What Vladimir Putin Is Really Thinking

July 6, 2022 Topic: Russia Region: Europe Tags: RussiaRussia-Ukraine WarUkraineVladimir PutinNATO

What Vladimir Putin Is Really Thinking

The person who has had to deal with Russia’s new challenge is Putin and Putin alone.

The rights of the Russian population were infringed upon in respect to cultural and linguistic distinctiveness. Putin cannot agree that the rights of sexual minorities should be protected, but the rights of Russians should not. It is here that his moral position is formed: to leave your comrades in trouble is a disgrace and shame. It is an honor and pride to protect them at any cost.

Putin once said that if it weren’t for NATO’s ambitions to absorb Ukraine into its structures, he wouldn’t even worry about Crimea, let alone Donbas. He points to normal relations at one time with such pro-Western leaders of Ukraine as Yushchenko and Tymoshenko. So far, the West has not yet begun the active phase of Ukraine’s transformation into an anti-Russian outpost, as Putin himself put it.

The most important factor that destroyed trust between Russia and the West was the principled cynicism, injustice, and group dishonesty of the West, acutely manifested in unjustified sanctions resulting from the far-fetched accusations of Russian collusion with Donald Trump. Any contact with the Russians was interpreted by the mainstream media as proof of guilt. Propaganda has replaced information. Russians were deprived of the presumption of innocence.

Putin’s Geopolitical Views

Putin is convinced that Russia, based on the scale and specificity of the problems in relations with its neighbors (fourteen states), can, under no circumstances, delegate issues of its sovereignty to supranational organizations and their members. Put otherwise, Estonia or Lithuania cannot influence Russia’s foreign policy decisions. He is convinced that Russia, like the United States and China, should have full sovereignty in making all decisions. “Sovereignty,” as an immutable category, is immeasurably more important for Putin than the categories “freedom” and “democracy.” All the decisions in recent years on Russia’s withdrawal from international obligations assumed by Boris Yeltsin and early Putin follow from this logic.

What Putin Wants

Putin wants a recognition of Russia’s exclusive geopolitical interests. In particular, in matters of its own security, he insists on the right to move NATO away from Russia’s borders. At a minimum, from the space of the former Soviet Union. This right of Russia should prevail over the right of neighboring states to enter into whatever agreements they want. In a way, these stands represent a return of elements of the doctrine of limited sovereignty of the Brezhnev era.

Putin does not recognize the familiar, but legally vague concept of the “rules-based order.” He says that Russia does not understand these rules, did not participate in the development of these rules and will not follow them. He is convinced that the Yalta-Potsdam peace is over thanks to perpetual violations of international law and the UN Charter by Western countries. He cites the bombing of Belgrade, Iraq, Libya, and Kosovo as examples.

He wants to retrain the new world order—without a nuclear world war. Putin wants the West to accept any domestic political processes in Russia on a non-discriminatory basis. He insists that there is no universal model of state and political structure that is mandatory for all countries. Everything in the West is decided in the corridors of power and offices of big business. Trump’s disconnection from social media showed the falsity of claims about freedom of speech in the United States. The use of postal voting technology without adequate verification of the identity of the voter struck Putin’s imagination. Big technology companies, relying on unprecedented windfall profits and access to voters, are becoming key factors in winning elections.

What the West Thinks About Putin

The main preoccupation of the West is the idea that Putin wants to restore either the empire or the Soviet Union. It seems to me that this is an erroneous judgment. Putin is not an adherent to the idea of a new internationale. By highlighting the Russianness of the “Russian world,” he clearly sent a signal to everyone that this is a proposed solution to the specific problems of a particular people. You cannot replace a Belarusian, a Kazakh, a Ukrainian, or an Uzbek with Russianness. This is obvious. Therefore, one can only guess why the West interpreted Putin’s specific concerns about security and the narrowing of the belt of friendly states around Russia as Putin’s desire to recreate the empire. Putin, unlike Xi Jinping, isn’t motivated by ideological concerns. The President of Russia has made statements several times that the CIS is a form of civilized divorce of the former Soviet republics.

