TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

17 November 2024: Putin's move, plus texts and tunes

“The Game of Chess”, Sofonisba Anguissola, circa 1555.

If you spend any time on social media, you are likely aware of the semi-mass exodus from Twitter (I still refuse to call it X) since the US election. I’ve seen it in my follower numbers, too, and I’ve decided to reinvest in diversifying my social media interactions as a result.

This newsletter will always be the place where I try to put my most cogent thoughts (though I may not always succeed!). But if you have an appetite for more rapid reaction, please do find me on Bluesky, Threads and Mastodon, as well as on Twitter.

What I’m thinking about

Vladimir Putin has some decisions to make.

I stand by my analysis (here, here and here) that Donald Trump is not about to hand Putin an outright victory—or anything approaching it—in Ukraine, not out of any particular sympathy for Ukraine, but because the politics of it are unlikely to work out to either man’s favor. That said, Trump’s election, and the pre-inauguration moves he is making, are already beginning to reshape the conflict in troubling ways, presenting Putin with a different set of calculations than the one he faced just a few weeks ago.

To be clear, there’s a lot we don’t know. Just as I’ve spent years saying I won’t pretend to know Putin’s inner thoughts, I certainly don’t know Trump’s. We have heard bits and pieces about what the various people around him might be thinking—I hesitate to call them ‘the Trump team’, because Trump isn’t really a team kind of guy—but we don’t know how any of these ideas resonate with the president-elect, or how beholden he may feel to any particular policy. Indeed, the signals sent by his initial appointments are all over the map, ranging from Tulsi Gabbard (who blames the war on NATO) as Director of National Intelligence to Michael Waltz (who thinks the way to end the war is to strengthen sanctions and allow Ukraine to use long-range American weapons against targets in Russia) as National Security Advisor.

It gets worse. In the immediate aftermath of the election, Donald Trump Jr. posted on Instagram that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was about to “lose his allowance”. Trump aide Bryan Lanza then averred that Ukraine needed to give up on the idea of recovering territory. Trump, in his post-election call with Putin (which I’m going to assume took place, despite, or maybe because, the Kremlin denies it), presumably sent a somewhat different message, reportedly including a request not to escalate.

Escalate, of course, is exactly what Putin did, ramping up drone and missile attacks to record levels. Russian troops are reportedly pushing as hard and as fast as they can all along the front, taking heavy losses in the process but inflicting them as well. Indeed, both are a rational response to at least part of the messaging coming from Trump-world: if Washington will not support Kyiv in putting territory on the table in a negotiation process, or give Kyiv the arms it needs to pursue a major new counter-offensive, the obvious incentive for Moscow is to grab as much Ukrainian territory as possible as quickly as possible.

But that’s only one shift that Trump’s election and early maneuvering has created, and as dangerous as it is, it may not be the worst. The other major shift is, if anything, even more nefarious. Trump’s call to Putin appears to have created an impetus in Europe to pick up the phone as well, with the result that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke to Putin on Friday. Scholz was, unsurprisingly, roundly criticized, including by Zelensky, who said that the call opened a “Pandora’s box” by breaking Putin’s diplomatic isolation.

While I get the criticism of Scholz, my reading of the situation is somewhat different. Once Trump got on the phone to Putin, it was inevitable that at least one senior European leader would do the same. For the Europeans, the prospect of the United States negotiating with Russia over a war on the European continent over the heads of the Europeans themselves—and particularly a US president who may be less than fully committed to NATO—is unconscionable. It was thus imperative that at least one major European leader establish his own line of communication with the Kremlin.

The problem isn’t the call itself or what Scholz said—which was reportedly fairly robust—but the logic that has been created. By deciding to talk to Putin before talking with the Europeans, Trump has already deepened the transatlantic anxiety and mistrust that were bound to accompany the launch of his second presidency. If the US is going to pursue a unilateral revision of relations with Russia, it may not mean that Europe is obliged to follow suit. It does mean, however, that Europe is obliged to hedge against American fecklessness, and getting Putin on the phone is an integral part of that hedging.

Trump, then, has started a process that will erode—if not entirely destroy—the principle of “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine”. Zelensky’s critique and the squall of public outrage that has accompanied Scholz’s phone call may be enough to dissuade his European colleagues from following suit right now, but that dissuasion will fade, and Putin will eventually be getting more and more phone calls. The question thus becomes, how will Putin use this opportunity?

Putin faces qualitatively new choices along two vectors. One is whether and how to escalate the fighting. To be clear, escalation itself is nothing new. Previously, however, escalation served mostly to inflict damage on Ukraine, as well as to pursue an indirect impact on the willingness of the West to continue supporting Ukraine’s defense. As it happened, the primary impact of Russian escalation has been to galvanize Western support. Now, though, the escalation calculation can be calibrated towards direct interactions with Western leadership, a possibility that did not exist before.

