Ukraine 2022,through the leadership binoculars

The day the tables turned

Although there are some exceptions, the idea of a particular day changing the course of history is rather overblown. Epochal change rarely revolves around a single event but is typically a longer process. Key historical dates, such as 4 July 1776, 14 July 1789, or 9 November 1989, are heuristic shortcuts that mark the moment when the boiling water vaporizes into steam. But the events that occurred on them—like the signing of the declaration of Independence or the storming of the Bastille—are merely the climax of longer processes that then continue beyond. The same is true for 24 February 2022: it represents the point in the process where the masks came off and the ambiguity dissipated.

To establish whether it really is a pivotal tipping point, we can ask under what conditions a return to the status quo ante would be possible? What if a diplomatic exit to the current situation was found, or a change of government did indeed take place in Russia? Would it mean a return to “business as usual”? Or have the bridges been burnt, for a considerable time to come?

Tying together all the evidence, it is hard to escape the conclusion that 2022 marks a point of no return; that it has propelled international relations in a new direction. The paradigms and cognitive framing of the post-Cold War were among its first collateral damage. Not only did this Russian invasion demonstrate that Europe was not immune against war. But it also rendered Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” with its triptych of market economy, liberal democracy, and human rights regime, obsolete. For Vladimir Putin’s assault established “identity” as a driver of international relations at least as powerful as economic self-interest (a feature already noted in connection with the BREXIT vote). Compared to the major havoc that awaits us, the challenges of the COVID crisis now look like a walk in the park.

What some commentators have already called Europe’s 9/11 (Ioffe, 2022a, 2022b; De Gruyter, 2022) erased decades of policy orientation. If Russia got off lightly with its first violation of Ukrainian sovereignty in 2014—a repeat of which many had feared—then this time around most Western countries imposed a massive, unprecedented wave of economic and financial sanctions on Russia, within mere days of the invasion. A similar scenario unfolded with regard to arms deliveries. Although this took weeks rather than days, the change is just as remarkable: even a country like Germany, with its long-standing policy against arms deliveries to belligerents in conflict zones, dropped its reservations, and committed to supplying Ukraine. The discovery of mass atrocities, committed by Russian forces in territory around Kyiv liberated by Ukrainian forces in the beginning of April, hardened the resolve.

The sanctions and arms deliveries point to a changed calculus, from which there is no return. By doing the “unthinkable”—the headline of Libération, a French left-leaning newspaper, on 25 February—Putin kicked-started a process that is irreversible. Many are those who now consider the Russian leader and his clique as rogues, with whom there can be no return to business as usual—the historian in me is invariably reminded of the reaction of the Allied leaders gathered at Vienna, on hearing the news of Napoleon’s return to Paris from his first exile in Elba, in March 1815. That relations are damaged beyond repair emerges from the language adopted by several Western leaders on the discovery of the atrocities; which added to the loss of what was left of confidence, itself a result of bad faith negotiation and a mendacity, irrationality and unreliability that, to some at least, is on par with that of Hitler. The straw that broke the camel’s back was the considerable hardening of the rhetoric, not even seen during the Cold War, which saw Russian politicians brandishing the specter of nuclear war. It tied in with the discovery of an arsenal of civilizational, informational, cognitive, and ideological warfare, which Western public opinion had hardly been aware of previously.

The Ukraine war and its—as yet—incalculable fallout adds to the charge sheet against globalization and trade liberalization that was already a feature of the COVID-19 crisis. Not only did the sanitary crisis engender a crisis of confidence between China and the West, but, it also exposed multiple vulnerabilities and led to a rethink of economic sovereignty. The ideas doing the rounds 2 years ago have now moved up one notch. If our concern then was the trustworthiness of official Chinese declarations, the resilience of supply chains, or the delivery of critical bottleneck items such as face masks, vaccines and breathing apparatuses, the challenge is now of a more existential nature: we are thrown back onto our ability to run our economies, heat our homes, and feed ourselves. In the face of military aggression, the question of the merit of Ukrainian attempts to join the EU or NATO prior to 24 February—and concerns to not “upset Russia”—is entirely redundant. No country in the former Russian or Soviet sphere of influence, and even beyond, can now feel safe. This new situation requires a return to the cognitive arsenal of the Cold War, and a thorough rethink of defense and remilitarization. Given the risk that our American “cousins” might redevelop cravings for a further round of Trumpism, Europeans have no choice other than to get their own act together, if they want to deter an assailant or defend themselves.

