As Putin’s war against Ukraine drags on, Russia now faces the very real prospect of defeat. There are still difficult weeks and months ahead for Ukraine, and you cannot wholly discount the possibility of a dangerous escalation still in the war. But Putin has failed to attain his initial aims (the capture of Kyiv) and now looks likely to fall short of his secondary and much more modest aim of capturing Donbas. The war has turned into a protracted affair. That in itself is a defeat for the Russians.
Russia’s humiliation in Ukraine has untold benefits, not least for Russia itself. We have heard it said for years that Russia must be indulged and humoured because, if not, it will resent having lost its great power status. The Soviet collapse, we were told, was a terrible catastrophe from which aggrieved, embittered Russians never recovered. So they need to be respected. They need to stand tall and proud. God forbid if they are humiliated because who knows what they will do.
I witnessed the Soviet collapse first-hand. It was, without doubt, a traumatic experience. There was poverty and misery and chaos and a far-right backlash. Rabid nationalists rallied under their revanchist banners. And then Russia invaded Chechnya in a brutal attempt to recover its tainted pride by bringing defiant separatists in the region to heel. And we watched and commiserated because, you see, the Russians had a good reason to be resentful: they lost the Cold War!
Yet in 1991 there was a sense among many Russians that the USSR was not so much defeated as it folded under its own weight. Too many refused to accept that the Soviet collapse was the outcome of years of economic mismanagement and imperial hubris – and so they looked for traitors instead.
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