Putin: The Man Who Broke Russia

When the Murdoch-owned, Trump-supporting Wall Street Journal suggests that Vladimir Putin has 'broken' Russia with his ill-advised and poorly executed invasion of Ukraine. 

And that follows similar reports in generally Russian-friendly mainstream media that he is increasingly paranoid about Ukrainian drone attacks as well as internal assassination and coup attempts, you know, if you are a Russian oligarch or Kremlin apparatchik, that it is time to reassess your options. JL

Walter Mead reports in the Wall Street Journal:

Will Vladimir Putin be remembered as the man who broke Russia? The master of the Kremlin made a critical error. Ukraine wasn’t a real country, he reasoned. Its people weren’t nationalist. Its government was a hollow shell. That turned out to be wrong. Mr. Putin’s army is stalemated. Even as he struggles vainly in Ukraine, Mr. Putin has been forced to watch the decline of Russian influence in Europe. The war has gone on so long, cost so much (that it has) weakened the sinews of Russian power severely. The  likely outcome is an agonizing stalemate that continues to chew up Russian manpower and economic resources, threatening Mr. Putin’s grip on power and the future of Russia itself.

Will Vladimir Putin be remembered as the man who broke Russia?

That once seemed unthinkable. For more than a decade, Mr. Putin outmaneuvered a series of clueless Western leaders. The Russian leader’s penetrating and unsentimental understanding of his opponents let him inflict one humiliating setback after another on an overconfident West. Among those humiliations were the 2008 invasion of Georgia, the 2014 seizure of Crimea and much of the Donbas, and the revival of Russian power in the Middle East while President Obama walked away from his red line in Syria. The defense of Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko against a tsunami of popular protests and the displacement of French power across much of France’s former colonial empire in Africa also advanced Mr. Putin’s goal of making Russia great again.

But then the master of the Kremlin made a critical error. Ukraine wasn’t a real country, he reasoned. Its people weren’t nationalist. Its government was a hollow shell.

That turned out to be wrong. A critical mass of Ukrainians was willing to fight and die for the country Mr. Putin arrogantly dismissed. Their leader, President Volodymyr Zelensky, turned out to be a gifted politician and diplomat who kept his people united at home while patiently amassing international support.

The god of war is fickle, and Russia’s spring and summer offensives could still push Ukraine into crisis. But even if Mr. Putin’s stalemated army regains some momentum, the war has gone on so long, cost so much and weakened the sinews of Russian power so severely that any victory will be Pyrrhic. The more likely outcome, an agonizing stalemate that continues to chew up Russian manpower and economic resources, threatens Mr. Putin’s grip on power and the future of Russia itself.

Even as he struggles vainly in Ukraine, Mr. Putin has been forced to watch the decline of Russian influence in Europe. Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary deprived Russia of its closest European ally. Mr. Putin may now have to watch helplessly as Hungarian investigators aid their Western colleagues tracing the flows of Russian dark money into European business and political circles. Meanwhile, the Europeans, divided as they are and disoriented by the trans-Atlantic rift, have found the financial means to keep Ukraine in the war and can likely shore up Ukraine for the foreseeable future.

Mr. Putin has proved unable to stem the decline of Russian influence across the rest of the post-Soviet space. Armenia and Azerbaijan are actively cooperating with the West. Some Central Asian republics now have closer economic ties with China than with Russia. They welcome the expansion of pipeline routes to the West that bypass Russia and are attracting investment from Turkey and the European Union.

Farther afield, Mr. Putin’s once-promising attempt to reinsert Russia into the Middle East has flagged. Longtime ally Bashar al-Assad fell from power. Russia has been unable to exert significant influence over military or diplomatic events in the conflict between the U.S. and Iran. Russia’s African adventure isn’t going well either. Military setbacks in Mali have undermined Russian power and prestige, worsening relations with disappointed African governments that expected more help against jihadist rebels than Russia’s overstretched forces can provide.

Meanwhile, the Ukraine war is exacerbating Russia’s demographic decline. Hundreds of thousands of military-age men have been killed in the war; hundreds of thousands more, including many of Russia’s best-educated, fled the country to avoid being fed into the meat grinder. Even as Russia’s Muslim minority populations grow, the Slavic Russian population seems fated to continue to decline at an accelerating rate.

These trends don’t just mean trouble for Mr. Putin. They potentially spell a crisis for the Russian Federation as serious as the meltdown following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia’s economy remains among the weakest of the great and near-great powers today. To the west it borders on a profoundly and bitterly estranged Europe. Its contested eastern border faces a predatory and ambitious China. At home, restless ethnic minorities seethe with discontent. If the ideology of Russian national revival that Mr. Putin has propounded is seen to have decisively failed, his successors may struggle to hold what remains of the empire together.

Under the circumstances, reports that Mr. Putin is tightening his security and spending more time in underground bunkers seem credible.

Russia’s wily president shouldn’t be written off. Whatever one thinks of his morals, Mr. Putin has frequently demonstrated uncanny daring and skill. But unless he can summon the energy and creativity to extricate himself from this predicament, he may be remembered by history as the leader on whose watch Russia’s standing as a serious great power was finally and fatally lost.