Есть ли у Путина цель | Или только путь в никуда (English subtitles) @Max_Katz

An important conversation we’d like to revisit today is this. What is Putin’s overarching global goal? You can’t really approach the discussion of a truce without answering it, and there are two polarly opposite concepts in this regard.

The first theory is that Putin views himself as an emperor with a strong irrendentist bone. He aims to seize back the territory that was once part of the Russian Empire and the Eastern Bloc. He’s yearning to divide global clout with the U.

S. and China and turn Russia into the third pole of a new multipolar world. The second theory is that Putin’s sole goal is to retain his grip on power through whatever means that are available.

Under this concept, he’s never had any views or convictions, except thinking he must rule till death dethrones him. Under that first conjecture, there’s some endgame Putin envisions for the Ukraine war. That’s where he’s going to stop.

Like, the negotiations may bear fruit because his counteragents can pander to his pride, and that’s going to lead to, at least, a truce. But the second theory suggests that for him, this war is a vehicle of retaining the power, and that’s what makes it a valuable asset that can’t be trumped by victory. We’re of the belief the latter theory is true.

Before we can explain why, let’s look into what kind of person Putin is and what his background was like. Then we’ll switch to his actions. The biggest thing about him is that he’s a Soviet bureaucrat.

A bureaucratic person of convictions is a bad bureaucrat no matter the system. No system or hierarchical structure is expecting them to be proactive, opinionated, and productive outside of their job description and pay grade. A bureaucrat’s job, no matter the nature of a hierarchy, is to consistently follow the orders in a disciplined way.

A municipal official that goes, “I’m opposing the construction of a new highway. I propose upgrading the fleet of streetcars instead,” will soon find themselves fired. Their career will be over.

Their job is to prepare a design for a tender and handle the paperwork. They mustn’t have an opinion about it. Their job is to make sure the approved solution is implemented.

Characterizing a person as a cog in the machine may sound insensitive, but that’s the kind of people every structure is in need of. Say a military, law enforcement, spy agencies, corporations, or a government. If every decision begins to be debated every step of the way and, instead of following the orders, bureaucrats begin to act in sync with their own set of beliefs, an organization will wind up unmanageable.

You won’t even be able to get a bench in the park repainted black because an official will say it’s too gloomy. You definitely need to repaint it green. Bureaucracy works as a well-oiled natural selection system.

Even if there’s an odd official with a creative outlook ambitious enough to materialize their own ideas instead of falling in line with their superiors, the system will either break or oust them. No boss in the world needs an underling who’ll be challenging every single assignment, blowing the deadlines, doing their own thing, and eventually making their boss look bad in the eyes of that boss’s boss. Any governance system favors loyalty and diligent execution.

The more you have of these two qualities, the higher you’ll progress up the career ladder. Vladimir Putin’s career as a KGB officer was fairly successful. It wasn’t exactly a hall-of-fame-level career, but a consistent one.

But seeing as civilian structures in the world’s most liberal-minded countries don’t value opinionated folks, a Soviet spy agency had no room whatsoever for combative ideologues. The Soviet reality wasn’t exactly conducive to rearing a person of convictions who’d have a consistent worldview. Even a factory worker was supposed to be a man of many faces.

What they could say at work was different from what they could say at a communist pep rally or a conversation at his dinner table. All of that wouldn’t jibe with his thoughts, let alone actions or motives. But far from being a factory worker, Putin served with an agency that was keeping tabs on each and every employee.

Having convictions that were at odds with the big boss’s will and out of synic with the party line was a no-no. But as times had changed, Putin was quickly hired by Anatoly Sobchak as an aide, even though a liberal college professor and a former spy agency operative sounded like an almost oxymoronic ideological mismatch. A couple of years before that career move, Putin could’ve only met Sobchak in an interrogation room.

That’s how starkly different those two worlds were. And yet, Putin did get that job. But that was because Sobchak was no longer a college professor and a borderline dissident.

He was a mayor of St. Petersburg. The city got a new boss, and Putin applied for a bureaucratic job under him.

He sure had no qualms about it. But then came the collapse of the Soviet Union, something Putin would call the “greatest geopolitical disaster ever” decades later, and the demise of the Soviet government. However, Putin didn’t side with the State Emergency Committee that was trying hard to reverse the “disastrous” scenario.

Instead, he sided with someone who, according to the current narrative, had eroded the USSR. One’s free to be fantasizing about Vladimir Putin’s potential values, views, and convictions. But there’s nothing in his prior bio to suggest he had any.

