The Killer in the Kremlin: Samuel Ramani on Putin's Strategy

"Putin is not fundamentally ideological; what he’s focused on is the retention of power at all costs."

GEOPOLITICS

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With the war in Ukraine entering its sixth week, the questions surrounding Russian President Vladimir Putin, his thinking, and his goals have only grown. Why does he seem to hate the West, and Western-leaning leaders like Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, so intensely? Why does he keep doubling down on his failed strategy in Ukraine? What are his larger foreign-policy goals? And what does it say about Russia’s culture or its military that it seems to have embraced war crimes as a tool of state policy? To help answer these questions and more, I called Samuel Ramani, a leading expert on Russia’s foreign policy. The Canadian-born scholar teaches international relations at the University of Oxford, is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, and has two books coming out this year: one on Russian influence in Africa, and one on Putin’s war in Ukraine. We spoke on Wednesday.

Putin with his top military advisers: Chief of Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov (left) and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (right). / Getty Images

Octavian Report: Let’s start with a very general question: how would you characterize Putin’s governing ideology?

Samuel Ramani: I’d hesitate to put him in a single category, because Putin has been quite amorphous in his foreign policy over the years. There were periods of time, particularly in the early 2000s, when he associated Russia’s status with the expansion of its economic power, with its ongoing sway over its sphere of influence, and with maintaining ties with the West.

After Russia’s economy began declining in 2008, however—thanks to the financial crisis, protracted inconsistencies in energy prices, and the effects of two terms of no economic diversification—Russia started moving toward a revanchist foreign policy focused on promoting illiberalism abroad and assertively consolidating its great-power status.

Given these shifts, I’d argue that Putin is non-ideological and heavily motivated by whatever will preserve his own legitimacy and the system he’s set up, which he describes as “sovereign democracy.” What that means he wants to preserve a form of kind of great-power status that looks good to Russian public. That means sometimes leaning toward acts of fascism—like we’re seeing right now in Ukraine—sometimes leaning toward imperialism and economic coercion and engaging in smaller-scale interventions like Georgia, and sometimes engaging with the West or challenging it.

OR: What people and thinkers have influenced his thinking?

Ramani: The ones who are most often talked about are the Eurasianist philosophers like Aleksandr Dugin in particular. But I find that their influence has been grossly overstated.

There are others who have been much more significant but get much less attention. With regards to Russia’s power projection in defiance of Western norms—whether it’s by backing Bashar al-Assad in Syria, or using debt forgiveness in Africa, or spinning narratives about opposing neocolonialism throughout the Global South—that all comes from figures like Yevgeniy Primakov, Russia’s foreign and prime minister in the late 1990s, as well as intellectuals like Alexei Bogaturov.

As for Russia’s internal political system—which has morphed from an illiberal democracy into a hybrid authoritarian regime into a full-fledged totalitarian regime—that  was heavily shaped by political ideologues like Vladislav Surkov, who came up with the term sovereign democracy in the first place.

OR:  Are these views popular in Russia?

Ramani: Yes, which leads to a chicken-and-the-egg question. Are they popular because of the closed nature of the Russian system and because of the effectiveness of Russian state propaganda, or did these ideas actually develop in response to what Putin and his allies think the Russian public wants? My work suggests that it’s a mixture of both, but I lean toward the idea that Russia’s leaders are responding to public opinion. There’s large-scale popular support, for example, for the idea that Russia and Ukraine are one people. And that many of the former Soviet states are artificial and that economic or military coercion of them is therefore acceptable.

There’s also a greater tolerance within the Russian public for the equation of democracy with economic security and the preservation of law and order, rather than with freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or freedom of assembly. So the idea of sovereign democracy—under which the government maintains security and safety for everyone but doesn’t allow competitive politics—does align with what most Russian people see as the optimal form of government. And there’s a lot of support for Russia projecting its power abroad and trying to accrue respect by sitting in multilateral discussions or being seen as an important actor in crisis diplomacy. All that plays into popular notions of derzhavnost [Russian greatness].

OR: Are there any significant players in Russia today who still support the liberal, rules-based, pro-market international order?

