How long will Putin the gambler keep throwing the dice?

Russia’s Victory Day, 9 May, was the first occasion since he started massing troops on the Ukrainian border late last year in preparation for an ill-considered adventure, that Vladimir Putin played his hand competently. Or it could be that he will do all the things he had been predicted to do on Victory Day but did not – declaring all-out war with general mobilisation, resorting to chemical or nuclear weapons – at a later date. This remains to be seen.

The one concrete fact, however, is that it was Putin who raised expectations of Victory Day and then defused them. On 9 May, perhaps only temporarily, he reverted to the calculating political survivor he has been for most of his career. Western commentators and politicians did not miss the opportunity to sneer at the apparent humiliation of a scaled-down victory parade as a reflection of Putin’s military failure; they would have been better employed in considering whether, after several months of hubristic detachment from reality, the wily old Putin of former days may be back in business.

Of course, he could, at a moment’s notice, go all-in with military escalation, his judgement possibly affected by poor health or a sense of frustration and entrapment, in which case all reading of the tea-leaves on 9 May would be a waste of time. For the moment, though, alongside the gaming of every possible alternative scenario, Western analysts need to take a long, hard look at Monday’s developments – or lack of developments – in a non-hubristic spirit of inquiry. What did this unusual interpretation of Victory Day actually signal?

In one respect, what you saw was what you got. Yes, the number of troops involved and the display of military hardware was reduced from previous years; that was only to be expected in a country actively waging war and its significance was probably mainly logistical – why transport troops away from tactical positions to participate in a two-hour parade for empty show? As it was, Red Square was fairly well populated with military units and it is doubtful that many Russians, outside the more questioning educated elites, noticed any difference.

What does merit considered analysis is the absence of any air display. The excuse that the weather was unsuitable was a transparent lie. Nor is it remotely credible that Russia lacks the remaining air power to mount such a display. In fact, the eight MiGs flying in a “Z” formation had already been seen rehearsing in the sky over Moscow in the previous days. Why was that provocative display cancelled?

There is only one persuasive answer: because the thinking of Putin and his advisers had changed since the time when that feature was originally commissioned. The Z-shaped flight in rehearsal had already been witnessed by many, creating an expectation that it would be performed on Victory Day. Since the regime subsequently determined to abandon the “Z” symbolism, that meant dispensing with any aerial display, since to exhibit a flight of MiGs in normal formation would have advertised the rejection of the provocative “Z” feature, which would have looked like a climb-down.

Kremlinology has always been a meticulous and uncertain science, since the days when Western intelligence agents and geopolitical commentators used to measure the precise ranking along the top of Lenin’s tomb of rival members of the gerontocracy on Marxist-Leninist high days and holy days. Today, Russia’s ruling elite is equally opaque. That is why analysts, professional and amateur, find it necessary to deconstruct issues such as the omission of a “Z”-shaped fly-past, for it is such details that offer a clue to the thinking of a regime that has plunged two countries into war and the entire world into economic disarray and insecurity.

It seems that Putin, at the last moment, decided to dissociate Victory Day, at least to some degree, from the aggressive and Ukraine-focused “Z” symbolism. Instead, the focus was slightly tilted towards the actual commemoration of victory over Nazi Germany. Putin even went so far, in his speech, as to invoke, even if grudgingly and a trifle sarcastically, the roles of America, France and Britain in the defeat of Nazism. That was then played into his narrative of a degenerate America and Europe now perversely allying with “Nazism” in Ukraine.

Putin did not ignore the inescapable elephant in the room – the war in Ukraine. That would indeed have looked like an implicit confession of failure. Instead, he pursued his narrative that he was compelled by NATO and Western threats to move against Ukraine. Hardly a compelling argument to Western ears, but perfectly credible to brainwashed Russians deprived of uncensored access to the internet.

Here we come to the nub of what Putin achieved (in relative terms) on Victory Day: he avoided the temptation to paint himself further into a corner by calling up reservists and ordering a mobilisation that would make him unpopular and further damage his economy. He abstained from nuclear and chemical sabre-rattling. Instead of declaring war, he reduced the focus of military action to the Donbas and maintained the fiction of a “special military operation”, almost of a police exercise, in a limited theatre.

Putin kept his options open, on the very occasion when he was forecast to close them definitively and initiate the Götterdämmerung phase of his dictatorship. There was a whiff of underlying realism, though still heavily distorted by propagandist fantasy, about the tone of events on Monday. Putin has found room for manoeuvre, but the likelihood is his innate hubris will prevent him from exploiting it successfully to extricate himself from the hole he has been digging.

If he were to assume a defensive position in the Donbas, digging in with concentric lines of defence centred on Luhansk and Donetsk, concentrating a mass of troops there sufficient to hold off Ukrainian forces with increasingly sophisticated Western weaponry, he could almost certainly hold that territory, fighting on interior lines, with shortened supply lines to the Russian border and support among the local population. He would, in effect, be recreating the stand-off since 2014, reducing his casualty rate and the expense of the war, while reporting triumphantly to the Russian public the successful stabilisation of Luhansk and Donetsk.

While a drain on Russia, such a mini-war could be sustained indefinitely without endangering Putin’s authority domestically. In time, a negotiated settlement could be reached (even Kyiv recognises that ethnically Russian Crimea is a goner and that, even if somehow recovered, it would be an enduring insurgency weakening Ukraine as it struggles to rebuild), leading to the lifting of sanctions. Putin won himself the space to create such an outcome on Victory Day.

That, however, is far from a prediction of Putin’s future conduct: rather, it represents an exit strategy that is available to him, but which we can be confident he will throw away. A realistic exit strategy for Russia would require the abandonment of Kherson (from which it may imminently be displaced anyway), of the ambition to take Odesa, sacred in Putinesque mythology, and to command the Black Sea coast, reducing Ukraine to a landlocked nation. Ukraine will, in all circumstances, insist on the recovery of Mariupol, which has become its Stalingrad, drenched in the blood of patriots.

Even now, the clever money is on Vladimir Putin, with the stubbornness of the losing gambler, throwing the dice again and again, to hold his precarious gains in eastern Ukraine and complete his corridor, not just from Russia to Crimea, but to Odesa and Transnistria too. In that ambition he will continue to squander Russian lives and impoverish his nation until definitively, undisguisedly defeated.

That is the likeliest outcome. Yet, on Victory Day, Putin recovered just enough of his formerly trademark pragmatism to keep open an escape route that would allow him to remain in power, glorified in the history books that his creatures would write, his perambulations through the gilded halls of the Kremlin lined by pseudo-Preobrazhensky grenadiers craning their necks in salute. Perhaps he will avail himself of that opportunity, but it seems more likely that hubris and the obsessiveness of a Dostoevskian gambler will propel him into a course of action destructive for himself and his country.