Putin’s Rating and Propaganda 

Putin has an extraordinarily high approval rating by the Russian people—between 70 and 80 percent. And many of his critics assert that this figure is generated state media propaganda. Ratings are driven by propaganda. This is correct. Even more so is the assertion that propaganda itself is driven by the demand for it. People today generate less demand for information, objective information. They want to hear biased information, i.e. propaganda. And this is a salient feature of today’s world: major narratives are propaganda-based. The clash of narratives today is the clash of propaganda in which neither side can lose. You can lose in information wars but never in propaganda wars. Because information is shaped upon the demand for the truth and propaganda is shaped by the desire of a recipient to hear lies.

Putin understood a new reality in relations with a West, which is not interested in information from Russia about his true concerns, and he switched to the language of propaganda inside the country. At the same time, he referred to all his opponents who received funding abroad as propagandists, calling them foreign agents. The sociology reports from the end of June of this year confirmed that the phrase “foreign agent” created mostly negative connotations among Russians who think in terms of a spy, a traitor, an enemy of the Motherland.

The displacement of information by propaganda has narrowed not only the field of trust between Putin and the West but has practically eliminated platforms for meaningful discussion between experts in order to identify possible areas of cooperation and normalization.

The War with Gadget-Proletarians

The West appeals to institutions in Russia and public opinion, but they are rickety, underdeveloped, and tone-deaf. Having stopped talking to Putin and betting on the long-term exhaustion of forces inside Russia, the West is waiting for the collapse of the system in terms of parameters that are not essential for Putin and most Russians. I emphasize, for the majority! In the West, the majority is sacred as a source of legitimacy. And only in relation to Russia is the majority perceived as something disgraceful and shameful.

And a minority of new gadget-proletarians are perceived as the voice of Russia. Gadget-proletarians, as a rule, for the most part are people without property, no apartment, no car, no house. And their mobility is due to the lack of attractive assets in their ownership in Russia. As Marx wrote in his Manifesto: the proletariat has nothing to lose but its chains. Today, the same can be said about almost all of Putin’s opponents. With some exceptions. The gadget opposition, strictly speaking, predetermined the direction of the government’s attack on social media as a platform and a “collective organizer” of the masses. Lenin called the newspaper Iskra a “collective organizer” more than 100 years ago.

Shock Surgery

The economic costs will be heavy in the medium term. The current sanctions packages have brought the Russian economy to a state that can be called “shock surgery.” The difference between “shock surgery and the “shock therapy” of the 90s is that then, thirty years ago, Russia was urgently looking for industries that could enter into global economic relations and value chains. Today, shock surgery means cutting out the most competitive sectors of the Russian economy from global value and supply chains. The turn to the East, to Africa, and Latin America, which the authorities are discussing, cannot be carried out quickly. There are too few exports of finished products. And optimism about China, as a consumer of everything sanctioned from Russia, is excessive. China doesn’t need much besides Russia’s raw materials.

Whether or Not Everything Has Been Taken Into Account

The concept of one people (Russian-Ukrainian) was clearly overestimated since it overlooked the significance of public consciousness as collective identity. It is one’s own identity that determines belonging to any community. In addition to a shared 1,000-year history, for a modern person, his actual political, state, gender, etc. identities are important. Within one nation (even if it is proven) there may also be two or three state-forming nations (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians).

The intelligence data on the state of morale and the real combat capability of the Ukrainian army, which, thanks to the training of instructors from NATO, Britain, and Poland, has radically changed since 2014, seems to have been miscalculated. Apparently, no one in Russia predicted the scale and depth of the sanctions aimed at isolating Russia from key world markets (capital, finance, technology, scientific exchanges, sales of main export items).

No one expected the new trend toward Cancel Russia, which has significantly undermined Russia’s “soft power” resources for years to come. It is difficult to imagine an intensive cultural exchange in the near future. Such things have been put on pause.