Ramani: There are a few, like former deputy prime minister Anatoly Chubais—who was a leading supporter of free market reforms in the 1990s, and, until recently, was Putin’s top climate diplomat—but they’ve been marginalized. [Chubais quit a few weeks ago.]

OR: Are there any true democrats and liberals among the elite?

Ramani: They have gradually been expelled from the system. You’re talking either about figures like Alexei Navalny, who’s in prison, or dissidents living abroad, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Andrei Kozyrev, the former foreign minister.

OR: What are the true sources of Russian resentment toward the West? Because the real answer seems to go way beyond NATO expansion.

Ramani: Right. Realist international-relations scholars like John Mearsheimer say that it was NATO expansion in the early 1990s that made all of this inevitable. But I strongly disagree, first because Russia’s attitudes toward NATO have not been consistent over the past couple of decades. There were periods in the early 2000s when the NATO-Russia Council was taken quite seriously. Putin himself even attended the NATO summit in 2008 where Georgia and Ukraine were invited to join. And at various points, the Russians have said that they would be okay with Ukraine at least engaging with the organization.

So I view Putin’s obsessive focus on NATO expansion over the past decade or so as a political construct. The real issue for him is that the West, or liberalism, or foreign values, poses a threat. That sense of threat leads Putin to adopt a blanket anti-Americanism, which leads to an exaggerated fear of NATO being a transmission valve for those dreaded foreign liberal values. If you want to really understand what Putin is doing today, you should look inside Russia, not at what the Americans and Europeans are doing. Because the prospect of Ukraine or Georgia or any of their neighbors ever joining NATO or the EU was always exceedingly remote. Again, Putin is not fundamentally ideological; what he’s focused on is the retention of power at all costs. He knows that if he can build an identity around illiberalism, that will tap into Russian public opinion. That’s what’s driving a lot of his actions.

That and one other thing. Russian leaders also suffer from a Versailles syndrome. In the late 1990s, Russia was largely seen as a regional power—as a gas station with nukes, without much influence. The ruble crisis had happened. And Russians’ opinions were disregarded when it came to NATO expansion and NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia. Ever since then, Russia has being trying to recover from that sense of humiliation by opposing the West and trying to redo the rules of the international order. I think that’s the other thing that explains Putin’s dark rhetoric and his grievances.

OR: You’ve described Russia as a “virtual great power.” What does that mean?

Ramani: I’ve used that term in the context of Russia’s power projection in the Global South: the Middle East, Africa, Latin America, and to some extent Southeast Asia. And what I mean by that is that Russia has a broad range of partnerships around the world. Notice the number of countries that are refusing to sanction Russia, or abstaining on UN votes condemning it.

Russia has developed all those relationships by prioritizing breadth over depth. That approach allows it to host large meetings like the Sochi Summit, or to play symbolically important roles, like being a guarantor of the Astana peace process for Syria. But Russia doesn’t have the economic foundations or even the formal state-to-state ties to do much more. It relies a lot on state-owned companies or private military contractors like the Wagner Group. That’s why I call it a virtual great power: because it has the appearances of being like China or the European Union or the United States, but the foundations of its supposed influence are often a lot less substantial than they look.

OR: I want to come back to your notion of Putin as a tactical thinker, not a strategic one, and the idea that he’s highly instrumental in the issues he uses to justify his actions, and apply that to his weird rhetoric about Ukraine’s leaders being Nazis. Do you think that Putin actually believes it? And does his language resonate with ordinary Russians?

Ramani: Putin may not have a clearly defined ideology, but I think that he’s repeated certain things so often that he’s begun to internalize them. Like the notion that all popular protests, including the ones that brought this Ukrainian government to power, are somehow instigated by the CIA. The idea of people saying, “Enough is enough” and standing up to a corrupt authoritarian regime—that just doesn’t compute for him. Then there’s this notion that the West is somehow encircling Russia or trying to destroy it, which is an opinion that’s shared by some 70 percent of Russians, according to polls.

