What Is Vladimir Putin Thinking?
By 
Vladmir Putin started this war, and he could stop it today if he chose. What he thinks is important. He’s told us what he thinks. The way Russia is conducting the war supports what he’s said.
It’s easy to dismiss Putin’s screeds as historically inaccurate and a bizarre reading of current events. They are. But listing how they’re incorrect misses the point, which is that Putin believes these things: Ukraine was never a separate entity from Russia. Lenin and others made mistakes that separated Ukraine from its appropriate place in the scheme of things. Russia and Ukraine can never fulfil their true destiny apart from each other. Those are the central points.
Also in his belief system is that NATO, the United States, and the EU, which are lumped together as “the West,” are dedicated to undermining Russia’s proper place in the world. It’s less clear that he buys the whole long-standing Pan-Slavic myth that Russia has been specially designated by God to redeem the world. But at least Russia is a superpower that the rest of the world must recognize as such.
Ukraine, then, has been corrupted by the West to believe it has a separate destiny from Russia. Thus the West is playing the same role as the Nazis in World War II and in fact is Nazi. If the Nazis are purged from Ukraine, then the proper union of Slavic peoples becomes possible.
It’s worth looking at his words again. Since the war started, another document (English translation here) has been published by a Russian propagandist much more explicitly laying out the justification for a war against Ukraine, including destroying it as a country and eliminating its name. This has been described by an expert in international law as explicitly genocidal. Dmitri Medvedev, former Russian President and Prime Minister, has endorsed the document. Dmitri Trenin, former director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, which was dissolved last week, published a Eurasianist agreement (in Russian, but browser translation is not bad) with much of what Putin has been saying. Trenin leaves out the Pan-Slavic lean, but the shape of the argument is similar to Putin’s.
Unfortunately, Putin’s argument about the unity of Ukraine and Russia, interrupted by Western Nazis led to a conclusion that a swift military operation to remove the Nazis would bring Ukraine back to friendly relations with Russia. He expected the war to take three days.
That didn’t happen. Also unfortunately, Putin has no need to modify his thinking. The Nazis have infected more Ukrainians’ minds than he expected. It will take more time. Or it might be necessary to eliminate all of Ukraine. His army performed badly, and reorganizing will improve it.
War has a way of imposing its own reality. It’s not clear when or if that reality will become severe enough for Putin to reexamine his views. His comments in this morning’s meeting with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenka suggest nothing has changed. But the military is reshaping the Russian offensive from the quick occupation to solidifying a hold in the Donbas.
There are reports that Russian intelligence had a large budget to turn Ukrainian officials, which would have led to the idea that the country could have been taken quickly. It’s not clear if the reports are wrong or whether such an operation went wrong. Another report is that 150 in the intelligence services have been fired or arrested, with Sergei Beseda, the now-fired chief of the division, being held in Lefortovo Prison. Another motivation for a purge might be a concern about how much internal Russian information the US and UK have been sharing with the world.
As unreal as Putin’s views may seem, he has written about them and incorporated them into his speeches. The form of the attack on Ukraine is consistent with them. Getting to a peace will require dealing with those views. This Washington Post article does a reasonable job of discussing them, although much coverage has been unwilling to come to terms with what seems absurd in an American point of view.
Within Russia, stresses will grow if the war continues to go badly for Russia. Military and intelligence people will be dealing with a world at odds with Putin’s expectations. Further purges will weaken Russia, as the war weakens Russia’s army.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner