Of course he meant what he said, off-script. The White House has frantically tried to walk-back President Biden’s Saturday assertion that Putin must go, asserting that he merely voiced the obvious warning that Putin should not attack Russia’s neighbors. President Biden’s ad-libbing was too personalized, possibly stiffening Putin’s back, as so many have commented. Appropriately, President Biden on Monday said that he was expressing “moral outrage.”
But how to accomplish regime change is, indeed, the key question. And there are too few good answers. Putin has long been persistent in watching his back and in being compulsively paranoid about threats to his continued rule. He also disciplines potential threats from inside, like Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. According to leaked accounts, Shoigu disappeared from public view two weeks ago, after Putin blamed him for Russia’s palpable military weaknesses in Ukraine. The Hindustan Times reports that Putin’s rebuke was so sharp that Shoigu suffered a heart attack. But whether anything like that actually occurred, and whether or not it was a real appearance, Shoigu was depicted Sunday on Russian television.
Putin has also critiqued his intelligence service’s failure to predict the strength of Ukrainian resistance, and everything else that has slowed the Russian march on Kyiv. Some operatives may have been sacked demoted.
Ordinary Russians have been fined and jailed, and harassed, for various kinds of protest against the invasion of Ukraine. Several thousand, supposedly, have already been “disciplined” for opposing Putin’s war. But, so far, there are few reports of riots or protests against food shortages, rising consumer costs, currency deficits, travel impediments, and a rising rejection of Russia’s world pariah status. Putin fears those possible protests just as he abhors the color revolutions that swept authoritarians aside in 2004 Georgia, 2005 in Kyrgyzstan, 2014 Ukraine, and -- if Russia had not sent troops to intervene -- in 2021 in Kazakhstan.
As earlier columns in this newsletter have discussed, regime change is almost certainly the most expedient way of removing short- and medium-term threats to world order from Russia. Accomplishing that difficult objective would also stabilize Russia itself, and – plausibly – bring Russia back into compliance with post-World War II expectations of civility in the conduct of international relations.
No one knows, however, who could replace Putin effectively. Possibilities of the post-Soviet, post-Gorbachev era were badly bungled by Boris Yeltsin. He responded to his own leadership incapacities and his affinity for vodka by plucking Putin, a reputed strong man, from obscurity as his successor. Admittedly, Putin masked his ruthlessness and his paranoia for a few years despite admitting that to a interviewer two decades ago that, basically, he was a committed “real thug,” with a loathsome temper.
President George W. Bush looked into Putin’s eyes and saw a gentle soul. But Putin was soon the tyrant who invited a black dog into the room with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, knowing that Merkel was frightened of dogs.
Putin acceded to power in Russia by pulverizing Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, and then by cutting a cynical deal to give free reign in the destroyed city and country to Ramzan Kadyrov, a true “butcher,” to use President Biden’s misspoken words about Putin.
The overthrow of President Eduard Shevardnadze in Georgia by its people in 2004 truly enraged Putin. He could envisage his own fate if such insults to dictatorship were not halted in their tracks. Four years later he robbed Georgia of two its provinces, possibly refraining from launching a blitzreig on Tbilisi and the remainder of the country to avoid international condemnation and sanctions. But the West did little, except for some tut-tutting.
As I and others have written, Putin slowly thought of himself as invincible after experiencing no serious consequences following his invasion of Georgia, his conquest of Crimea by Russian soldiers posing as “little green men,” and his intervention in Syria.
Somewhere deep in the Pentagon or the CIA task forces must be discussing how to oust Putin, the Kremlin’s czar. But engineering such a shift, and being certain that a successor behaves less perniciously than Putin, are key imponderables. Of the Russian generals who have not been killed in Ukraine (six supposedly are now deceased), are there any capable of seizing power from Putin and his acolytes, and then holding it? Or are there close associates like Shoigu, or Anatoly Chubais (who has now fled the country), who could command the respect and the support of the military and then go on to win the confidence of the Russian people?
Conceivably, even contemplating such options is foolish. Putin’s hold on the military and security apparatuses may be so strong, bolstered by both patronage and coercion, that no one in or near the Kremlin would dare to raise their ambitions above the parapets. If so, without the World War III that no one wants, Putin may remain for months or years, and Europe and the U. S. may be forced, along with President Volodymyr Zelensky, to conclude hostilities without regime change. (President Zelensky indicated on Sunday that he was open to some startling compromises.)
Absence regime change, of course, Russia remains a threat not only to Ukraine but to the free world. Even if Russia’s war objectives are really now reduced --- as a Russian military commander declared Saturday in a possible feint-- to carving out a province in eastern Ukraine, Russia with Putin remains a potent threat to peace and stability everywhere. The war is not winding down. Our guard should remain vigilant and our support, and the tightening of an economic noose around Putin’s Russia should forge forward. (And more on that last point tomorrow.)
The commentariat, ever inclined to criticize, has made too much of Biden’s ad-libbed remarks. Too many people imagine they are superior to the current President (… to *any* President?).
Jen Psaki and the State Department should have kept their mouths shut, rather than attempting to put words in their boss’s mouth. If I’d been Biden, I’d have been furious at their presumptuousness and insubordination.
When Biden finally got a chance to “explain” himself, he very effectively stood by, and justified, his remarks.
Putin probably took Biden’s remarks in stride. I bet he has long imagined that the West has it in for him, and has come to grips with the idea.
Finally — Biden’s so-called gaffe may be inspiring to people in allied nations, as well as in the US. He dispensed with diplomatic pablum and gave voice to the moral outrage welling up in normal, moral people. He exhibited personal, Presidential leadership.