As for Ukraine, we know that he views it as an artificial country. He talked about partitioning Ukraine as early as 2008, when he told Poland’s then-Prime Minister Donald Tusk that Poland should take the west of Ukraine and Russia should take the east because Ukraine is not real.

With respect to this whole notion of Nazism and the Great Patriotic War, as the Russians call World War II, I think his language is instrumental. Some of his advisors really take the language about Nazis seriously. But Putin uses it to make people think that Russia’s under siege. Because when was the last time Russia was demonstrably under attack by Western forces? When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. So Putin uses language about Ukrainians being Nazis to evoke the memory of that struggle and how the Soviet Union prevailed against seemingly all odds and then became a superpower for 45 years. The idea is to galvanize the Russian public around a threat they understand, around stories that they’ve heard.

OR: Do you think the atrocities the Russians have committed in Ukraine are a deliberate Russian tactic, or the result of their fielding badly trained conscripts who are badly led by non-professional NCOs and who are following a bad strategy that’s led to many of their comrades getting chewed up by the Ukrainians? And if it’s the former—and Russia is committing war crimes as a matter of policy—what in the country’s ideology or culture would explain that?

Ramani: It’s an important question, because the Russians are always the first to fall back on what-aboutism and call out American and British and French atrocities—even though, at least since Vietnam, the United States hasn’t had an organized policy of targeting civilians. These things happen due to mistakes or rogue units doing their own thing. But it’s not a matter of state policy the way it is in Russia. Yet the Russians deflect that.

How do they do that? Due to pervasive control of the state media, the Russian public isn’t aware of the extent to which their forces are committing atrocities. When civilians were killed in Chechnya, for example, the state media called them terrorists. And according to the Russian media, there’s no such thing as a moderate Syrian rebel—they’re all Islamist extremists funded by the Gulf monarchies or the CIA (which again speaks to Putin’s belief that there’s no such thing as a genuine revolution). It’s always a foreign conspiracy aimed at undermining Russia.

The same thing applies to Ukraine. The Russian state media isn’t showing any condemnation of atrocities or acceptance that civilian lives are being lost. What they show instead is the Russians doing their best to protect civilians. They talk about how they’re giving out humanitarian aid. They create an image of Russia as a paternalistic protector of the Ukrainian people. And the Bucha killings are said to be either a fake operation staged by the NATO, or to be Ukrainians killing Russian collaborators or retreating Russian soldiers. Every hour, the story seems to change.

One of the only times in modern history that the Russians have taken accountability for something that they did was Katyn forest [a series of mass executions of some 22,000 Polish military officers and professionals in 1940]. And in that case, Moscow initially blamed the Nazis, and only admitted the truth decades later. So there’s a tendency in Russia to obfuscate, to blur the truth, and to not take responsibility for mass atrocities—which allows Russia to use them as a weapon of war with little backlash from society.

OR: But that doesn’t really explain why Russia’s leaders consider atrocities a legitimate tool of foreign policy. Do you have a theory about that?

Ramani: I do. One, they know they’re not going to be found out about domestically. Two, Russia has long suffered chronic logistical and planning difficulties in major combat operations, such as the First Chechen War, when a much inferior opposition held out for 16 months. That was a defining moment, because it was Russia’s first really big foreign adventure since the Soviet War in Afghanistan, which also ended in failure and was characterized by the indiscriminate loss of life.

After those losses, the Putin vowed, “Never again. From now on we’re going to achieve victory through any means possible. Even if it means we have to fight an attritional war, even if it means that we have to engage in barbaric tactics to win.” What Putin did during Second Chechen War [when he reduced Grozny to rubble] was a reaction to his belief that Gorbachev and Yeltsin had not been tough enough. And that’s a lesson he’s applied everywhere else: in Georgia, Syria, and now in Ukraine. And until recently, he’s enjoyed impunity. Russia isn’t a member of the International Criminal Court, it has nuclear weapons, and until recently, it was deemed too large and powerful to sanction in a crippling way. It didn’t see any downside to waging war this way, so it did it.

OR: Speaking of the ICC, do you think there would be any value if an international judicial body went ahead with war-crimes trials—even if they were held in absentia?

