How dangerous is Vladimir Putin’s Russia? That was the question that Rex Tillerson was grappling with, just hours before he was sacked. The former US secretary of state told reporters: “We’ve seen a pivot on their part to become more aggressive. And this is very, very concerning to me – we don’t fully understand what the objective behind that is.”
The question of Russia’s real intentions is all the more urgent because, to nobody’s surprise, Putin has just been declared the victor in the presidential election, and is set for another six years in the Kremlin. Normally, a president entering his fourth term in office is a known quantity. But the Russian leader seems to be becoming more reckless and confrontational with the passage of time.
Russia’s deployment of a deadly nerve agent on the streets of the UK is a new and dangerous departure. The US government has just accused Russia of scoping out possible attacks on America’s critical infrastructure. In a recent speech, Putin boasted of a new generation of “invincible” Russian nuclear weapons that could devastate America, and used videos to illustrate his threats. And he closed his re-election campaign with a flag-waving rally in Crimea, the territory that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
But while Putin is reckless, he is not irrational. The record suggests that he can be deterred. Just three years ago, there was a widespread fear in the west that the annexation of Crimea would be followed by further seizures of territory in Ukraine. Russian state television seemed to be preparing the ground for this by suggesting that large parts of Ukraine were historically Russian territory. Some analysts worried that Putin’s tanks would roll all the way into Kiev, the Ukrainian capital.
Russia-backed violence
But although Russia-backed violence has continued in eastern Ukraine, there have been no further seizures of territory. The most likely explanation is that the Kremlin was deterred by the unexpected strength of the sanctions imposed on Russia by the US and the EU – as well as the threat that the west will step up military assistance to Ukraine.
More recently, there have been widespread reports that scores of Russians may have been killed in US-backed air strikes in Syria. But rather than react strongly, the Russian government has refused to discuss the alleged incident. There are some confrontations that Russia is not eager to rush into.
Putin seems willing to take big risks when he believes that the west is not paying attention. But when the Russian leader meets clear resistance, he backs off.
The real danger for both Russia and the west is therefore not that Putin is seeking outright conflict with the west, but that he miscalculates and creates confrontations that he cannot control. Putin’s fans at home and abroad have fallen for the idea that he is a brilliant strategist who annexed Crimea, intervened in Syria and meddled in the US elections without paying a price.
But a cooler look at the record shows that the Russian leader’s interventions frequently backfire. The conflict in Ukraine led to Russian-backed separatists shooting down the civilian airliner MH17 in 2014, killing 298 people and provoking greatly intensified sanctions on Russia. Moscow’s intervention in the US elections may have tipped the vote towards Donald Trump, which would be an extraordinary coup for Putin. But the subsequent backlash has led to the Mueller inquiry, which in turn may lead to further sanctions on Russia.
Putin still has his fans in the west, on both the far-left and the far-right
When Mitt Romney described Russia as the foremost threat to America in 2012, he was widely derided. But now a whole new generation of opinion-formers in the US is being raised with a deep suspicion and resentment towards Russia, of a kind that had previously been fading into history.
Meanwhile, Russian casualties in the war in Syria appear to be mounting, and Putin’s promises of an early conclusion to the conflict have not been met.
Trivial violations
Even relatively trivial violations of international rules by the Kremlin have backfired. A state-sponsored doping programme for Russian athletes was discovered and led to a ban on official Russian participation in the Winter Olympic Games. Now the attempted murder of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK has provoked an unexpected display of western unity – just when cracks were widening between Britain, the EU and the US.
The cumulative result of all these missteps is that Russia is much poorer and more isolated than it should be. Its economy is under sanctions and the years of rapid growth before 2008 are a receding memory. The staging of the football World Cup in the summer is no more likely to revive Russia’s image than did the Sochi Winter Olympics of 2014.
Despite all this, Putin still has his fans in the west, on both the far-left and the far-right. These fringe parties are gathering strength in Europe and may seek to promote more Putin-friendly policies. But the weakness of the Russian economy means that even politicians who are sympathetic to Putin’s style of tough-guy nationalism are unlikely, ultimately, to break with the EU or the western alliance. A Russian government that specialises in assassinations and nuclear threats does not have all that much to offer its foreign admirers.
– Financial Times Service