has always told him that patience brings its own rewards. As he’d aged he understood that more and more, but he was running out of time. At 72 he had maybe ten years to get things done. he’d outlast them all, Xi and Trump included. Russia would prevail. It always had and it always would. After all, what point is there to the world without Russia in it? A point he had not long ago made to the commander of one of his ballistic missile submarines.

The Analyst

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