By ANDREW KATELL (Associated Press)
Vladimir Putin says he discovered from his boyhood brawls in his native St. Petersburg: “If you want to win a fight, you have to carry it through to the end, as if it were the most decisive battle of your life.”
That lesson, cited in the newest biography of the Russian president, appears to be guiding him as his invasion of Ukraine suffers setbacks and stalemates. The Kremlin strongman, who began the struggle on Feb. 24, 2022, and will finish it in a minute, seems to be decided to prevail, ruthlessly and in any respect prices.
Stoking his countrymen this month on the eightieth anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad that rotated Moscow’s fortunes in World War II, he mentioned: “The willingness to go beyond for the sake of the Motherland and the truth, to do the impossible, has always been and remains in the blood, in the character of our multiethnic people.”
But up to now, Putin’s gamble in invading his smaller and weaker neighbor appears to have backfired spectacularly and created the largest menace to his greater than two-decade-long rule.
HISTORY AND MODERN ROADBLOCKS
He started the “special military operation” within the title of Ukraine’s demilitarization and “denazification,” searching for to guard ethnic Russians, forestall Kyiv’s NATO membership and to maintain it in Russia’s “sphere of influence.” While he claims Ukraine and the West provoked the invasion, they are saying simply the other — that it was an unlawful and brazen act of aggression in opposition to a rustic with a democratically elected authorities and a Jewish president whose relations had been killed within the Holocaust.
Putin laid the muse for the invasion with a 5,000-word essay in 2021, during which he questioned Ukraine’s legitimacy as a nation. That was solely the newest chapter in a protracted obsession with the nation and a willpower to right what he believes was a historic mistake of letting it slip from Moscow’s orbit. He reached again three centuries, to Peter the Great, to assist his quest to reconquer rightful Russian territory.
But rectifying historical past quickly hit trendy roadblocks.
“Literally everything that he set out to do has gone disastrously wrong,” mentioned British journalist Philip Short, who revealed his biography, “Putin,” final yr.
Despite armed interventions in Chechnya, Syria and Georgia, Putin overestimated his army and underestimated Ukrainian resistance and Western assist. Russian media attempt to enhance his authority with photos of a bare-chested Putin using a horse, taking pictures at a army firing vary and dressing down authorities officers on TV, however the struggle has uncovered his shortcomings and the weak spot of his army, intelligence providers and a few financial sectors.
Ukrainian forces have liberated greater than half the territory Russia seized. The struggle has killed tens of 1000’s on either side, brought on widespread destruction, and induced not solely Ukraine however Sweden and Finland to hunt NATO membership. It has elevated the safety menace to Russia and scuttled a long time of Russia’s integration with the West, bringing worldwide isolation.
Increasingly, Putin appears to be improvising in a battle for much longer and harder than he anticipated. For instance, he’s threatened to make use of nuclear weapons, then backed off. The technique is acquainted from his lifelong ardour, judo: “You must be flexible. Sometimes you can give way to others if that is the way leading to victory,” Putin recounted in flattering 2015-17 interviews with American director Oliver Stone.
In Putin’s view, an aggressive West desires to crush Russia. His narrative, together with more and more repressive measures to stifle home dissent, has galvanized patriotic assist amongst lots of his countrymen. But it runs up in opposition to an inefficient, top-down energy construction inherited from the Soviet Union, in opposition to the interconnected world’s porous borders, and in opposition to the sacrifices Russians are struggling firsthand.
AN ERRATIC BUT DETERMINED LEADER
In interviews with The Associated Press, Short, different analysts and a former Kremlin insider describe the 70-year-old Putin as an erratic, weakened chief, inflexible and outdated in his pondering, who overreached and is in denial in regards to the difficulties.
They say he appears involved about waning, although nonetheless sturdy, home public opinion — albeit from unreliable polls. Mostly remoted as a consequence of COVID-19 considerations and his private safety, Putin speaks with a small set of advisers, however they seem reluctant to supply trustworthy assessments.
Observers see a protracted, grinding struggle that Putin is decided to win, along with his means out laborious to foretell.
