Putin is bored

At the beginning of this year, Vladimir Putin was sitting comfortably in the Kremlin: his legacy so far a steady leader who had saved his people from the helter-skelter of robber capitalism in the 1990s and given them a modicum of stability and pride. He must have known that if he waged war on a country of 45 million brother Slavs, he risked losing it all. Liberty and life are now less certain.

So why did he do it?

Having spent four years in Moscow and more than two decades of Russia-watching, I have never believed that Putin was a chess grandmaster. While his apologists in the West lauded his cunning, I have always seen him as an improviser. Like the best at his favourite sport – judo – he prepares for combat, studies his opponent, and considers various eventualities. But he does not, and cannot, map out the entire fight. So we have seen him hesitate and procrastinate again and again.

In the jailing of the tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2004 – the point that more than any other marked the beginning of Putin’s slide into autocracy – there is much anecdotal evidence that he vacillated for months even as hardliners begged him to act. 

Before seizing Crimea in 2014, he put all his pieces in place and then waited and waited before giving the fateful order. It seems that Putin was still undecided on Ukraine until fairly late on. He had good reason, after all, to think that he might get something for nothing. The last time he marched his troops to the Ukrainian border – almost a year ago – he was rewarded with a gratifying one-on-one with Biden in Geneva. If he did it again, then, the Americans and the Europeans would surely give him something to take home. Guaranteed neutrality for Ukraine, or maybe even a commitment to draw down Nato forces in the east.

But they didn’t. In its lumbering way, the West, which had caved to pressure so many times before from Moscow, stood firm. In fact, chivvied along by a surprisingly deft Biden administration – who could have predicted that? – it stiffened its backbone. Suddenly, and unexpectedly, Putin was in a trap of his own making. He could either take his soldiers home with nothing to show for it, or go for broke, like a poker player who throws good money after bad.

And that is where the delusions that had over the years silted up his mental decision-making machinery began to tell. Surely there was no way that the Ukrainians – corrupt, inept and with a second-rate army – could resist the forces of the Motherland. Surely the effete West was not going to offer any muscular resistance? For all their talk, western capitals had been only too willing to look the other way in the past and, after a fit of complaints, would probably do so again.

And it was in these calculations – skewed by years of listening to mealy-mouthed courtiers, isolation and the drip-drip corruption of power – that Putin showed perhaps his greatest delusion of all. In his head Ukrainians were either morally flabby or fascists. The West was suffocating in the straightjacket of its internecine doctrinal wars. So a tough and determined tactician could always face down a weak-willed crowd – much as he had faced down east German protestors outside the KGB headquarters in Dresden in 1989.

‘Everything is going according to plan’, Putin said last week on Russian television when talking about the invasion of Ukraine. Is this madness or delusion? There is another even more painful possibility. Back in the early 2000s, when I was working as a correspondent in Moscow, I finagled my way into a Russian maximum security prison. All the inmates were on death row, although a moratorium had been imposed on executions.

I met a 46-year-old balding man with a squint and wire-rimmed glasses man called Vyacheslav. During the dying days of the Soviet Union he had been a young prosecutor in the Smolensk region of Russia and, by his own admission, had almost God-like powers over the locals. One day, overcome with ennui, he stabbed to death two women he barely knew because he wanted to know how it felt.

‘I took a knife, killed a book-keeper and a cashier and stole their money. I didn’t need the money, but I needed to feel again. I was simply bored with my life.’ I looked at him quizzically. ‘You’ve read Dostoyevsky’, he said ‘Maybe you understand’.

As a westerner, I do not pretend to have a telling insight into the Russian soul. But the interview with Vyacheslav has stuck with me. And these days my thoughts have turned it to more than once. ‘Putin is bored’, a westerner who has had long-standing dealings with him told me three years ago. That was before the two years of intense isolation Putin imposed on himself during Covid.

Today Putin’s contempt for human life is on garish display in the cities of Mariupol and Kharkiv. That in itself is signature KGB. During the battle of Stalingrad, the NKVD – predecessors of the KGB – executed around 13,000 of their own. ‘Panic makers and cowards must be liquidated on the spot,’ Stalin’s infamous Order No. 227 read, ‘not one step backwards without orders from higher headquarters!’

Where next? Putin is probably capable of firing short-range tactical nuclear weapons into Ukrainian cities if he believes his job – or life – is on the line. He may even be willing to launch a strategic nuclear strike. The Russian army, most of which has now deployed in Ukraine, is being mauled, and it is difficult to imagine that it is in good shape to fight a conventional war against the West.

And so, as the ruble collapses and opposition to the war in Russia grows, we can expect to see more sabre-rattling, but this time with nuclear weapons. When Putin raised the readiness of his nuclear arsenal last week, he left it purposefully vague as to which level he was putting them at. But having stiffed the pundits when his courtiers told us that he would not go into Ukraine, it would be a brave person – or a fool – who now predicted that Putin won’t escalate further.

There could come a point where if he is mad, delusional or simply bored with life, it may not matter one bit.

Julius runs the newsletter Back to the Front about Russia, Ukraine, Afghanistan and the Balkans.