What’s going on in Putin’s head?
The eight-hour talks between Russian and American diplomats in Geneva on Monday broke up with little sign of a peaceful exit from the confrontation over Ukraine. It is one of a marathon series of several talks in different venues running all week to break the impasse, and dispel the growing gloom over an impending war.
One of the few positive signs from the meeting was that both sides agreed to go on talking. Russia, led by deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov, said it did not intend to invade Ukraine – though it has continued to manoeuvre its four army groups in its west ever closer to the Ukraine border. Latest reports reveal that new helicopter units have joined the forces, suggesting an attack of some kind might be only days away.
The terms raised by Ryabkov suggested a hardening of Vladimir Putin’s stance on Ukraine and Nato in general. Ukraine must never aspire, let alone apply, to join Nato. Newly joined members of Nato, mostly former Soviet Union satellites, should reduce the number of exercises and deployment of missile forces on their territory. There should be no expansion of Nato membership in eastern Europe.
“For us it is absolutely mandatory to make sure that Ukraine never, never becomes a member of Nato,” Ryabkov said after the meeting. “We need iron-clad, waterproof, bulletproof, legally binding guarantees… It is a matter of Russia’s national security.”
Nato military chiefs now believe a Russian military operation is more likely than not, and the opening moves could start this weekend. The Biden administration appears to have learned from the response of the Obama administration to the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, and from the chaotic retreat from Kabul last year. US diplomats and military are consulting with interested parties at every level.
The US services chief General Mark Milley has been consulting regularly with his new British counterpart Admiral Tony Radakin. Both have spoken with their Russian opposite, General of the Army Valery Gerasimov. Radakin privately described the encounter as “very interesting”, and Gerasimov appeared to have discounted a full-on attack on Ukraine, but this was a week or so back and events are moving quickly.
America and Europe are discussing a two-strand strategy: widespread punitive sanctions and preparations for a Ukrainian campaign of guerrilla counter-insurgency, should Russian forces invade and occupy.
The sanctions might involve depriving Russia from access to international banking and credit facilities, including denial of the SWIFT clearing protocol – as happened with mixed results in sanctioning Iran.
The counter-occupation campaign involves the preparation of stay-behind forces with caches of weapons such as Stinger man-portable air defence missiles, and Javelin anti-tank rockets. Russian forces have fared poorly in operations of pacification and occupation since 1979, which saw the disastrous ten-year assistance and occupation to aid a creaking communist regime in Afghanistan.
Russia now has eight operational army formations formed up Klintsy in the north at the angle with the border between Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, with a reserve in the training ground at Yelnya. To the south and east five groups are arranged in an arc from Soloti, Pogonovo and Boguchar to two groups facing the separatist enclave of Luhansk and Donetsk, at Persianovskiy and Rostov on Don and a reserve in Volgograd – once known as Stalingrad. Another group has been stood up in Crimea itself.
This latter cluster of forces circling southern Ukraine may be a hint of what Putin’s next move may be. His diplomats have said that Russia does not intend an invasion of Ukraine as such, but several now speak of the need for “military-technical adjustments.” This could mean a move to shut off the Sea of Azov, denying Ukrainian and allied naval forces access, and an attempt to establish a “land bridge” across the north shore of the Azov Sea linking Russia to Crimea through the port of Mariupol.
This could well involve the UK because of the new agreements for Britain to assist building new patrol craft and in training for the Ukraine navy. Russia has made it plain it wants to deny whole tracts of the Black Sea to Nato allies. It has recently denied access to the Azov Sea on the pretext of holding live-fire naval exercises there.
In the string of meetings, the session of the Nato-Russia Council on Wednesday and the OSCE, the 56 member Organisation of Security and Cooperation in Europe, due at the end of the week, will provide clear milestones. Both will bring Ukrainian representatives into the wider negotiating arena.
Russia will depict Nato and the US as the rule breakers and bringers of threat and instability. The Russian delegation will demand a dial-down and pull back of Nato from patrolling and arming countries on its borders. It will also demand that no more new members are allowed to join the alliance. This could be a slender straw that breaks the camel’s back. Russia does not want Ukraine and Georgia to join the alliance. This week, against all previous run of play, the government of Finland has opened discussion about joining Nato as a full member. If Finland joins, so will Sweden. Putin faces the prospect of two new Nato partners in and around Russia’s northern borders.
Much is now focused on the increasingly erratic rhetoric and state of mind of Vladimir Putin himself which is causing swirls of suspicion and fear in Moscow, and the whole defence and security apparatus of the Kremlin. He is behaving like a haunted man in a hurry. He has accused Ukraine and the West of breach of trust and breaking established agreements. Yet it was he that broke in letter and spirit two of the more successful late and post-Cold War security treaties, the INF, governing intermediate nuclear weapons, and the CFE, governing Conventional Forces Europe. In tearing these up he had latterly the aid of Donald Trump playing the role of useful idiot.
With an attack on Ukraine he will breach another fundamental agreement of European security, the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, to which Russia was full signatory. It holds that no international border should be altered by the use of force. Russia has tried this before with limited success in Crimea in 2014 and South Ossetia bordering Georgia in 2008.
Putin seems bent on reconstituting the old Soviet empire, along lines of his own fantastical imagining. He regards the collapse of the old Soviet Union as “the biggest geo-political disaster of the 20th century.” He has established the Common Security Treaty Organisation, with six former Soviet Union partners, nations headed by kleptocratic thugs like Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus and the Nazarbeyev-Tokayev clique of Kazakhstan. Putin believes that Ukraine is an integral part of his old-new empire, and seems unwilling to register that most Ukrainians, whether by political or cultural inclination, do not feel part of Russia.
Putin’s post-Soviet version of Stalin’s old empire might pay lip service to the Marxist analysis of its founding myth. More useful for all of us as Ukraine teeters towards war might be a Freudian analysis of the motives and psyche of Vladimir Putin himself.