“It’s not Putin that rules Russia. It’s circumstances which rule Putin,” mentioned Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Short believes the Kremlin chief “has painted himself into a corner. … He will be looking for ways to push ahead, but I don’t think he’s found them.” Giving up is unlikely, Short mentioned, recalling that “his character was always to double down and fight harder.”
Fiona Hill, who served up to now three U.S. administrations and is a senior fellow on the Brookings Institution, believes Putin wished to win rapidly in Ukraine, set up a brand new president in Kyiv and power it to affix Belarus in a Slavic union with Russia. A successor would run Russia, she mentioned, with Putin elevating himself to guide the bigger alliance.
But now, in keeping with Stanovaya, “It feels like there is not any hopes that the conflict can be solved any other way than militarily. And this is scary.”
WHAT’S AHEAD
Analysts see a number of situations for Putin, relying on battlefield developments. The situations, not mutually unique, vary from what may very well be his greatest nightmare — a coup or uprisings like these he noticed as a KGB agent in East Germany in 1989, within the USSR in 1991 or Ukraine in 2004 and 2014 — to successful reelection subsequent yr. That would lengthen what’s already the longest rule of any Kremlin chief since Josef Stalin.
Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst and professor at Free University in Riga, Latvia, mentioned Putin might revise his targets in Ukraine, declaring he achieved them by establishing a land hall from Russia to Crimea and taking up the Donetsk and Luhansk areas within the east. Then he might announce, “We punished them. We showed them who is the boss in the house. We have defeated all NATO countries,” Oreshkin added.
But Kyiv has proven no willingness to cede territory, and for Putin to promote this as a victory, Orsehkin believes “he needs to convince himself that he defeated Ukraine. And he understands better than anyone that, in fact, he lost.”
As army setbacks mount, Russians are withdrawing morally and psychologically, and pondering, “Yes, we see that something is wrong in the war, but we do not want to know,” in keeping with Oreshkin.
Such tuning out, together with financial hardships, might blow again on Putin, he mentioned, maybe this spring, as Russians ask, “You promised victory, so where is it?”
Former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov mentioned the Russian president doesn’t admit errors or defeats, and “desperately needs a victory just to prove the point that he’s a strongman.”
Even some within the army are turning essential, he mentioned.
“When he becomes hated by more than half — and we’re driving in this direction — the chances for a coup, elite coup, military coup, will increase,” Gallyamov mentioned, giving a timeline of 2024 “plus a couple of years.”
Stanovaya and Short imagine no rebellion is imminent.
“Even if people are suffering, and they can be discontented and angry, there is no way to make it political,” Stanovaya mentioned.
Gallyamov sees a means out for Putin if he can achieve recognition of “new territories, plus a declaration of NATO that it stops expansion, for example, or Ukrainian introduction into their constitution of their neutral status … or their declaration that Russian will be the second official language.”
DEATH OR SUCCESSION
Another risk is Putin dying in workplace, however CIA Director William Burns is skeptical.
“There are lots of rumors about President Putin’s health, and as far as we can tell, he’s entirely too healthy,” Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, instructed the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado in July.
Short mentioned Putin has established such tight safety controls and rival energy facilities that he’s extra prone to endure “a totally unanticipated heart attack than to be overthrown by the people around him.”
He and Hill imagine Putin will finally search for a successor. Gallyamov lists “technocrats” akin to Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin as potentialities. Hill mentioned Dmitry Medvedev, whom Putin tapped as president from 2008 to 2012, “seems to be auditioning for that role again.”
For the second, Putin stays very a lot in cost. In his licensed 2000 biography, he famous: “There are always a lot of mistakes made in war. … You have to take a pragmatic attitude. And you have to keep thinking of victory.”
When a reporter requested him in December if his “special military operation” in Ukraine has been taking too lengthy, Putin replied with a Russian idiom about massive targets being achieved incrementally: “The hen pecks grain by grain.”
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Follow AP’s protection of the struggle in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Source: www.bostonherald.com”