Putin’s character was molded by a setting that was totally averse to any convictions. They didn’t care whose orders to follow as long as those were handed down by a boss. Putin is a textbook apparatchik.

His only conviction is that a task at hand should be handled no matter what, even if the current task defies yesterday’s assignment and narrative. President We can recall Putin campaigning for his first term in office and speaking in his first presidential stint. If we rewatch any of his annual Q&A live streams from before the mid-2000s when he began getting more dictatorial, we’ll see a politician that, by today’s standards, should’ve been killed, jailed, or forced to flee.

The “s__tlib” he was, he exudes no indication of his imperialistic or irredentist plans. Far from it, he was rooting for human rights and liberties, Russia’s global integration, and the respect toward the neighbors’ sovereignty. Everyone with a decent memory knows that the annexation of Crimea was being justified only in retrospect.

The Russian Crimea narrative had been floated by the same people that are advocating the need to reclaim Alaska these days. Even the Russian nationalists’ standards would consider it a super-fringe idea. The propaganda was never pushing for it.

Before 2014, Putin was repeatedly asked about the status of Crimea during his Q&A’s. He was unequivocally and emphatically against the idea of reclaiming it. We aren’t dealing with a revolutionary-type politician like Trump.

He wasn’t campaigning on the “Make Russia Great Again” platform. He wasn’t calling for the reversal of the Yeltsin-era accomplishment or a crusade to retake the lost provinces. Instead, Putin was seen as a bureaucrat who was appointed president.

And a president he was as he proceeded with the policies of his former boss. Just like he did in his KGB years or while working under Sobchak. Consider it done, sir.

All of us remember the point where Putin began waxing nostalgic about the “spiritual bonds” and the government machine started looking for anything remotely redolent of an ideology. They started off by touting Orthodox Christianity with its traditional values. Then they clamped down on gay people.

That was followed by the now-regular protracted history lectures, a slew of conspiracy theories, a mad search for foreign interference, and those the State Dept. ’s bidding like the so-called “foreign agents. ” Prior to that, they were walking about being friendly, drawing foreign investment, cooperating with Europe and the U.

S. , building a NATO base in Ulyanovsk, and bankrolling the Russian students’ scholarships for studying abroad. Today, it all sounds like a recipe for a lengthy prison term.

These ideas gave way to militant isolationism. Some may remember Putin’s speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference when he first said that Russia was getting a raw deal and had a right to push back. But this speech only resurfaced in retrospect as it suddenly began to make sense amid the events that happened years later.

Back in the day, the address was viewed as a one-off and pretty insignificant event as it didn’t lead to the change of tack in terms of Russia’s integration into the Western world. It wasn’t until years later that they banged a U-ey, and the rationale was different. It all started in March 2012 as Putin got reelected amid a massive wave of street protests.

That’s when it became clear that the previous model to remain legitimate and retain the power would no longer be working. In the 2000s, most Russians were busy making money, upgrading their housing conditions, buying ACs, installing double-glazed windows, taking out loans for foreign-made cars, and traveling abroad. They didn’t care if there was a government at all.

But even if they did, they were thankful to it for creating money-making opportunities without stealing from them or meddling in their affairs. But then it dawned on them that the political rights mattered. Affording a comfortable living space was a great thing.

But they wanted to enjoy that comfort and safety outside of their pads, too. They didn’t want the cops to abuse their duties. They didn’t want to see corrupt officials.

They didn’t want V. I. P.

public road users plowing into the oncoming cars and having the passengers killed. They didn’t want spy agency officers colluding with judges to take over their businesses. That’s where people began noticing the government’s policies.

Previous elections used to be seen as an exercise in futility. They used to be drawing scores of retirees looking to snag cheap pastries in the pastries. But suddenly, people got concerned about the electoral process.

Politics was no longer a fringe hobby. Indeed, you first had to cast a vote, but then you needed to protect it. On top of your Toyota Camry, you were now also responsible for the country you’re driving it in.

You care about what kind of people are running the country. And that’s how people ended up voting for the unexpected candidates. The rampant electoral fraud was easily verifiable.

It caused massive backlash. In 2012, Putin faced the kind of fork in the road every developing country inevitably encounters. One option is to keep developing the political institutions like competitive elections, an independent judiciary, and free media outlets.

You don’t foil the development of a civil society that’s ready to keep the powers-that-be in check. But then you end up losing the power. The second option is to roll back the liberal transformations, steamroll the civil society, and try to conserve the current state come hell or high water.