Finally, the conflict marks the end of economic cooperation between Russia and the West. The Nordstream-2 pipeline project, completed only last year, now invites comparison with the most famous shipwreck in history, the Titanic. The exodus of scores of companies (Yale School of Management, 2022)—including the emblematic McDonalds that had been serving burgers in Moscow’s Pushkin Square since January 1990—reminds us that the Russian market is “burnt” once more. And it is here that we suddenly recall that fabled Russian tradition of trompe l’oeil—the famous Potemkin villages—which the Cassandras of our time had warned us against. The work of a generation of Russians, who had worked to open up their country to business, went up in smoke in the space of a few days. And the question now is, is Russia, that “gas station equipped with nukes” (Harari, 2022), on its way to becoming a Chinese financial colony, with the next conflict already pre-programmed (considering that democracies never go to war with each other)? And how could all these companies get it so wrong, and for the second time (if we consider BREXIT the first round)? It would seem that this then is also the “end of an era” for how multinational companies navigate their geopolitical environment. The legions of consultants, economists, corporate lawyers, or bankers, who companies typically rely on to make decisions, gave no early warning. And, who could blame them, considering their adherence to the idea that the world was driven by economic self-interest, and that history and identity were inconsequential? In the future, companies may want to compensate this form of intellectual dereliction by tapping into the pool of university-based area experts, including historians, of whom we cannot seem to get enough since 24 February. Generally, the scholarly community will have to undertake more efforts to highlight the risks that venturing into the markets of countries under authoritarian or dictatorial rule entails. This should include a realization that, where it comes to doing business, we cannot dispense with asking “values” and “ethics” questions. And, as cumbersome as they may be, democracies are the better deal in the long run. ¹

The silence of Uckermark

A final characteristic of epochal shifts is that they always involve a reckoning with the past. Paradigm change moves the benchmark for assessing past behavior: things that were murky or ambiguous before, now stand exposed in broad daylight. This forces a cognitive rethink on past behavior, to the point where it is more likely be framed as an error. Although the new insight is derived from the wisdom of hindsight (retrospective selection bias), the lure of the idea that an event could have been predicted and that more appropriate action should have been taken before is too strong to resist. The cognitive rewiring triggers a movement questioning the legacy of past or present leaders associated with a now discredited course of action. The tendency to go down this route and identify scape-goats is very compelling. Similar to the COVID-19 crisis—which could have been anticipated, if the regular WHO warnings of an impending pandemic had been taken seriously (Iken and Schnurr, 2021)—the Ukraine war is a “grey rhino”: a probable event with major impact, which a majority chose to discount, and which was met with dismay when it did materialize. The truly intriguing aspect of turning points then is the effect they have on the cognitive framing of post-event narratives (Anderson, 1991: 187–206; Ellis, 2006; Berlin, 2013: 28–30; Freedman, 2017); rather than attempts to merely define or qualify them (Iggers and Wang, 2002).

