Channeling Putin: Seeking Reemergence as Superpower

Vladimir Putin wants Ukraine because its conquest is indispensable to Russia’s reemergence as a superpower.

Putin’s strategic goal is clear: to overturn the unipolar world of Pax Americana and restore the bipolar world of the good old Cold War days. His desire for a Manichean system of international dualism overlooks a crucial factor: China.

There is no return to the Moscow-Washington global division. Instead, the Kremlin must recon with tri-polarism, including Bejing.

At the moment, the Russian Federation maintains a tactical alliance with the People’s Republic of China. But this is an alliance of convenience.

Arguably, these two powers are sworn adversaries. There is no great Russia with great China and vice versa. They have coalesced for now because of their hatred of, and competition against, the United States.

Left to their own devices, the Chinese and Russians would most likely be at each other’s throats, sooner rather than later. It is not only about a general competition, but also a regional one.

Both giants share a long border. The Russian side to the north is largely depopulated but rich in mineral resources and space. The Chinese periphery to the south is the opposite in all ways. Bejing covets what Moscow commands.

The conflict between the two is a given sometime in the future. For now, however, both would like to kick the U.S. out of the game. That is a strategic goal for both Russia and China.

Meanwhile, Russia must undertake appropriate steps to accomplish its global re-ascendancy. That includes conquering Ukraine.

So far Putin has shown that he lost his patience and chucked sophisticated rules of statecraft with their intricacies of public diplomacy, active measures, and incrementalism to the side. As far as Ukraine, he has come to rely on crude, naked power buttressed with primitive propaganda.

Apparently, he got tired of waiting. He must have realized the fact of his own mortality.

The Russian leader is 69. If not now, then when? If not him, then who will make Russia great again?

Putin’s end game in Ukraine remains obscure. He listed “neutralization” and “de-Nazification” as his desires. But he provided no specifics. Defeating Ukraine remains his strategic goal, but what’s next?

“Neutralization” means no independent foreign policy for Ukraine; “de-Nazification” means that Ukrainian nationalism would be forbidden.

Both strategic goals can reveal themselves in a variety of ways. First, there can be an outright, or piecemeal, incorporation of Ukraine into Russia.

Second, we have the “people’s republic” model. Lenin and Stalin started with Mongolia and Spain and after the Second World War they foisted this paradigm on all their satellites. It was for this reason that Putin considered restoring Ukraine’s former President, Viktor Yanukovych, as his puppet.

However, whereas this particular discredited politician, who escaped to Russia in the wake of the Maidan Revolution, remains an option, anyone would really do. In fact, it would be advisable to find a stooge with a clean slate for the sake of public peace.

Third, the Kremlin can partition the conquered land. And here we have several options as for their organization.

For starters, there is Finlandization. From 1940, under Stalin, Helsinki was left free to practice its democracy and free market capitalism, while it had no independent foreign policy. Moscow called the shots.

Next, the “people’s republic” option can either be unitary or not. Namely, Putin must be considering a partition of Ukraine into several units of various degree of dependency on Russia.

For example, for years now Russian politicians have dangled western Ukraine as a present to the Poles. The area with the city of Lwów (now Lviv) used to be a part of the Polish Republic seized by Stalin, which, by the way, the U.S. and the U.K. approved in the Yalta Agreement of 1945.

Putin himself offered Lwów to a previous (liberal) Polish government about 10 years ago. The offer was rejected.

Nonetheless, western Ukraine could either be incorporated into Poland or it could be set up as a rump Ukrainian state: either Finlandized or sovereign and permitted to join NATO, a Ukrainian Piedmont, a staging point for future Ukrainian revanchism against the Muscovites.

All in all, Putin has made his move and now he is stuck. The longer the Ukrainians resist, the weaker the Russian president’s prestige becomes and a greater likelihood of the war in Ukraine turning into a Chechen-like quagmire.

Force is always the ultima ration, in particular in an empire (re)builing effort.