But that’s how you stay in power. Autocrat The annexation of Crimea became that proverbial steamroller. They’d failed to forge a coherent ideology, justify their policies with traditional values, or infect the public with an anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment.

But that’s where a patch of foreign land that was left unguarded and unattended came in handy. Various sources agree that the decision to invade Crimea was an off-the-cuff move. But it was clear right away that they’d hit an unplanned grand slam.

What the annexation did was solve two problems. First, it was a resounding and almost casualty-free W. A cinematic Victory Day without any hostilities.

For any government, a foreign policy success solidifies the legitimacy and brings more support. For a brief period of time, nothing else matters. Who cares about the stolen votes when “Crimea’s ours again”?

Second, Putin used the Crimea and Donbas cases to show the Russians that a protest couldn’t be successful. An idea to topple the government through nationwide protest rallies could only precipitate instability, hostilities, or a foreign invasion. The Maidan Revolution, a success story of citizens from a neighboring country overthrowing the corrupt government via a peaceful protest, jeopardized Putin’s power amid the still-active Russian protests.

If it hadn’t been for Crimea and the Donbas and Putin hadn’t crushed the Ukrainians’ victory with a catastrophic invasion, we’d now be living in a different world, and most certainly that’d be a world without Putin calling the shots. Even though it wasn’t true, many government critics in Russia viewed the Maidan events as a spin-off of the Russian protests, as another in a cascade of protests that kicked off in December 2011 If the Maidan success hadn’t been eclipsed by the Crimea and Donbas disasters, it would’ve rekindled and catalyzed the Russian protests. That also explains Putin’s full-bore support for Lukashenka in the wake of the 2020 election.

Otherwise, he wouldn’t have survived. It wasn’t about Putin pressuring Belarus. The country has always been heavily reliant on Russia, and any government would’ve pursued a friendly policy toward Russia.

To Putin, it would’ve even been friendlier than Lukashenka who’d been shamelessly sponging off him for 20 years while making a fool of Putin. But a scenario where a longtime dictators got crushed by peaceful protesters would’ve been a grim omen for Putin. Every step Putin takes can be explained if we assume he has no convictions or ideology.

His only job is to retain the reins of power. Even the rationale behind the totally chaotic warfare suddenly becomes clear as day. It may have been conceived as a special military operation that’d follow the Crimean scenario and have the same effect.

Which it didn’t. That’s where the war devolved into an attempt to seize anything that could be spun as a W. But those plans were thwarted by Ukraine’s counteroffensive and the ensuing liberation of the Kharkiv Region.

The debacle and the resulting forced mobilization drive turned out to be the biggest threat to the resilience of Putin’s regime since the 2011–12 protest campaign. The war has ever since been waged for its own sake. The sole goal is to keep up the war effort that props up the regime’s stability.

If we assume that Putin keeps it up to retain the war, it all fits. It also explains why Putin doesn’t jump at the opportunity to sign a truce, which looks reasonable as his army is struggling to capture more territory. Taking over Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipro, and Mykolaiv, let alone Kyiv, is a bad fantasy.

No easily recognizable name of a large city will be added to the W column in the years to come. Trying to postpone the talks in a bid to have the war frozen on much betters terms doesn’t make any sense. On a scale of this war, gaining or losing another 500 yards doesn’t matter a little bit.

Putin has gained as much “originally Russian” land as he could. There’s no ideological point in extending the death toll anymore. If you think this war seeks to restore the former empire, Putin should’ve pulled the plug, like, two years ago.

The changes to the battlefield dynamic haven’t been impressive, let alone inspiring. He should’ve stopped it the moment Trump forced Zelenskyy to agree. Putin doesn’t need more time for territorial gains.

True, the idea of Putin doing whatever it takes to cling on to the throne may sound simple and simplistic even. But any other explanation, whether it be his imperialistic appetite, his legacy, or the expansion of the “Russian world,” is at odds with Putin’s background and, more importantly, his actions. A dictatorial leader seeking to expand his empire and divide the rest of the world with the superpowers may sound like a more dramatic and fancier yet totally baseless explanation.

A bureaucratic boss who can say anything, torch anything, and kill anyone to remain in his capacity sounds simplistic, but it fits. Does it make Putin look pathetic and worthless? It doesn’t.

Any powers-that-be aspire to remain that way come what may. Most of the steps taken by politicians can be explained by their reluctance to go. It’s only the robust institutions that are capable of messing with your plans to rule forever and kicking you out of office whatever your blowback.

See you tomorrow!