Russia’s Ukraine gamble might have paid off if its original thesis had been correct: Ukraine was a fake country and rotten state, ready to fall gratefully into Russia’s hands.
This would have proved a lot of things—that Russia is a model for the future that somebody somewhere wants to be part of, that its neighborhood is full of countries and peoples that are naturally inclined to bend to its control.
But unless I miss my guess,
knows nothing now would finish him off quicker than if domestic allies saw him reaching for a dangerous escalation of a botched war that no longer offers any upside for Russia, that is pursued only to save Mr. Putin’s face. He’s already tossed away 50 years of Soviet and Russian effort to build up a European gas business. This is enough damage for one episode.
Mr. Putin’s best bet is to negotiate—for starters, to get a cease-fire and then let the talks toward a final settlement drag on for 10 years, 20 years, however long he expects to be alive while he strives to rebuild his energy capital.
The question is much debated, but Mr. Putin can survive a failed war. The Russian dead mostly belong to his disposable classes and minorities from the provinces. We can assume he knows something about his situation. His conspicuous policy, to which everything else has been subordinated since the war went wrong, has been to anesthetize vital sectors of the population to the fact that a war is going on at all. Moscow and St. Petersburg’s privileged 17 million aren’t going to protest in the streets if he doesn’t conquer Ukraine. They might if he tries to drag their families into his deluded project.
He would still face hard-line pushback, but he’s turning 70 and was destined to face aging-dictator risk anyway. His chances are better by cutting his losses, but don’t expect to see it coming. He can’t show his hand prematurely because the other thing he can’t risk is being rebuffed and humiliated by
Volodymyr Zelensky.
For months, Mr. Putin has been holding out for a leverage-increasing development that hasn’t come: a military blunder by Ukraine and its Western allies, Europeans succumbing to energy panic. Even if a friend and ally were to rise to power now in Italy or another major European country, it wouldn’t deter the U.S., Brits,…
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