Once More, with Feeling: What Does Putin Want?

To get people thinking. He has succeeded in that.

The first bright light on the murky  situation  in Ukraine shone Friday when Ukraine officials “sharply criticized” the Biden administration, according to The New York Times in its Saturday edition “for its ominous warnings of an imminent Russian attack,” saying that the US was spreading unnecessary alarm.    

Since those warnings have been front-page news for weeks in the Times and The Washington Post, Ukrainian president Volodynyr Zelensky implicitly rebuked the American press as well. As the lead story in the WPost indignantly put it, he “ [took] aim at his most important security partners as his own military  braced for a potential security attack.”

Meanwhile, Yaroslav Trofimov, chief foreign affairs correspondent of The Wall Street Journal, writing Thursday in the paper’s news pages, identified a well-camouflaged off-ramp to the present stand-off, in the form of an agreement signed in the wake of the Russian-backed offensive in February 2015. The so-called Minsk-2 had since remained dormant, he wrote, until recently.

Now, after a long freeze, senior Ukrainian and Russian officials are talking about implementing the Minsk-2 accords once again, with France and Germany seeing this process as a possible off-ramp that would allow Russian President Vladimir Putin a face-saving way to de-escalate.

Economic Principals has a long-standing interest in this story.  In 2016, in the expectation that Hillary Clinton would be elected US president in November, I began a small book with a view to warning about the ill-consequences of the willy-nilly expansion of the NATO alliance that President Bill Clinton had begun in 1993, which was pursued despite escalating Russian objections by successors George W. Bush and Barack Obama. The election of Donald Trump intervened.  Because The Could: The Harvard Russia Scandal (and NATO Expansion) after Twenty-Five Years appeared in 2018.

I was relieved when Joe Biden defeated Trump in 2020, but alarmed in 2021 when Biden installed the senior member of Mrs. Clinton’s in the State Department, as Undersecretary of Political Affairs.  Seven years before, as Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, Victoria Nuland had directed US policy towards Russia and Ukraine and passed out cookies to Ukrainian protestors during the Maidan demonstrations in February 2014.  At their climax, Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych fled to exile in southern Russia, and, in short order, Russia seized Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula.  

A couple of weeks ago, I implied that, when it came to the interpreting the situation in Ukraine, it would be wise to pay attention to a more diverse medley of voices than the chorus of administration sources uncritically amplified by the Times and the WPost.  David Johnson, proprietor of Johnson’s Russia List, told readers he didn’t think there would be an invasion.  Neither did I. Russian and Ukrainian citizens seemed to agree; according to reports in the WSJ and the Financial Times, they were going about their business normally.

Why? Presumably because most locals understood Russian maneuvers on their borders to be a show of force, intended to affect negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow. 

As for what Putin may be thinking and privately saying – his strategic aims and his tactics – I pay particular attention to Harvard historian Timothy Colton. His nuanced biography of Boris Yeltsin makes him an especially interesting interpreter of the man Yeltsin in 1999 designated his successor.