After Crimea, Putin stirred up a proxy war in Ukraine’s south-eastern Donbas region that, four years on, is stalemated and has cost Russia dearly in terms of international credibility, economic sanctions and the need secretly to bankroll two pseudo-states there. But I was in Moscow in March 2014, when this undeclared war began, and what struck me then was that everyone I spoke to – government insiders, military types, think-tankers – was sure that this would be a short and limited intervention. Within six months, I was told, Ukraine would have got the message, have realised that it would be destabilised if it tried to break away from Moscow, and come back into the fold. The Russian troops, spooks and saboteurs in the Donbas would be home, and the West would have forgotten all about it. This was not too ridiculous an assumption, as it is what essentially happened after Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, but the point is that there seems to have been a consensus that it would be another easy win. It didn’t work out that way, but Putin had presumably believed what everyone told him. This was Putin the badly advised, not Putin the bold.
He is, of course, willing to take chances when he must, but he will do everything he can to minimise the risks. For example, Russia’s intervention in Syria in September 2015 risked conflict with the Americans or their proxy forces or else embarrassing losses. So serious thought went in to avoiding foreseeable dangers. A relatively small number of aircraft was deployed, every effort was made to avoid hitting Western forces on the ground, and when they needed to send in ground troops to stiffen Syria’s wavering army, instead of regular forces they sent ‘mercenaries’ working for the Wagner Group, a front organisation set up by military intelligence. Even though most of Wagner’s soldiers were Russian, it meant that the Kremlin could reassure ordinary Russians that their boys would not be coming home from the Middle East in body bags, and that, if any did die at the hands of the Americans (as happened in 2018), Moscow could pretend it had nothing to do with them.
When it is time for tough decisions, Putin tends to fudge and hedge. In March 2016, he announced that Russian troops would be withdrawn from Syria, and many within the military command – many of whom had served as junior officers in the Soviet Union’s bitter war in Afghanistan in 1979–88 – were jubilant. ‘We’ve done something the West never managed,’ one told me. ‘Intervened in the Middle East without getting bogged down.’ He shouldn’t have tempted fate, because Putin then seems to have changed his mind, disconcerted by different opinions about the likely outcome, turning the supposed withdrawal into a simple rotation of forces. Two and a half years later, Russia is still in Syria, and while things are currently going Damascus’s way, the longer you stay in a war, the more chance there is of painful surprises.
One such struck in November 2016, when a Russian Su-24M attack aircraft cut briefly into Turkish airspace during a bombing mission in northern Syria. In what appears to have been a deliberate ambush, Turkish F-16 fighters popped up from low altitude and shot it down; having ejected, one of the crew was rescued but the other was shot and killed by rebels while still in the air. Putin was visibly furious, calling it a ‘stab in the back’, placing sanctions on Turkey and threatening more serious retaliation. But Turkey’s President Erdoğan snarled back and it was eventually the Russians who backed down, after the Turks had provided a face-saving statement of regret – though not an apology.
Putin often shows a similar unwillingness to face direct challenges in domestic politics. For example, when unexpectedly strong protests greeted unpopular pension reforms in 2018, Putin – who had in 2005 publicly promised that the pension age would not be raised on his watch – at first tried to ignore them, and then rather weakly allowed his spokesman to say that it was a matter for the government in which ‘the president is not taking part’. This excuse would not wash, and he eventually offered a watered-down version of the reforms that, like so many compromises, pleased no one.