The reckoning with the past is particularly momentous in Germany, not only because it is the major EU economy, but also because of the country’s exposure to Russia. The geopolitical seism of 24 February has proven a rude shock to those decision-makers who discounted that Putin would start a war in Ukraine, on the basis that it was not in Russia’s interest. For decades, the German political and economic elite stood for an agenda of engagement, on the understanding that this would generate change in Russia. This half-a-century of Ostpolitik and “change through trade” (Wandel durch Handel) has now come to a sticky end (indicatively, Karnitschnig, 2022). The manifest failure of not having been able to get the correct measure of Putin has triggered a crisis of conscience. The re-composition of the cognitive framing of the past and the emergence of “blame games” has occasioned different types of coping mechanisms. Some decision-makers, such as the German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier, attempted a Mea Culpa (Grint, 2016). Steinmeier’s line of argument was that he always acted in the best of intentions, and that he was not alone in getting Putin wrong. While it remains to be seen what side of history Steinmeier will end up on, his fellow party member and former boss, ex-chancellor and Russian gas lobbyist Gerhard Schröder, has categorically ruled out a Mea Culpa (Bennhold, 2022) and is likely to spend the remainder of his twilight years in disgrace. The even more interesting case than these two, however, is Angela Merkel, still hailed as an exemplary leader, when she stepped down only a few months ago, on 8 December 2021. But now there are other sounds:

Remember when Angela Merkel said goodbye and many people said they would miss her? Well, that’s how it actually turned out, albeit in a different way than was believed at the time. While the longing for Merkel’s foreign, security or energy policy remains within manageable limits, her absence in the debate about Putin’s Ukraine war is unpleasantly conspicuous (Neubacher, 2022). ²

The context for these ironic lines is the energy dependency trap, which so many warned about for years and which has finally been sprung; and the pitiful state of the German Bundeswehr, both legacies of 16 years of Merkel government. Merkel is finding herself in a situation similar to that of British Prime Minister Cameron, following the debacle of the Brexit referendum in 2016; only that she is luckier, as the trainwreck did not occur on her watch. Her answer to the underestimation of Russian aggression is a resounding silence, which, by the way, adds a fifth variant to the political decision-making heuristic proposed by Grint (2016).

This “speech is silver, silence is gold” stratagem is not without its merits. For blame games and scapegoating entail an erroneous understanding of the challenge: there were of course experts who had a heightened sense of the danger, and who were not taken seriously. But these “Cassandras” ³ are not the ones who make the decisions. Their job is to speak truth to power. But they have no part in translating their own advice into action. It is not up to them to operate a choice among the thousands of possible threats—some imagined, others genuine—that should be treated as a priority. What is primordial then is not identifying a leader on whose shoulders the blame can be deposited, but to correct the deficient filtering that misled leaders to discount Putin’s Russia as a priority threat.

What collective blinders or mental maps made that, for example, pro-Russia pundits dominated the debate in German political talk shows before 24 February? (Welsch, 2022). An undeniable part of it was purely and simply economic interest. The lobbies missed no opportunity to emphasize the natural complementarity of the European and Russian economies; the potential of the Russian market; the benefits of the energy partnership; all associated with a Fukuyamist mindset that there was a convergence of interest and that the Russians wanted the “same thing” as the Germans. The other part was self-delusion: taking one’s imagination for the real world (because, in the end, no company that invests billions of euros in a foreign market wants to be under the obligation to write them off). ⁴ Understanding it requires going back further in time.

The miracle of 1989 and the ensuing 30 years of peace have come back to haunt us. In fact, the optimism that 1989 engendered meant that there were no particular lessons to be derived for us in the West, except that we were on the right track. 1989 did not render our frameworks redundant, but rather comforted us in the false belief that war, as a means to pursuing politics, was obsolete. In the German case, the mechanism was compounded by sheer relief over the end of Cold War and the threat of nuclear extinction; and the restoration of national unity and positive denouement of an otherwise disastrous 20^th century—all of which were at least partly owed to a Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev.

This is precisely where the tables have turned now: we have understood that we must retool and re-learn, or go under.

Rationalizing Europe’s 9/11

The uncertainty of genuine historical junctures is daunting. It is only understandable then that we would seek out ways of rationalizing the experience. If 2014 was heralded as a return of geopolitics, then the idea now is that of a full-swing return of history. Putin’s own biased reading of Ukrainian history—his negation of the country’s specific cultural persona and right to exist as a sovereign nation, tied together by claims that the Russian-speaking populations had to be protected from “Nazis”—featured prominently in his TV appearances prior to the invasion.

The penchant for armchair history is not limited to the Russian president. The ability to come up with pithy historical comparison is even a defining feature of the public debate after 24 February. As one commentator quipped, if COVID turned us into amateur epidemiologists, then Ukraine has now turned us into geopolitical strategists, battlefield tacticians, and weapons experts.

The conflict has crept upon us with a parade of images borrowed from the darker pages of the past century. One could start with the multiple footage of Russian tanks entering Ukrainian territory with Soviet flags fastened to their radio masts, which evoked previous Soviet invasions, such as Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Afghanistan in 1979. While Putin’s Sovietism is a Sovietism without the Marxism-Leninism, such images echo with a geopolitical theme frequently heard during the Cold War—the Soviet Union as an emanation of the Russian imperial tradition. Other “candidates” for analogy are 1914, a date already cited in the previous Ukraine crisis in 2014 (but which I then attributed to what one might call a “centenary” effect). Then there is 1936, the struggle for survival of the Spanish Republic in the Civil War, in the face of fascist aggression and the indifference of the Western democracies. Others asked whether we had witnessed the “Munich” of our generation—so 1938—with one side bargaining in bad faith, and the other granting concessions that encouraged aggression. Some said that the clocks had been turned back to the beginning of bipolarism in 1945; or to the two nuclear standoffs in 1962 and again during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. As regards the massive arms deliveries to Ukraine, the German military historian Sönke Neitzel likened the situation to an inversion of the Vietnam war, with the Russians swopping seats with the Americans, and getting stuck in an unwinnable quagmire.

Following the failure of the Russian army to realize its initial objectives—take Kiev and decapitate the Ukrainian government—two other dates, 1856 and 1904, linked to past Russian military defeats, crept into the discussion and fed brief speculation on the possibility of regime change. Finally, why not adopt an even broader angle and ask whether we are not experiencing another chapter in a wider struggle for liberty and democracy? Do not Kremlin ideologues, such as Vladislav Surkov, denounce liberalism as a sham, and democratic elections and representative government as working hand-in-hand with capitalist elites? In their view, is not all emancipatory work “from below” and revolutionary legitimacy a mere cover for foreign meddling in the domestic affairs of sovereign rulers? In that case one might ask whether the Putinist time machine has not perhaps dropped us off somewhere in the 19^th century. Or in Antiquity—an analogy attempted in the French weekly L’Express, on 19 March (Doan and Lefèvre, 2022).

This exercise of drawing on historical parallels can be pushed very far, and in all directions. But how much does it allow us to grasp what is fundamentally new about the situation? What can we be sure about, other than that 2022 is the antithesis of 1989, that is, a regression in relation to the achievement of ending the Cold War without major bloodshed? The answer to that question is, that to be relevant, historical analogy has to attach to a specific issue that can actually be compared. ⁵ In many other cases, however, the foible for analogy is merely a sign that our compasses have gone haywire; they are a corollary of our profound disarray and disorientation.

Another type of comparison we have seen is that between Putin and other leaders. The focal image here is that of the fake TIME Magazine—Putin’s head upon which Hitler’s moustache is superimposed. The “Putler” phenomenon emerged already in 2014, when several Western politicians, most prominently Hilary Clinton, ⁶ ventured into drawing comparison between certain aspects in Putin’s behavior—his incalculability and disregard for international norms—and Hitler’s diplomacy of the 1930s. Others cite the partial rehabilitation of Stalin—visible in the closure of Memorial ⁷ or the emphasis on the “positive aspects” of Stalinism (such as the Great Patriotic War) and the simultaneous de-emphasis of repression, deportation, and mass murder—as signs that Russia is traveling in a neo-Stalinist direction.

What are we to make of these claims?

Over the years Putin has harnessed the potential for mobilization that Russian hatred of Nazism and the memory of the Great Patriotic War entails. His own assertion that he invaded in order to root out “Nazism” in Ukraine therefore has to be examined with a ten-foot pole.

