They lost interest. It is striking how far Putin’s foreign ambitions are psychological, about the ideas of power and forms of respect. He certainly seems to believe that the West is trying to keep Russia under its thumb. In 2011 he said, ‘Sometimes it seems to me that America does not need allies, it needs vassals.’ The trouble is that, when viewed from the Kremlin’s narrow windows, and especially when filtered through the conspiracy-theory-laden analyses often peddled by those in Putin’s circle, the world can seem very hostile. Uprisings in the Middle East and other post-Soviet states? Clearly not protests against corrupt, inefficient and unresponsive rulers, but CIA plots to bring down Moscow-friendly regimes. The rise of a new generation of young, middle-class Russians unimpressed with what Putin can offer and willing to protest? Obviously another example of creeping and weaponised Westernisation. After all, as far as Putin is concerned, the decline of Russia’s distinctive cultural values and civilisational uniqueness also affects its place in the world, because ‘without history, without culture, without mentality, nothing works. Those are the things that glue everything together. All those things create a country, ensure its cohesion and determine its position in the international arena.’
This sense of military, political, economic and cultural vulnerability is widely held, and there are those who see it in even starker terms than Putin. When, for example, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of his Security Council, one of his closest allies and the nearest thing he has to a national security adviser, openly affirms that he knows for a fact that the USA ‘would very much like Russia not to exist at all as a country’, what can one expect? The claims of my colonel friend that the West is just waiting for the chance to invade Russia are not just the whinnies of an old warhorse, they reflect a genuine concern that, however much we may think it perverse and paranoid, continues to inform Moscow’s military planning and policy discussions.
Losing an empire, and with it great-power status, is hard – one could say that Britain and France haven’t really come to terms with this, fifty-plus years on. Putin doesn’t simply want to turn the clock back to past glory days, whether tsarist or Soviet. Instead, he is kicking against Russia’s new place in the world. After all, this is a country with a shrinking population and an economy the size of Spain’s, that is largely dependent on oil and gas. Despite having innovative and creative programmers and designers, it is having trouble adapting to the information age. It has nuclear weapons and a large army, but it can barely afford either, with a third of the federal budget being spent on security, broadly defined. It also has strikingly little ‘soft power’ – there are wannabe strongmen who dream of being like Putin, but not many countries want to be like Russia. On any objective basis, Russia is not a great power. But Putin is determined that Russia matters, matters more than this recitation of moderate strengths and less moderate weaknesses would suggest.
At the same time, Putin – who is known to read a lot of history – has a view of what being a great power in the world means that is more rooted in the nineteenth century than the twenty-first: he thinks each great power has a sphere of influence, buffer states and jewels in the crown. For example, when Putin punished Ukraine and Georgia for their temerity in trying to get closer to the West, it was less for practical reasons and more because he could not bear to see them being ‘lost’. Secondly, he sees a great power as having a voice in all global issues of consequence, not because it necessarily has interests at stake but rather because this symbolises its status. Finally, he thinks a great power should get to waive the rules and should not have to consider itself bound by international laws and norms.
