There are a couple of things that are important to bear in mind amidst the torrent of analyses of Vladimir Putin following his invasion of Ukraine. One is what we know about his character, and what we don’t. The other is how this move has given away one of Putin’s traditional advantages.
Putin should be respected as an adversary, but not treated as some sort of infallible superman. He has shown himself, repeatedly, to be an extremely shrewd and calculating reader of situations and opponents. He has proven he has the patience to play the long game and the audacity to seize opportunities. He is also not especially ideological. He grew up in the Soviet system and the KGB, but it is clear that Putin would be equally at home in a communist, fascist, or tsarist system; his chief interests are, in no particular order, (1) a powerful Russia expanded as near as possible to its maximum historical borders and maximum influence over its neighbors, (2) a powerful Russian state that controls the nation’s wealth and industry, and (3) himself at the head of both. The rest is negotiable: he will coexist with as much or as little of the Orthodox Church, private enterprise, and corruption as is consistent with those three ends.
Simply because Putin has been tactically savvy and strategically patient in the past, however, is no assurance that he always has a good plan. Many has been the good or even brilliant tactician — Napoleon being the most notorious example — who made grave strategic errors. Putin is 69 years old, and he has been leading Russia for over two decades, most of that as effectively a dictator. The life of a dictator is isolated and paranoid: The strongman has no peers, often has nobody who can contradict him without fear or bring him bad news without happy talk. He must always fear plots around him. The isolation has doubtless deepened in the past two years of pandemic for Putin, as it has for all of us. His behavior in recent appearances suggests a man who has consumed too much of his own propaganda, a common ailment for aging dictators. Also, Putin oversees a powerful military and intelligence apparatus and plenty of mineral wealth, and he need not fear elections, but the Russian economy is creaky, and even dictators find it easier to govern when they are popular, not least because a popular leader is more imposing to depose. He is not, therefore, unconstrained in his decisions. And Putin’s ambitions, focused as they are on Ukraine, are not limited to Ukraine; if the invasion goes badly or imposes greater costs than expected, he will not be indifferent to that.
All of that said, I believe that Putin has blundered by unleashing a massed invasion that threatens Ukraine’s survival as an independent sovereign state, or at any rate, that threatens the survival of its government and its ability to choose who leads it. One of the great tactical virtues that Putin has possessed throughout most of his career, all the way up to this week, has been ambiguity: the ability to mask his true intentions and keep his adversaries divided and off-balance because they never quite know what they are facing. As I wrote in 2015, applying the analytical framework of military theorist John Boyd:
The ideal Boydian approach is to keep the opponent so confused he isn’t really sure who he’s fighting, where the battlefield begins or ends, or even if he’s in a fight at all!…One of the most devious and successful practitioners of ambiguity today is Vladimir Putin. From Ukraine to Georgia to Syria to the Baltics, Putin has shown again and again the ability to expand his influence while using secrecy, disinformation, and incrementalism to keep his potential opponents from becoming sufficiently oriented to make a decision and translate it into action. While the West’s foreign policy apparatus continues to debate what exactly Putin wants, what he is doing, whether he is doing himself more harm than good, and even whether he is in some ways on our side, Putin is constantly reshaping the reality on the ground in ways that conform to his own ideas about his objectives.
These are precepts that have often allowed Putin to follow the aphorisms of Sun Tzu: “All warfare is based on deception.” “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” “Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” “The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.” “Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” “Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness,” etc.
Now, however, Putin has placed all of his cards on the table. The West, full of leaders with diverging interests and little will to fight, is for the moment relatively united in seeing Putin for what he is and the threat he represents. Ukraine is roused behind Volodymyr Zelensky and the often ramshackle government he leads. A full-fledged invasion means that time, which was on Putin’s side so long as he could afford to be more patient than his foes, now works against him. Perhaps Putin will pump the brakes soon and reintroduce ambiguity to peel off some of that comparatively united front and try to resume negotiations, but it will be hard to put that genie back in the bottle so quickly.