A Dangerous Mind: Angela Stent on Understanding Putin
A Dangerous Mind: Angela Stent on Understanding Putin
"There are limits to how we can affect his calculus. If he’s determined to do keep going, I don’t think anything’s going to stop him."
GEOPOLITICS
What was Putin thinking? In the last few weeks, Russia’s president has made so many strange mistakes—from assuming he could easily seize Ukraine to expecting his actions would divide the West—that many analysts have been left scratching their heads, wondering what’s going through his mind and whether he’s still thinking capable of rational thought in the first place. That last question has become especially important, since NATO’s ability to contain and deter Russia while avoiding a new World War will depend on its leader acting in a predictable—or at least comprehensible—manner. So last Friday, I turned to Angela Stent—a leading academic, former U.S. government official, and the author, most recently, of Putin’s World—for insight into how Russia’s dictator works and what he’s likely to do next.
Octavian Report: Putin seems to have expected the war in Ukraine to be short and easy. How did he get things so wrong?
Angela Stent: One can only assume that the information he was getting from the people around him wasn’t accurate. Were they giving him wrong information because they knew that’s what he wanted to hear, or were they themselves misinformed? We don’t know. But Putin clearly thinks that Ukrainians and Russians are one people. He clearly believed that the Ukrainians would welcome the Russians with open arms, or at least that they wouldn’t fight back. He doesn’t understand that even in Russian-speaking parts of Ukraine, people feel very Ukrainian.
OR: It seems that if he’d used a more minimal approach, like the one he used in Georgia or with Crimea—invading part of the country and supporting the separatists—he could have easily succeeded and destabilized Ukraine in the process. Why did he abandon a strategy that had served him so well in the past?
Stent: Well, his ultimate objective is to subjugate Ukraine, to control Ukraine, to put a government in power that’s pro-Russian. Beyond that, he wants to recreate a union of Slavic states: Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia.
OR: Why do you think the Russian military has made so many tactical blenders? Their planning and logistics have been terrible. Did the West overestimate how good Russia’s military forces had become?
Stent: I think we may have. After the Georgia-Russia war, the Russians built up their military again. It has performed pretty well in Syria and in some other parts of the world where they’ve intervened. But all of those interventions were limited and were done at low cost. This is the first massive military movement by Russia we’ve seen. And maybe the problem was that Russia hasn’t undertaken a large-scale invasion like this before. We may have overestimated how professional Russia’s army is. It’s still improvising in this war.
OR: Why has Putin been so slow to bring his full military power to bear?
Stent: He thought it was going to be easier to subjugate Ukraine. And I think he’s been waiting to see what the response from the Ukrainians and the West would be. Now, of course, the Russians are becoming more reckless—for instance hitting the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant on Thursday.
OR: Was Putin trying to avoid devastating Ukraine because that would problematize his argument that Ukrainians are actually Russians?
Stent: I think so. A full invasion would also be much more expensive for the Russians. And I think they were hoping to avoid Western sanctions on a massive scale.
OR: Do you have any sense of how the war is being perceived in Russia? On the one hand, media there is highly censored and becoming more censored every day. And Putin’s adventurism in the past has been quite popular at home. On the other hand, ordinary Russians must be starting to feel the pain caused by his recklessness. So how is the Russian public responding—and does Putin care?
Stent: There’s strong opposition among the urban educated elite. We see all these protests, and 6,000 people have been arrested. Some business people, journalists, and cultural figures are speaking out. They’re a not insignificant number, but they’re a minority of the population. Many Russians receive their news from the state-run media and still believe that this is an operation to get rid of Ukrainian Nazis who are threatening to invade Russia or build nuclear weapons and drop them on Russia.
What you have to watch for is when the body bags start coming back. When that happens, many of these parents and siblings and spouses of those killed will say, “What was all this about?”
But I don’t think Putin really cares very much. He believes that as long as he can maintain the current level of repression, popular opposition won’t be translated into anything that can threaten him.
OR: That’s public opinion. What about oligarch opinion? The conventional wisdom is that as Western sanctions start to bite and the West starts to seize the oligarchs’ foreign assets, they will start to put pressure on Putin, and that could make a difference in his choices. Do you agree?
Stent: The oligarchs have what they have because Putin has allowed them to have it. The oligarchs and Putin rely on each other. There’s no way that they can get together and decide that it’s time for Putin to go. The only people who could do that are people who come from the power ministries, from the military, from the intelligence services. We’ve seen reports that a couple of alleged plots to kill Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky were leaked to him by the FSB (Russia’s domestic intelligence service). If that’s true, it would mean that some in the Russian intelligence services are questioning what’s happening.
OR: Where is the war going to go from here? Do you think Putin is going to do a full Grozny or Aleppo and reduce Ukraine’s big cities to rubble?