A more serious counter-indication is that his own accoutrements do not overlap with those of the Nazi leader. Also, Putin is not a genocidaire. If anything, his rule bears some features of “Fascism light,” which ties in with the argument of the political scientist Vladislav Inozemstev, who sees Putin as a “Russian Mussolini” (Boy, 2022).

At the same time, sham trials, political assassinations, denunciations of “unpatriotic scum,” linguistic contortionism, tough talk on other nationalities, and war cult pale into insignificance when compared to the full repertoire of Stalinist repression: mass denunciations, engineered by state-sponsored hysteria and paranoia, witch hunts, purges, show trials, mass executions and deportations, Gulag, the regimentation of society, and private life. One can conclude, rather safely, that Putin still has a lot of ground to cover before turning his country into a larger North Korea.

This should not lead us into underestimating the toxicity of the phenomenon. As we know from experience, historical grudges about unfair treatment and humiliation by foreign powers in the past, associated with a desire for revanche, are toxic enough. The atavistic violence and ethnic cleansing that accompanied the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s did not require fully fledged Fascists and Stalinists to become a very messy affair. To get that result, “nationalism on steroids,” was quite enough.

The prospect of a prolonged war of attrition in Ukraine increases the likelihood of an acceleration of more severe measures, signs of which are underway. Considering the historical track record of mass violence against the Ukrainian nation—as witnessed in the Great Famine of 1932–33, when Stalin deliberately starved to death at least 3.3 million citizens in Soviet Ukraine (Snyder, 2010)—plus the verbal fallout of Kremlin propagandists, for whom “de-Nazification” equals “de-Ukrainization,” we cannot exclude worst possible scenarios. Resistance and guerilla warfare are the inevitable consequence of occupying a territory whose population is unwilling to submit. And, after Bucha, we know how the Russian military is likely to respond to any such challenge. In parallel, how is the political leadership of Russia ever supposed to climb down from the current heights of repression, after they have done everything to ratchet up the demagoguery in the preparation and pursuit of war?

Understanding what we are up against

In fact, the reflex to ascertain a totalitarian pedigree makes it more difficult to understand the real nature of the phenomenon. In this sense, the greatest impediment to considering Putin a totalitarian is the void of congruent content. Rather than putting extreme ideology left, right, and center, Putinism exploits this in an opportunistic and, ultimately, cynical manner. The historian Timothy Snyder (2022) may argue that Russia has become the HQ of the international extreme right (which makes its claim to be fighting the Nazis in Ukraine phony). But this support is done without any great conviction. It is a tactical device for attaining other objectives. In reality, Putinism is a hodge-podge of Sovietism, Orthodoxy, Eurasianism, ultra-conservatism, anti-liberalism, New Paganism, anti-wokism, warrior cult, corruption, rule by thugs, and kleptocracy (CNN, 2022); all sustained by tight control of the media sphere and an ability to neuter any cognitive dissonance with a judicious mix of conspiracy theory and virtual reality. ⁸ Its only claim to genius lies in the fact that even the insiders of this propaganda machine can probably no longer tell truth from lies.

The Princeton historian and Stalin biographer Stephen Kotkin is one of the best connoisseurs of Russian history. And he is not afraid of drawing a direct line between Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and the Russian track record of aggression. Contrary to speculation about Putin as a Fascist or Neo-Stalinist leader, this continuity ties in with how Putin portrays himself: as a ruler walking in the footsteps of Peter I., the founder of modern Russia, and of other imperialist land-grabbers such as Catherine II. Kotkin stresses that the specific Russian matrix of autocratic rule plus imperialism produces dilemmas, which keep returning Russia to the default position of self-defeating failure. And from this, there is no exit route other than to escalate the commitment (Remnick, 2022).

