But let’s face it. Putin could care less about the West’s threats, sitting as he does in the enviable position of being able to call the shots.
Putin’s endgame is USSR 2.0, coming almost 30 years to the day the Soviet Union collapsed. His next moves come at a delicate geopolitical moment, with Western fears of a Ukraine invasion, the colonization of Belarus, a Europe-wide energy crisis, German Chancellor Angela Merkel stepping down as EU chief negotiator and concerns over US President Joe Biden’s discombobulated foreign policy.
Without firing a shot, Putin has managed to send the West into a collective panic — or at least into a position where they feel the need to appease the aging autocrat.
With so much muscle, Putin could be gunning for a land bridge between Russia proper and Crimea — a move which could be designed in part to free-up water resources blocked by Ukraine in the North Crimean Canal, which once accounted for up to 85% of the peninsula’s water needs.
Most recently, Putin opened up another front with the West by establishing a military alliance with the man often dubbed “Europe’s last dictator,” Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko. Emboldened by the Kremlin’s backing, Lukashenko has acted with impunity by jailing opponents, forcing down a Ryanair jet with a political opponent onboard and sending migrants toward its border with EU neighbors.
Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and security services expert, told me that the country is already heavily sanctioned, and that targeted Russian companies have been effectively inoculated with lucrative contracts from the defense forces and intelligence entities.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Russia and China pledged this week to work jointly toward a closed trading network that would reduce dependence on the international financial system and limit transactions in US currency.
At home, Putin has been brandishing the state’s power through fear and cohesion — chiefly by banning civil society groups, jailing high profile opponents and threatening Russian nationals who work for foreign embassies.
What are the tools left in the West’s diplomatic toolbox? Depressingly few. But some options remain: banning Russians from travel, blocking those multimillion dollar property deals which have transformed London and Miami into playgrounds for wealthy Russians — even ordering the immediate expulsion of Russian nationals from Western countries. In other words, whatever it takes short of direct military conflict.
The appearance of a lack of resolve, whether in diplomacy, on the battlefield or on the chessboard, is never a winning strategy.