The Noose Tightens: Will Russia Remove Putin?
Russian forces are tightening the noose around Kyiv, attacking nearby towns ever more damagingly than before. Equally worryingly, Putin and his lackeys are readying themselves to use chemical and biological weapons against Ukrainian defenders, even civilians. At least that is how it looks early this morning; some Pentagon sources even anticipate Russia attacking its own columns with such prohibited weaponry in order to provide a false flag pretext for using those same kinds of outlawed weapons against Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin has backed himself into a corner. He began a war he cannot win. That is, his overwhelming troop and tank numbers can outlast the valiant Ukrainian army and (perhaps soon) reduce Kyiv and other cities to rubble. But he and his legions cannot conquer Ukraine any more than the Russians could subdue Afghanistan. The resistance will swell, for Putin has united most Ukrainians just as he has strengthened NATO as a defensive alliance in Europe and beyond. There are some elusive tiny signs, too, that China is trying to back away from all out support of Putin’s war (and calling it by that name).
Legitimacy is the key to transforming battlefield conquests into enduring control. But, even if some Russians are misled by Putin’s propaganda and – in coming days – by false talk about biological and chemical weapons factories in Ukraine directed against mother Russia, his conscripts know that they are shooting and being shot at only because of some madcap creation of Russia’s modern wannabe czar. So do many (but not all) Russians back home understand that they have been misled. And, most of all, Putin has lost any global standing as a serious statesman. Yes, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates, among others, abstained in the United Nations when criticism of the invasion of Ukraine was voted, but those countries know nevertheless how illegitimately Putin has behaved, and how the assault on a free-standing nation is, at best, a vanity operation with no underlying strategic or nationalistic purpose. There is no logic to it. Nor is there any moral rationale. When corrupt former South African President Jacob Zuma supports you loudly, you must know that you are disgraced.
Putin’s attack on Ukraine is a very personal crusade to “restore a mystical vision of greater Russia,” that is, to recover a loss of very personal stature and status. Or to put it more accurately, Putin is seeking to recover from a perceived but not objectively real narcissistic injury that plagues a small man who needs to ride horses bare-chested in order to showcase his supposed manliness. Conquests are more to bolster his own sense of self than they are to uplift Russia. We should thus sequester his massive yacht in the Mediterranean and find a way to threaten his immense palace near Sochi on the Black Sea.
The Soviet Union was bound together by an ideology – until everyone realized that there was none and that empire’s legitimacy was thoroughly hollow, especially after the invasion of Hungary in 1956. Now Russia is held together at the political and economic elite level by unvarnished greed, with Putin (until the invasion) the strong Mafia chieftain capable of manipulating patronage networks and gaining obeisance by creating profitable positions for the oligarchic class and food and clothing for the masses. But that era has ended. It is therefore essential –whatever happens on the battlefields – for the West to redouble its efforts to relieve the oligarchs of their illicit football clubs, jet aircraft, giant floating pleasure palaces, and their flats and mansions in Londongrad, Monaco, and Dubai. (Persuading the Emirates to extradite offenders for trial in the United States will be a major effort, but worthwhile.)
At least three prominent Russian generals have been killed thus far by Ukrainian partisans. An untold number of conscripts have reportedly laid down their arms and surrendered to the Ukrainians. A medley of oligarchs have fled to Dubai and others are trying to vanish themselves in plain sight. The big question is whether the realization that Putin is in fact Potemkin will encourage the Russian internal security services or the Russian military to preserve themselves at Putin’s expense.
Few experts anticipate a palace coup anytime soon. If not, since President Biden is understandably reluctant as yet to retaliate directly to save Ukraine, and as our own information machines have not penetrated Russian censorship and effectively countered Russian propaganda, we do not as yet have a way to support those who would want to remove Putin from power. Nevertheless, the forces of world order are dealing even more than they did in World War II with the need somehow to overcome personally driven and motivated aggrandizements, not a war that has structural or ideological underpinnings. Putin has tried in his mad public ranting and at his strange press conferences to claim something else that would cloak the invasion with the raiment of legitimacy. But few are buying.
The West needs to escalate its threats beyond sanctions, and as well to doubledown on its sanctioning. A few Western companies are lingering in Russia. They need to be persuaded to leave. We need to find a way to prevent profits from Russian and Belarusian exports from returning to Russia. We need to tighten our own consuming belts and to help Europe tighten theirs.
We may not have forever to end Putin’s war. Ukrainian defenders are valiant and President Volodymyr Zelensky is a leader like none other. But war materiel, fuel, and food supplies cannot last too many weeks longer. The U. S. and its allies need to support Ukraine strongly while contriving to speak quietly but pointedly to remaining Russian generals.