That dictatorships and authoritarian regimes might have an inbuilt need for mechanisms that allow them let off steam, in order to remain viable, should not prove too all-surprising. To give but one example, this safety-valve topos is central to the study of the Nazi regime from the systems theory perspective, by the historian Ludolf Herbst (1996). That something similar was also central to Putin’s calculus has been known for some time, but did not get the attention it deserved, due to the cognitive blinders of the prevailing paradigms. In 2017 the German security expert Hannes Adomeit published an article arguing that a confrontational Russian foreign policy stance is not a reaction to alleged mistakes of the West, but a consequence of the crisis of the system of government created by Putin. Adomeit cautioned that Putin’s power vertical would attempt to achieve its internal stabilization by fomenting external conflict. This corrupt, kleptocratic, and undemocratic system ensures its domestic survival by reactivating strategic antagonism with the West. For this reason, one had to be prepared for a greater willingness on Moscow’s part to engage in risky conflict-seeking (Adomeit, 2017).

The inability of the system to address genuine economic or social problems was also the focus of Gari Kasparov’s presentation at a session of the MIT Starr Forum, also in 2017. Arguing that Russian power is above all “nuisance power,” Kasparov argued that Putin depended on creating conflicts and wars: others would then come to him and involve him in a solution, which raises his market value (Starr Forum, 2017: at 01:06:00).

In the current situation, this implies that Russia might revert to even more violent means—especially if its offensive in Ukraine continues to stall or loose traction. Generally, one should consider that nuclear threats to the maximum level—short of triggering an actual nuclear war—will be the new constant of Russian diplomatic rhetoric. For a Putin who has maneuvered himself into a cul-de-sac, this is the last trump card left in order to increase leverage Vexler (2022a). As I write (14 May 2022), this is showing some effect—witness the over 275,000 co-signatures that an open letter by 24 German personalities has received, which showed concern for a nuclear exchange and therefore called upon Chancellor Scholz to rethink the recent decision to furnish German weapons to Ukraine (EMMA Redaktion, 2022).

The need to escalate also suggests that more is at stake in this imperial adventurism than merely Ukraine. Putin not only wants to return Ukraine by force to the civilizational fold he believes it belongs to but is now also squarely positioned for confrontation with the West. As we know since late 2021, when it suddenly appeared on the agenda, Putin’s bucket list includes pushing back NATO frontiers to where they were in 1994. The game plan for this is not military intervention, but subversion, that is, disinformation, provocations, and incidents (“active measures”), expressly designed for the purpose of stoking the fires of discontent and bringing divisions to a boil. That the Russian intelligence services could come up with such a scenario betrays the Soviet pedigree of many Russian leaders, including Vladimir Putin. In their minds, the West is irremediably corrupt. Sooner or later, its internal contradictions will cause it to implode. And Russia alone can provide a viable civilizational alternative Vexler (2022b).

The first target of subversion are the Russian minorities and Russian-speaking diasporas in the Baltic States, Moldova, Georgia, and elsewhere. They are to be fed a narrative whereby they are victims of omnipresent discrimination and—why not—Nazism (considering how well this stratagem has worked in disinforming Russian public opinion about the war in Ukraine). The second target are the “natives” susceptible to be shaken down by the invocation of an existential threat to their identities from immigrants and Muslims (Toranian, 2022), and therefore tempted by populism. Naturally, the self-implosion of the West will take time. And it is not clear whether Putin will still witness the day when the prize falls into Russia’s lap like a ripe fruit. But come it will. And a couple of setbacks—as seen in the war in Ukraine—are nothing in the grander scheme of historical revisionism.

Putinist leadership in perspective

That autocracy and its trappings exists independently from particular Russian rulers renders not only the smörgåsbord of Putinism more digestible but it also addresses the riddle that “Putin as a leader” poses to analysts. That they might consider such a thing in the first place showcases the flawed belief that Putin’s personality is the analytical focus most worthy of attention. Profiling the leader at the top, attributing outcomes to individual leaders, personalizing and psychologizing leadership—all this has a long tradition. At the same time, its discounting of context is problematic—even where it concerns a highly personalized and hyper-concentrated regime such as Putin’s Russia. Only because they held on to this conviction could so many observers be perplexed by the apparent irrationality of Putin’s fully fledged invasion of Ukraine; and then ask whether he was sick, mad, or simply evil. What they should have asked themselves instead was whether filtering Putin’s leadership through narrow Western categories of rationality was adequate. For even a cursory glance around would have revealed that Putin’s mindset is shared by many.

Putin’s approval ratings among the Russian population show that this war may not be his sole personal affair, but coincide with strictures and structures of Russia as a society. Equally erroneous is the idea that the “international community” has taken a spirited stance against Russian aggression. If we look at recent UN votes condemning Russia, such as the suspension from the UN Human Rights Council, then we find that although over half of members voted in favor, and only a considerably smaller number voted against, the remaining large number of countries refused to place their bets and abstained. This included the most populous countries, India and China. Where it comes to passing sanctions, the club is even smaller—it overlaps with NATO, the EU, most other European countries that are members of neither, Australia, New Zealand, and some of their Asian allies.

The pitfalls of apprehending reality through the spectacles of personalistic leadership also apply to Putin’s adversary, Volodymyr Zelensky. Considering his media savvy and stamina, it is no surprise that the hitherto relatively low-profile Ukrainian president, and his coterie of young aides, would captivate the imagination of the world. Who would be surprised about the cover of the 28 April issue of TIME featuring his portrait, together with the simple headline “How Zelensky Leads.” Nobody can deny that the latter’s refusal to buckle under the pressure in the first days (“I need ammo, not a ride”) had Churchillian qualities (Bell, 2022). But, however admirable, to attribute Ukrainian steadfastness to the behavior of the man at the top is several bridges too far. Stellar war communication is not conjured out of the thin air, but relies on outside help. And similar things could be said about arms deliveries or the Ukrainian information advantage on the battlefield. Finally, as a collective community, Ukraine had obviously braced itself for the eventuality of a war (that so many others had always ruled out categorically).

Rather than the trope of individual genial leadership genius, what one is likely to encounter are traces of Tolstoian historical forces—a theme we already know from the COVID crisis, when a collapse was not staved off by the high-flying bankers, consultants or tech entrepreneurs who typically grab all the headlines, but by nurses, food growers, lorry-drivers, supermarket cashiers, waste collectors, cleaners, and others. As in Aesop’s fable of the Belly and the Members, we realized that our well-being depended on millions of people doing their jobs (something which we perhaps tended to take for granted), and this despite exposing themselves to risk (at least in the first weeks, when the supply of protective masks was low). Something very similar is playing itself out in Ukraine today.

The need to shift cognitive gear

Putin’s seemingly irrational goals and associated need to escalate make Western leaders and public opinion unprepared for a cognitive and ideological onslaught of a new kind. In a tribute to Hannes Adomeit, who died on 25 April 2022, Joachim Krause, Director of the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University, writes the following:

Unfortunately, this advice (i.e. to expect a more aggressive Russia, and regardless of any action by NATO members, P.S.), like so many others, was ignored by the advisors of the German Chancellor (I am not naming names now), the Foreign Minister, and many other politicians and policy makers, who today are surprised to find that they were wrong about Putin (Krause, 2022). ⁹

In a previous section we examined some of the reasons why voices like Adomeit were not really heard. To sum it up once more: since the end of the Cold War, for which we have to thank a Soviet leader, it has no longer been customary to attribute negative or aggressive intentions to others (with the odd exception like North Korea or Islamist terrorists). Our Fukuyamist mindset has gotten the better of our ability to engage in hard-nosed analysis, and it is likely to do so again, with even worse consequences, if we are not vigilant. That we are vulnerable is visible in the reflex to distrust anything that looks like a polarized view and always seek out truth in the middle ground. My favorite line in an article published on the controversial Azov Regiment, in April, is the following:

Western society tends to reject the black-and-white vision of the world and to consider more complex models. Typically for this vision is to look for the truth somewhere in the middle, between the polar points of view. But the truth, as Adam Michnyk said, does not lie in the middle, it lies where it lies (Center for Civil Liberties, 2022).

