Being wrong about Putin

I was dead wrong, as were most of my friends who specialize in Ukrainian and Russian studies. We couldn’t imagine that Russian President Vladimir Putin would embark on something as foolhardy as a full-scale war against Ukraine. Decades of serious scholarship proved useless. In contrast, those of my friends who predicted an invasion were almost all non-specialists.

The mistake we made was to think that Putin is a rational actor, with rationality being defined in terms of tangible, material costs and benefits. From that point of view, it simply made no sense to embark on an adventure that would result in fierce Ukrainian resistance, many Russian body bags, harmful sanctions, the end of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the galvanization of NATO, and Russia’s transformation into a pariah state. As it turned out, what we predicted would happen did happen — though it obviously failed to deter Putin.

And that’s because, when it comes to Ukraine, Putin is anything but the supposedly calm, cool chess grandmaster able to outwit Americans struggling with checkers. Instead, Putin adopts a wholly different personality that, like Mister Hyde, is driven by passions, appetites, fears and emotions. His public statements and articles clearly show that he denies the very existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians. They are artificial entities foisted upon Russia by dark imperialist powers such as Austria-Hungary, Nazi Germany, the United States, or the “Anglo-Saxons.” In Putin’s mind, Ukraine and Ukrainians are foreign entities that, like cancer, threaten to poison the Russian soul and bring about Russia’s demise.

The rhetoric, as Putin acknowledges in tracing contemporary Russia’s lineage back to the USSR and Imperial Russia, is little different from that employed by czarist and Soviet propagandists. My non-specialist friends saw this and, like those Germans who read “Mein Kampf” and took Adolf Hitler’s ravings seriously, concluded that Putin was an existential threat to Ukraine and, sooner or later, would strive to destroy it. We “specialists” contextualized Putin’s words, tried to comprehend them in relation to the needs of the Russian economy, society and culture, and thereby failed to appreciate them for what they were: a declaration of war against Ukraine and Ukrainians. We overthought Putin and, in doing so, failed to understand what really drives him.

Once this point is accepted, so much of Russia’s behavior over the past year becomes perfectly comprehensible. Last summer’s military exercises along Ukraine’s border were really a prelude to invasion. Russia’s written statements of its security needs, passed on to Washington and NATO last December, were just a ruse to force the West to adopt a position of intransigeance that would serve as a pretext for war. Russian insistence that an invasion was a product of Western hysteria was obviously a prolonged exercise in mendacity. Russia’s absurd claims that Kyiv was committing genocide in the Donbas and that its government consisted of fascists and Nazis made perfect sense for a country seeking to fabricate a casus belli.  

Most importantly, Russia’s repeated claims that it genuinely feared NATO membership for Ukraine were a canard, as Washington, Moscow and NATO — as well as Kyiv — knew full well that Ukraine’s chances of joining the alliance in the next 20 years were nil. Ukraine posed no imaginable security threat to Russia, the largest country in the world, possessing a huge army, thousands of nuclear weapons and enormous natural resources. But Ukraine and Ukrainians did pose an existential threat only in Putin’s diseased imagination. And, naturally enough, he responded in the manner that any lifelong KGB agent would have favored: with extreme violence and complete ruthlessness.

That’s something that we also got wrong: the continued reality of violence and war. Our world was supposed to have transcended brute force. It was supposed to consist of amiable governance — and not government — practiced by well-meaning consumers of globalization. As Putin has shown, violence and war are alive and well. And as the mistakes of specialists like me show, sometimes the gut is mightier than the brain.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction.