Putin’s Long Game
Russia’s leader aims to cherry-pick concessions from the West, while imposing Soviet-style barriers between his people and outsiders.
The bloody war waged by Vladimir Putin and his regime against the independent Ukrainian state, with the aim of its destruction, has never just been a matter of bringing its largest European neighbor to heel.
The Kremlin is equally determined to reclaim the superpower status that Russia lost in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and believes Ukraine’s subjugation will aid this aim.
That lost status once included, among other things, holding talks with the Americans as equals — two leaders deciding the fate of Europe, if not the world. Trump granted Putin that status in Alaska.
Russia plays the long game. The Kremlin strongly believes that it is engaged in an existential war with the West, and in this contest, Moscow has never seriously considered a lasting peace deal as a viable option. It’s either us or them — that is the lesson drawn from the traumatic history of Russia by the now-elderly members of the Russian Security Council, most of them ardent students of history who lost their first careers in the turmoil of the Soviet Union’s collapse.
In their view, every peace deal Russia has made with Western powers has either led to another war or triggered a bloody regime change, followed by the disintegration of the Russian state.
The regime’s solution has been to pick fights with smaller neighbors since the 2008 war with Georgia, selling the restoration of national pride through militarism to the Russian people.
But while that is the policy, the rhetoric is very different. The Kremlin elite believes that real peace is by definition unachievable, but cannot say as much. It therefore plays a blame game — and the Kremlin’s goal, both tactical and strategic, is to shift the blame for this failure onto Europe.
This anti-European narrative is aimed at multiple audiences.
One is Donald Trump and his circle, whom the Kremlin hopes may be looking for a way out of the conflict and a villain to offload responsibility.
Another is a domestic audience in Russia, increasingly tired of the war, with a sense of depression palpable across Russia, most visibly in big cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Trump’s re-election inflated expectations of a swift end to the war, even within the military, and Putin must now address this. Happily, from the regime standpoint, Russian polls have shown more hostility to Europe than the US among ordinary Russians, which the Kremlin finds very useful in present circumstances.
The final message is to European voters. The Kremlin didn’t miss J.D. Vance’s speech at Munich in February, where he assailed the migration and free speech policies of European allies, and if there’s an opportunity to tell Europeans that peace could be achieved by replacing their liberal elites with more nationalist-leaning governments, Russia won’t miss it.
Having secured a desired result in Alaska, Putin will move on to his next goal: to separate the issue of “the Ukrainian conflict”, as the Kremlin calls it, from Russia’s global standing.
The status quo — in which Russia is seen solely as an aggressor and a pariah state by the West — has become increasingly frustrating for Putin and his inner circle. He aims to reduce the war to the status it was in 2014-2022, when the relationship with the US was frosty, but respectful. That would reduce Russia’s imperial quest to just one of many diplomatic matters, not the single, defining issue that determines the role of Russia on the world stage.
If successful, Russia would then re-enter high-level talks with the United States on strategic arms control, the Middle East, and so on, leaving Ukraine off the main agenda. And from there, the Kremlin will push for lifting the sanctions most important to Moscow — those targeting the movement of capital and technologies.
The Kremlin desperately needs to rejoin the SWIFT banking network for international transaction, as well as access to modern Western technologies, the lack of which became a serious obstacle for the development of a military industrial complex that is now falling behind.
As a Chatham House report noted in July: “Being ‘good enough’ to prolong a war against Ukraine is not the same as being able to keep up with Western (and Chinese) advances in military technology.” If, as Putin intends, Russian militarism is to prosper, these issues must be fixed.
Paradoxically, the Kremlin is not interested in lifting all the Western sanctions, for instance, those that contributed to Russia’s isolation from the West. The Kremlin no longer needs or wants Schengen visas for Russian tourists, American and European professors teaching Russian students, or children of the elites studying in Harvard and Oxford. Putin understands that close ties with the West expose Russians to dangerous liberal ideas.
When confronted with a choice between the costs of stability against the costs of modernization via globalization, the Russian authorities tend to choose isolation – as they have for centuries.
When Tsar Nicolas I, mortally afraid of political changes and deeply traumatized by the Decembrists revolt, heard of the July 1830 revolution in Paris, he immediately recalled all Russian citizens from France to Russia, including the aristocrats, to prevent the virus of the French revolution spreading to his countrymen. He froze the country and halted innovation, but secured his regime.
Putin now seeks to do the same, aiming to cherry-pick what he needs from the West while keeping Russians quarantined from its ideas.
* Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities. Their book ’Our Dear Friends in Moscow, The Inside Story of a Broken Generation’ by Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov was published in June.
* Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.