This admirable concern for balance and impartiality plays straight into the hands of Russian hybrid warfare (Galeotti, 2022). As became patently clear in the disinformation campaign surrounding the downing of flight MH17 in 2014, it opens the door to doubt, thereby disabling hard thinking, and appropriate action. Our intellectual resources had better be employed elsewhere. One of the first things that have to be put into perspective is that diplomacy only works if it can be backed up by strength. Negotiation that does not involve the capacity to simply walk out and use other means, if necessary, is a toothless ritual.

Secondly, the dynamic of a game whereby Putin is allowed to outwit his antagonists, by doing what nobody expects him to do—which always puts him one step ahead—must be reversed (Ioffe, 2022a, at 45:40).

As to the endgame, one thing is clear: one cannot invade a nuclear armed country and effect regime change. At the same time, weakening Russia’s ability to wage aggressive war, through economic sanctions or other means, could take years, if it materializes at all. The only chance for change is to drive a wedge between the regime and what is left of the Russian elites and Russian public opinion.

Certainly, from what we know, the potential for doing any such thing does not look good. The current hyper-personalization of the regime began in 2012, when protests in Moscow demonstrated to Putin that he could not rely on the liberal intelligentsia and new middle class and realigned himself on the hardline siloviki (the strongmen from the armed forces, intelligence services and ministry of interior). The COVID crisis then increased his isolation, with only a tiny clique of these men and women still having regular access (Ioffe, 2022a; at 35:20). As can be seen from the pursuit of the war in Ukraine, this constriction of the power circle around Putin creates a sycophantism that has a deplorable influence on the quality of the decision-making. And, at a point in time, this situation could backfire so badly as to become untenable.

Although there is much to be said about the power of autocracy, one would do good to not take its rhetoric at face value. The regime needs public consensus and it relies on personalistic elite networks (Ledeneva, 2006: 91–114; also Hosking, 2001: 34–35; 91–95); otherwise the propaganda, which is mostly geared to domestic audiences, makes no sense.

We may now put the swift sanctions against the Russian oligarkhs into perspective. Generally, the term is a misnomer: “oligarkh” points to an individual holding economic and political power, of which there were several in 1990s Russia. However, the term lost its meaning after the ousting of those said individuals from their political chairs, in the wake of the Yukos affair (2003). The majority of today’s oligarkhs therefore owe their money and status to Putin, and they can lose it as quickly as they gained it. Sanctioning them amounts to sanctioning Putin.

On the other hand, driving such individuals against a wall is only reasonable, if it is part and parcel of a larger strategic game plan for lasting change. At the Casablanca conference in 1943, the Allies settled on the formula of unconditional surrender because it was the only one that could allay fears of a separate peace and keep the alliance intact and because it would not allow the German elites to wiggle themselves out of the affair, as they had done after the First World War. The downside of this is that it encouraged the closing of ranks and a die-hard attitude—a scenario that one can now also see emerging among the Russian elite targeted for blanket sanctions (Inozemtsev, 2022). However, there is no hope in generating democratic change in Russia through outside intervention (as was the case with Germany after 1945); that job will have to be left to Russians themselves. So, whether we like it or not, some kind of arrangement with Russia is the only option. And although it was the right thing to send a strong signal that the West meant business, in the long run one should consider what incentives one can offer to potential opponents, such as the first generation of oligarkhs—the Deripaskas and Abramoviches—who do not owe their rise to Putin.

The second recommendation relates to the fact that one should not throw stones when sitting in a glass house. In this respect, one should remind readers that—before it first hit the headlines in 2014—separatism in eastern Ukraine was a fringe phenomenon. Most evidence points towards the cauldron of astro-turf militantism, separatist violence, civil war, and then war having been carefully stoked by Russian “active measures,” which itself follows a long Soviet tradition. Naturally, this stick could also be turned around. As a multiethnic and multireligious entity consisting of 85 subjects, not all of which are happy with the current arrangement, the Russian Federation offers plenty of potential for subversion. While Russian disintegration is not a cause for celebration, it might create cracks in the system and, ultimately, bring a government to the table that Ukraine and its Western partners can sit down to talk with.