What Does Putin Want, What Does It Take to Stop Him, What Are the Risks

"Above all, we should acknowledge that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama. Tens of millions of our co-citizens and co-patriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration infected Russia itself."

Russian President Vladimir Putin in April of 2005

“You want to provide the other side with a victory speech. It doesn’t have to be a real victory. It just has to be able to be portrayed as a victory. (Remember ‘Peace with honor’?) The challenge we face is that there is no clear result that leads to a victory speech for Putin.” 

Bill Ury, Harvard scholar and global strategy expert.

What Does Putin Want, What Does It Take to Stop Him, What Are the Risks

The son of factory workers, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born on October 7, 1952, in Leningrad, Soviet Union (now Saint Petersburg, Russia). Fluent in German as well as his native Russian, and after initially considering a career in law (he graduated with a law degree from Leningrad State University), Putin instead joined the Soviet KGB (the Committee for State Security; a mixture of our FBI and CIA) in 1975. He then served as a foreign counter-intelligence officer (above picture) for 15 years, spending the last six in Dresden, East Germany. After leaving the KGB in 1991 with the rank of lieutenant colonel, a lower and undistinguished rank for a retiring officer (he left in 1991), his ambitions moved him into political arena of a nation very much in a post-Soviet transition.

According to ThoughtCo.com: “After moving to Moscow in 1996, Putin joined the administrative staff of Russia’s first president Boris Yeltsin. Recognizing Putin as a rising star, Yeltsin appointed him director of the Federal Security Service (FSB)—the post-communism version of the KGB—and secretary of the influential Security Council. On August 9, 1999, Yeltsin appointed him as acting prime minister. On August 16, the Russian Federation’s legislature, the State Duma, voted to confirm Putin’s appointment as prime minister. The day Yeltsin first appointed him, Putin announced his intention to seek the presidency in the 2000 national election.

“While he was largely unknown at the time, Putin’s public popularity soared when, as prime minister, he orchestrated a military operation that succeeded resolving the Second Chechen War, an armed conflict in the Russian-held territory of Chechnya between Russian troops and secessionist rebels of the unrecognized Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, fought between August 1999 and April 2009.” His brutality in Chechnya earned him the tough guy reputation he cherishes to this day. 22 years later, Putin continues to lead Russia, having amended the Russian constitution to eliminate Presidential term limits, with an iron hand and a rubber stamp Duma. 

Over the years, Putin has openly tried to reconfigure several Soviet republics, which had gained independence, back into Mother Russia or at least directly under Moscow’s complete control: Georgia (using force in 2008 to prevent Georgian “genocide” in South Ossetia) and Crimea (under the guise of protecting ethnic Russians, in 2014, he simply marched into this Ukrainian state and annexed it). His recent defense of ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine was the precursor to the current war. But nothing made Putin’s blood boil more than former Soviet republics’ joining NATO or former Eastern Bloc allies gravitating towards the West. Like Ukraine. To Putin, having this mass of armed foes on his border was unacceptable. And nothing makes Putin more popular that invading “enemies of the Russian Federation.”

In his annual address to the Duma in March 2018, days before another election, Putin stated that the Russian military had perfected nuclear missiles with “unlimited range” that would render NATO anti-missile systems “completely worthless.” While U.S. officials expressed doubts about their reality, Putin’s claims and saber-rattling tone ratcheted up tensions with the West but nurtured renewed feelings of national pride among Russian voters.  But containing NATO – and sending a message to any other former republics or allies that they risked invasion if they did not tow the Putin-directed line – was his clear and unambiguous message. 

Obviously, the United States, under an unholy relationship between Donald Trump and Putin, didn’t care in 2018.  Withdrawing from NATO was on Trump’s table. That the Russian press openly touts that Russian interference brought Trump the US presidency in 2016, and believes it can repeat that effort in 2024, seems to slide past the consciousness of most Americans. Trump was always jealous of Putin’s unbridled power, unchallengeable and absolute; the Russian leader’s policy of never retreating, always doubling down became Trump’s mantra. Truth, laws and moral standards were inconvenient disposables. Putin’s knowing savagery against Syrian civilian targets was simply “the way he does things.”

That Putin miscalculated NATO’s and Kiev’s response to his invasion of Ukraine is obvious. But he may still attempt to divide NATO, especially if his ally French presidential candidate Marie Le Pen replaces Emmanuel Macron. I have written about his path to this divide and conquer strategy, if Putin is willing to make good on his recent warning to Western leaders against continuing to supply Ukraine with weapons. But unless he is deposed, extraordinarily unlikely no matter how many Americans believe that is possible, Putin will not stop unless he can declare victory. Victory in his fabricated campaign to support ethnic Russians and “de-Nazify” neighboring Ukraine. Otherwise, this is most probably a very long and withering war. 

Putin’s rather poorly trained army, lacking workable tactics and the ability to communicate and coordinate with other ground units, much less companion air and naval forces, is suffering and very clearly diminished. Russia has already lost 20% of its tanks and a prominent heavy cruiser. His casualties are now estimated at well over 15 thousand troops. He’s handed the war over to the general who butchered Syria. Russian soldiers are expendable. Russian workers are watching an approaching major recession are expendable. His military is in shambles and looks more like paper tiger. Ukrainian civilians are being slaughtered by indiscriminate Russian missiles, bombs, artillery and just plain being shot. Evidence of genocide is everywhere. Putin does not care. 

Like it or not, Putin has the support of his people, the leader of the Russian Orthodox church and a not-insignificant American constituency of right-wing zealots. Putin’s only real choices to stop NATO and the West are to draw them into the war or just wear them out. Knowing his military is not up to the challenge, many believe that could force him to use military assets that border on weapons of mass destruction or rely on severely debilitating cyberattacks on Western countries. 

But Putin knows by now that his army, as it exits, was literally brought to its knees by motivated Ukrainian forces, armed by NATO, with no real air cover. He also knows Biden is scared to add enough to this mix to provoke what the US President believes to be WWIII, even as Russia has not been weaker in a very long time. Can Putin fire a single missive across the Polish border, literally into a NATO nation, to see if NATO will do what it says? Can Putin outlast the budget drain and inflationary pressures that the West faces by continuing to support Ukraine? A year? Two years? The American public is notoriously impatient with foreign wars, and Putin believes he can sway the US presidential election in 2024… if the war lasts that long. 

And if NATO caves, withers or dissolves, what then? What is the message that China, still eyeing annexing Taiwan by force, will read? What happens to the Swedish and Finish applications to NATO? How much does global stability depend on a strong and resilient NATO stand against Putin? Is NATO even able or willing to do that? How long will it take for America voices to demand our pulling back? Can the great western alliance finally be stilled… as China and Russia step up?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the answers to these questions will determine the face of the planet for a very, very, very long time.