TL;DRussia Weekend Roundup

9/10 March 2025: Pots and kettles, plus texts and tunes

“Bell Rock Lighthouse”, JMW Turner, 1819. (Courtesy of the National Galleries of Scotland)

I’m pretty sure I said this last week, and likely the week before, and the week before that, but it’s been a week. Or a year. I remember how time seemed to slip during the pandemic, but I’ve never experienced a time warp quite like this one. In part as a result, it took me longer to collect my thoughts this week than I had hoped—not to mention that there are a few other things going on out there—so, apologies for the delay with the newsletter this week.

With apologies for those who might be looking for a blow-by-blow, the thoughts below aren’t a dissection of the rather extraordinary events of the week. Rather, I’ve tried to provide some perspective on how I think we should be going about the business of analysis and policymaking in these circumstances. But if you are interested in the events themselves—and don’t mind a bit of self-promotion—I discussed them briefly with The World (radio), somewhat less briefly for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (TV), and at considerable length for the New Statesman’s podcast.

What I’m thinking about

I should, I suppose, be thinking about Vladimir Putin.

About two weeks into the second Trump administration, I wrote in this newsletter that, given Putin’s core objectives of securing his regime against internal pressure, dominating the post-Soviet space, and disrupting the institutions of Western power, “it’s hard to see how he could be anything other than ecstatic.” And that was before Vice President Vance’s intervention at the Munich Security Conference, before the Oval Office debacle, before the withdrawal of military and intelligence support for Ukraine.

So, what must Putin be thinking now that all of those things have occurred? What’s the next rung on the emotional ladder after ecstasy?

Here’s the thing: I don’t care.

To be clear, that’s not an emotional response. It’s an analytical one. Long-time readers of this newsletter will be sick to death by now of my refrain that I cannot get into Putin’s head and don’t want to try. The fact that now might be a particularly good time to know exactly what he has in mind—what he might and might not be willing to agree with Trump, whether the supposed “red lines” he has drawn about Ukrainian security guarantees or European boots on the ground will hold firm—does not change the fact that I cannot really know even approximately what he has in mind. And neither can anyone else. (If anyone tells you otherwise, they’re lying. Or naive.)

But I really don’t care this time around for a qualitatively new reason: I’m seeing way too many smart and important people on both sides of the Atlantic getting bogged down in endless debates about what Donald Trump is thinking, and it needs to stop.

Some of this we can see in the produce of the punditocracy, as academics and think-tankers and even ex-politicians vie for the best take on Trump’s inscrutability. On the one hand, people pretending they know things they don’t is such a fundamental element of human nature that I almost don’t begrudge it. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t do better, and the conversation that European leaders and American oppositionists are having about trump—is he really that crazy? does he really mean what he says?—is exactly the same conversation they had for decades about Putin. If we don’t snap out of it soon, the result will be the same.

In fairness, not all politicians present this problem. Indeed, most democratic politicians do not, because most democratic politicians build support by trying to be reasonably legible to their voters and their comrades: they calibrate their intentions to suit the demands of electoral politics, and then they communicate them. Even some authoritarian leaders strive to be predictable. But not Putin—and not Trump. Both men extend and amplify their power by manufacturing and manipulating uncertainty, and when we attempt to deny the reality that uncertainty by attempting to ‘know’ the unknowable, we indulge in a dangerous fiction.

With repeated apologies to those readers who have heard me pontificate on this before, I think there are three primary reasons why trying to get into the head of someone like Putin is a bad idea. First, it makes a mockery of analysis. Analysis is fundamentally about identifying relationships of cause and effect. Doing that requires not just seeing correlations, but being able at least partially to observe the mechanisms at work. We know, obviously, that information about the world enters Putin’s head, and we can see the policies and rhetoric that emerge from said head. Over time, to be sure, we can even see patterns, which might allow us to ascertain things that look like consistent patterns, such as Putin’s clear preference for maximizing his autonomy and flexibility of decision-making. Fine. But how much does that really tell us? Not much, is the answer, which means if we think it’s important to know how Putin thinks, we have to guess, usually based on what we think we know about his upbringing, training, formative political experiences, ideological and identity structures, and so on. And having guessed, we end up making predictions about his behavior that have much more to do with our own thought processes than about his.

Second, focusing on Putin’s thought processes gives him more power than he deserves. At the heart of the “what is Putin really thinking” question is an assumption, usually unspoken, that if we could just get a little bit further inside his head, we could either devise policies that would not provoke him, or else devise policies that would effectively deter him. And if we actually could get inside his head, I suppose one or both of those things could well turn out to be true. But because we can’t get inside his head, and because all of our theories about what and how he thinks are conjecture, we ignore the one thing we do know, which is that Putin benefits from being unpredictable. And because Putin is actively trying to be unpredictable, predicating our policies and our deterrents on conjectural models of what may or may not be going on inside Putin’s head means that we are handing him the ability to upend our analysis, and thus our policy, simply by being opaque.

And that, in turn, leads to the third problem: The overriding focus on how Putin thinks means that we are predicating analysis and policymaking on something that is fundamentally unknowable—and that cannot be a good thing. For starters, all Putin needs to do is give us reason to question our analysis, and we go back to the drawing board for endless arguments, rather than implementing policy. What’s worse, because those arguments are about things that we cannot know, they quite literally cannot end: because there is no right or wrong answer to be had, we just go around in circles. And because no camp in the “I-know-what-Putin’s-thinking” debate can ever establish the incontrovertible truth of their position, consolidation around a line of policymaking becomes virtually impossible.