To make that calculation, Putin will have to decide whether he wants to allow the emerging diplomatic engagement with Western leaders to gain traction—and that’s the second vector. Ever since breaking off talks with Western leaders and launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Putin has repeatedly dangled the prospect of negotiations but has—for good reason—found no takers. I suspect that Putin knew his ‘offers’ would be declined, however, and designed them with that expectation in mind. Facing the prospect that an offer might be accepted puts Putin on unfamiliar ground.

How might Putin behave in this situation? Again, let me be clear: I have no special knowledge of Putin’s thoughts. But if past performance is any guide to future results, I would expect Putin to find this whole scenario to be somewhat problematic. Trump’s overture to Moscow and his emergent rupture with Europe present Putin with an opportunity to undermine, perhaps fatally, Western military support for Ukraine. Whatever he does, he will not want to upset that dynamic. Almost anything he does, however, will make that dynamic more difficult to maintain.

If, for example, Putin ramps up escalation to take advantage of the ‘grab-what-you-can’ incentives he’s been handed by Washington, he risks provoking the Europeans to set aside their fiscal challenges and surge defense production. In the process, he would likely turn the friction between Europe and the US from a potentiality ripe for manipulation, to a fait accompli, as a result of which Europe would be greatly empowered and emboldened. Not exactly what Putin is hoping for.

On the other hand, should Putin decide to modulate his escalation and allow some kind of a negotiating process to begin, European leaders would likely face insurmountable pressure to provide Ukraine with the kind of long-term security guarantees that it would need to resist future Russian aggression. Again, not an optimal outcome from Putin’s point of view.

In fact, the biggest problem Trump creates for Putin is that Putin is no longer the most unpredictable player in the game. As the structurally weaker party in relations with the West, Putin has long relied on unpredictability as a strategic asset. By manufacturing and manipulating uncertainty, he has been able to ameliorate his own weaknesses while minimizing his opponents’ advantages, as they struggle to understand his objectives and to formulate their own responses. Playing the game that way, however, is difficult to do if you’re not the only unpredictable contestant.

If I had to put money on it, then, I’d wager that—faced with choices that might actually allow the fighting to stop—Putin will elect to keep going, while maintaining the illusion of an opportunity for peace. In practice, for the foreseeable future that likely means:

1. Maintaining the current level of aggression, while signalling a readiness to de-escalate;

2. Engendering enough ambiguity in direct and indirect communication with Western leaders that an increasing number feel compelled to engage and formulate their own approach;

3. Engaging with Western leaders when phone calls or meetings are offered, expressing a willingness to explore whatever proposals they may eventually bring forward, but not committing to an actual negotiating process.

Throughout all of this, unless Putin has decided that it’s time to stop fighting—and has concluded that he has the political and economic wherewithal to deal with the domestic political and economic consequences of that decision (the subject of another newsletter, I suppose)—I expect his overriding goal will be to use engagements with Trump and European leaders to gain insight into their intentions and thus make them more transparent to him, while maintaining his own inscrutability.

Not peace, in other words.

What I’m reading

I’m afraid it’s bit of a tossed salad of readings this week, with tidbits here and there on multiple fronts.

• On Monday, the Financial Times reported on a growing trend of butter theft from Russian stores, a striking symptom of the strain caused by war-driven inflation. Amazingly, Anastasia Stognei and Max Seddon got through the entire article without once using the phrase “guns and butter”.

• Regular readers may recall that I wrote back in September about a campaign to revisit the late-Soviet and early-post-Soviet legal rehabilitation of the victims of Soviet repression, including Stalin’s terrors. Well, on Tuesday the BBC Russian Service reported that authorities have now begun re-trying people whose early rehabilitiations had been overturned, including on charges of treason.

• There’s increasing indirect evidence that the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk Oblast is beginning to have a political effect. Thus, on Tuesday a court handed down a fine to a resident of Ukrainian-occupied Sudzha for helping to organize a protest in Kursk involving displaced residents of the town. And on Thursday, Govorit NeMoskva reported on a video recorded by residents of the village of Olgovka in Kursk Oblast calling on Putin “to end this damned war”.

• On Wednesday, Carnegie Endowment analyst Dara Massicot published a long thread on Twitter outlining her conclusions from a recent fact-finding trip to the front in eastern Ukraine. “Serious and urgent” covers both her conclusions and the thread itself, and it reinforces my concern about the incentives Washington is setting up for Moscow right now.

• Also on Wednesday, iStories reported on the “colossal losses” Russian forces were enduring as they attempt to retake Ukrainian-occupied territory in Kursk and Belgorod Oblasts.

What I’m listening to

A little bit of nostalgia—and a lot of swagger—to take us out this week.