Ramani: It would have to be done in absentia, and it would be framed inside Russia as politically motivated. And if the Ukrainians compared it to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Russians would just see it as another attack on an Orthodox country that does not want to surrender to the dictates of Europe and the United States. They’d say, “Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic stood up to the West, so he was punished. And now we’re being punished for the same reason.”

That said, international trials might heighten Russia’s isolation. They would impact Russia’s ability to host large summits, to make trade and arms deals, and would further weaken Russia’s economy and its standing as a great power. So it could have some effect. And if the risk of war-crimes trials was coupled with a credible offer from the European Union to give asylum to Russian troops, which Poland already supports, that could lead to some defections. But even those would likely be small-scale.

OR: You’ve argued that the only thing that could force Putin to back down in Ukraine is an intra-elite schism. What are the odds are of that happening?

Ramani: I think it’s very remote at this point. It really depends on members of the security establishment realizing that the war is a failed misadventure and that they need to sue for peace and rebuild. Or it could happen if the rumors of Putin’s ill health are actually verified.

Both Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu and Gen. Valery Gerasimov, chief of the general staff, have been heavily involved in the planning and the orchestration of the Ukraine war. But both of them have a history of engagement with the West. Shoigu acted as a diplomat in Syria, for example, and performed quite well in that role. And Gerasimov was the point of contact for military deconfliction with the United States, preventing U.S. and Russian jets from colliding with each other. So they’re not necessarily averse to pragmatism and a degree of moderation. It’s conceivable that they could disagree with Putin behind the scenes. Or others could be become frustrated if Putin sues for peace with Zelensky and gives up on capturing Kyiv. So there could be a backlash from either the pragmatists or from people who are more extreme than Putin.

OR: Do you believe that Putin is now giving up on Kyiv, as many analysts argue, and is going to settle for Donbas and a land bridge to Crimea in lieu of his original maximalist objectives?

Ramani: Not in the long term. In the short term, it’s unrealistic to think that Russia is going to be able to take over Kyiv. And if it’s facing a choice between forced conscription and nationwide draft, which is something that the Russians have said they don’t want to do, and establishing a cooling-off period before striking again, I think that they might err on that side.

OR: You’ve just written a book on Russia’s foreign policy influence in Africa. How will the Ukraine war affect Russia’s influence campaigns further abroad?

Ramani: As Putin chews on his growing isolation, as well as things like de-dollarization and the end of unipolarity, he’ll be looking to consolidate Russia’s partnerships in the Global South. It’s worth noting that the dialogue between Putin and African leaders has been fairly consistent throughout this conflict. The same goes for Latin America and the Middle East. These partners are going to become even more important because they haven’t sanctioned Russia, which means they may become the last refuges for Russian trade. So I suspect that Russia will pay more attention to these regions going forward. But there are two questions. Number one, will Russia start pursuing revenue-positive missions in those areas? Number two, is Russia going to continue to go it alone in? Because even though Russia is building closer ties China as well as some regional powers like Turkey, when it goes to those third countries, Moscow sometimes finds itself in direct competition with Beijing or on Ankara. Going forward, is it going to try to partner with some of those powers because its own capabilities are waning, or is Russia going to try to project great power on its own and get stuck?

OR: Do you think that Putin thinks about the question of succession?

Ramani: Not very seriously. There are a lot of rumors as to who his successor could be, and it will depend on what faction emerges as dominant after his death, as well as the state of the Russian economy and Russia’s place in the world. If things continue to go badly, that could cut in one of two ways. If it intensifies Russia’s sense of grievance, it could lead to an extremist like Nikolai Patrushev, who led the FSB and now heads Russia’s Security Council. Or it could lead to a more moderate figure, which could even be somebody like a Shoigu.

I don’t know whether Putin has really thought about any of this. But what he definitely has thought about is the fact that he can’t afford to lose power while he’s alive, because if he does, he can expect to face retribution. Life has never been easy for Russian leaders who are overthrown, whether it was Khrushchev or Gorbachev. They end up being marginalized and discredited. Putin does not want to face that, so he’s going to cling to power until death—if he can.