Everything I have written for years about the dangers of trying to get into Putin’s head—the way it substitutes conjecture for analysis, the way it empowers him at our expense, and the way it impedes effective decision-making—holds true for trying to get into Trump’s head. His thinking is inscrutable by design. Unpredictability is the cornerstone of his exercise of power. And by focusing everyone’s attention on the never-ending stream of contradictions and escalations that flow from his words and his desk, he all but ensures that no effective resistance will ever consolidate.

There is, however, a way out.

In the summer of 2023, while the Prigozhin mutiny was still unfolding, I demurred that I could not know where things were headed, because the answer to that question lay within the heads of two men—Prigozhin and Putin—and was thus unknowable. I wrote:

My strong preference, then, is to embrace the uncertainty: because we cannot know where this is going or how it will end, we shouldn’t try. As I’ve been saying for a year and a half now, patience and humility are key. Plus a stiff drink.

Embracing the uncertainty when it comes to Putin and Trump means using the fact that we cannot know their thoughts as a signal that we need to reconstruct the equation at the core of our analysis. Let me explain.

If we think that we know what Putin or Trump is thinking, then we end up constructing an equation in which we hold their thoughts constant, in order to calculate what our responses should be, based on the interaction between their thinking and our interests. If, however, we recognize that Putin or Trump’s thinking is actually a variable—as, of course, is our response—then the only constant in the equation is our interests.

In practice, an approach based on assumptions about what Putin or Trump are thinking leads us to make probabilistic judgments about what they will or won’t do, and thus to prepare responses based on those predictions. And if we find that the response necessitated by our prediction requires putting too much strain on our resources, then we often find ourselves modifying our interests. In other words, if we think that Putin is likely to go nuclear if Ukraine retakes Crimea, we are likely to encourage Ukraine to leave Crimea alone.

By contrast, understanding that we cannot what Putin or Trump will do forces us to shift our focus from probabilities to plausibilities, i.e., the range of things it is possible to expect from these unpredictable leaders. That, in turn, allows us to re-center our own interests in the policymaking process, calculating appropriate responses across the full range of plausibilities and preparing and investing accordingly. And because Putin and Trump are watching us just as we are watching them, the prospect of facing concerted resistance across a broad range of scenarios might just provide a bit more deterrence.

What I’m reading

The weirdest thing I read this week—indeed, the weirdest thing I’ve read in a long time—was a ceasefire plan for Ukraine featured in a lead story in the New York Times this weekend. Published Wednesday by the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, the highly detailed, professionally thought through plan involves proposals for a joint military commission to delineate and deconflict a line of control, the establishment of humanitarian corridors, a Europe-led monitoring mission, and multilateral agreement on security guarantees. It also reads like a plan developed in a parallel universe. Yes, these things could make a ceasefire workable (though plenty of ceasefires have these things and fail anyway). But a plan for a workable ceasefire is only a workable ceasefire plan if it can get the belligerent doing most of the firing to cease. Whatever this is, it isn’t that.

Heading back to Russia, more polls!

On Tuesday, Elena Koneva had a piece in Russia.Post drawing on ExtremeScan and Chronicles surveys, argues in essence that while a majority of Russians are increasingly geared up for “peace”, the peace they actually have in mind looks a lot more like victory—not least because both Russian propaganda and the White House have given them reason to believe that something akin to victory may be in hand.

And also on Tuesday, Levada Center director Denis Volkov had a piece in the Russian edition of Forbes making a very similar argument based on Levada surveys and focus groups. More than 70 percent of respondents envision a post-war settlement that involves a Russia-friendly government in Kyiv governing a neutral and de-militarized Ukraine, as well as the removal of all Western sanctions, and again respondents point to Trump as the basis for these expectations.

Finally, of particular interest to my US-based readers may be Anne Applebaum’s piece this week in The Atlantic. My European readers, I imagine, need no such education, but I’m not sure how many people in the US understand the depth not just of disappointment, but of genuine disaffection and disgust that is sweeping Europe right now when it comes to the US. And as Applebaum points out, it’s not just Trump and his administration at fault: Europeans are shocked by the rapidity with which Republicans have acquiesced to the evisceration of decades of Republican policy, and by the lack of concerted resistance from Democrats. Remember the debates about whether the invasion of Ukraine was Putin’s war, or Russia’s? Well, Americans need to begin preparing mentally for the fact that, unless they can stop it from happening, Americans as a whole will own what Trump is doing.

What I’m listening to

This piece of music has haunted me since I was a boy. There is something about its contrasts—the second movement of Schubert’s 8th symphony, bucolic one moment, belligerent the next, but each embedded organically in the other—that is equal parts soothing and unsettling. When life seems too frictionless, it reminds me of the reality of turmoil and struggle. When, as now, the turmoil threatens to become overwhelming, it reminds me of the bedrock that lies beneath. Whatever the context, though, I take no small solace in the movement’s sublime resolution. It is, I think, the composer’s way of reassuring us that it will all be okay in the end. And isn’t that what music is for?

This is the key passage, exquisitely performed. If you want the full movement, though, you can find it here, or wherever fine records are sold.