Stent: I hope not, but unfortunately, the war in Chechnya was how he came to power, and it’s part of his playbook. I think he would rather take control of Ukraine without razing the country, but if necessary, he may do it. After that, he couldn’t keep a puppet government in place without a full-scale Russian occupation, because there will be very strong resistance. To occupy a country like Ukraine, with the population waging an insurgency that’s supported by the West, would be a real strain on Russia’s resources. I think that’s something he hasn’t reckoned with yet.
OR: How do you interpret the nuclear threat Putin made a few days ago?
Stent: You have to take it very seriously. Russian strategists have been writing for some years now about the possibility of a limited nuclear war, the use of tactical nuclear weapons. So you can’t rule it out. With Putin behaving in ways that seem not to be rational, you can’t know how far he’ll go.
OR: What do you make of the reports published today saying the White House fears that all this Western pressure could cause Putin to lash out?
Stent: It’s possible. He could cut off energy supplies to Europe if he wanted to, though he’d lose those revenues in the process. There could be a massive cyber attack on government installations, or on commercial ones, as we saw in the United States last year. Russia could brandish something militarily.
OR: There’s been a lot of speculation in recent days about Putin’s mental stability and the effect that age and isolation have had on him. Do you share those concerns?
Stent: I do, because in 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia, and in 2014, when it invaded Crimea, there were limits. Today there seem to be no limits. And the kind of speeches he’s made in the past couple of weeks—the vehemence, the emotion, and the outrageous claims—are different from the way he spoke before. We know that he’s been very isolated. We know he’s only talking to a few people. He’s clearly obsessively concerned about COVID. If you look at the pictures of him with foreign leaders or his own cabinet, sitting at a 30-foot table, he appears to be unhinged. But this could all be an act he’s putting on to make us believe that he’s unhinged so that we’ll be careful about pushing him too hard.
OR: Do you agree with the pundits and officials who have begun arguing that this is the beginning of the end for Putin?
Stent: I wouldn’t go that far yet. We don’t know how strong his hold on power is. We have to wait, and watch, and see what happens.
OR: We’re now clearly in a new cold war with Russia. How will it differ from the last one?
Stent: We definitely are in a new cold war. The question is, will the American people make the kinds of commitments to defending Europe they did in the first Cold War? We know that Putin’s ambitions extend beyond Ukraine, possibly to Central and Eastern Europe. Will the United States and the Europeans step up and spend more on defense? We’ve had the surprising announcement from Germany that it’s going to do so. But will the United States go back into Europe with the numbers of troops it stationed there during the first Cold War?
Whether or not it does, this will be a different cold war. In the first Cold War, there were rules of the game. We had an American and a Soviet sphere of influence, and we didn’t interfere much with each other’s sphere. I don’t think that’s what Putin wants. He wants a new world disorder. He wants a disruptive, a Hobbesian world order. So I don’t think he’ll be willing to accept limits on Russia’s influence.
This new cold war also won’t be global like the last one was. There won’t be the same ideological component. And we’re now in the age of cyber, which will make the conduct of this cold war different.
The other major difference is that during the first Cold War, there was a consensus in the United States about democracy and the other values we believed in. We don’t have that anymore. We’re a deeply divided country where parts of the population really don’t believe that our democratic system is worth fighting for.
OR: Can you imagine a scenario where the West gets involved militarily in Ukraine, either because the carnage there gets so bad or because of an accidental spillover into a NATO state?
Stent: It’s more likely that the West would get involved if there was an accidental spillover. However terrible the humanitarian disaster becomes, I think that the NATO is not going to deliberately get involved because of the danger of a conflict with a nuclear-armed Russia.
I do think it’s possible that if the war continues and something inadvertent happens—say, one of the convoys taking weapons from Poland to Ukraine encounters the Russian military—we could be facing a major, major crisis. Because either NATO would have to come to the defense of the member that was threatened, or, if it did not, that would expose the limits of what NATO membership actually means.
OR: What are the next non-military steps the West can take short of war? If you were advising President Biden right now, what would be your high-level recommendations?
Stent: We have to immediately establish a deconfliction channel with the Russians, just like we did in Syria. We have a military-to-military deconfliction channel that works every day to make sure that U.S. planes and Russian planes don’t encounter one another over Syrian territory. We have to do the same thing for Ukraine. We have to try to diffuse the possibility of a wider war.
I think we can continue to offer diplomacy, to talk about missile-defense deployments, troop deployments, intermediate-range nuclear forces, and other issues that the Russians claim threaten their security. I just don’t think Putin is interested in an off-ramp at the moment.
If the war gets worse, there will be more and more calls to sanction the Russian energy sector. And we can continue to support the Ukrainians by supplying them with weapons. Nothing can be taken off the table. But there are limits to how we can affect Putin’s calculus. If he’s determined to do keep going, I don’t think anything’s going to stop him.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.