On Putin

Published on 3 March 2022

I had several dealings with Vladimir Putin as BBC Diplomatic Correspondent. From around 2006 I was part of a group of western Russia experts who attended an annual conference with Kremlin officials called the Valdai conference, always ending in dinner with Putin and a Q & A session lasting several hours.

He would field our questions without notes, just a cup of honeyed tea. He was a good performer, fluent, across his brief, with a lot at his fingertips. 

To begin with, he was quite open to being challenged – he liked combative questions so he could argue back. Though that is not the same as being willing to change his mind on anything. But you could see over the years, as events unfolded, how step-by-step his views cemented that NATO and the West, instead of being potential partners, were a threat.

Very important in this were the ‘coloured revolutions’, first in Georgia, then the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. The Arab Spring also fitted into this narrative for Putin, along with protests in Russia against his own government in 2011. Putin became convinced, I think, that popular protests are never grass roots – they are always incited by external puppet-masters, and in his view it is always the West behind it. 

He grew more aloof from around 2011. Dinners with foreign experts were replaced by press conferences broadcast live on Russian TV – with Putin standing on a podium to tell us what he thought. We’ve seen over the last two years of Covid he has withdrawn even more and become very isolated.

His identity also seems to have become increasingly wrapped up, in his mind, with Russia’s historical mission. In 2007, when we asked what he would do after his first two-term stint as President ended in 2008, Putin said: ‘I still want to be Father of the Nation’.

So this sense of his own personal destiny being wrapped up with Russia’s goes back a long way. But in recent years his thinking has become more religious and more entrenched in his reading of Russian history, I think; more connected with a historical idea of ‘Russianness’ and with Russian Orthodoxy, than the multi-ethnic identity of modern Russia.

As for how Putin operates, I think we have seen over the years that he often operates by testing, then pausing, evaluating the response, and only then taking the next step. It’s a kind of dance to allow him to argue that he gave his opponent every chance to back down.

I remember at the annual Valdai dinner with him in the autumn of 2008 just after Russia invaded Georgia. It was clear from what he said to us that he saw the Russian invasion as the consequence of Western leaders failing the test he had given them through his famous public warning at the Munich Security conference the year before, when he warned the world that any expansion of NATO eastwards would be seen by him as a threat.

In his mind he had gone out of his way to warn NATO not to overstep the mark; NATO had ignored him and continued to engage with Ukraine and Georgia about possible NATO membership in due course; and now he was taking the action he warned NATO would come.

He often does this, I believe. He makes a move or gives a warning, then sits back, as though to say ‘We’ve warned what we can do, or have given you a taste of it, and now it’s up to you, the West, to decide how to respond.’ And if the West ‘fails’ the test, as it often does in his eyes, then he will think,  ‘Well I warned you, I gave you a chance. Now you have to accept the consequences.’

That is what he thinks is happening now in Ukraine. He keeps saying this in his speeches: that he gave the West plenty of chances, plenty of warnings that they would regret it if they didn’t take Russia’s concerns seriously (and yield to his demands that Ukraine should return to Russia’s sphere of influence) so – he will argue – what is unfolding now is really the West’s fault, he had no choice.

When I heard that Russia had agreed to negotiations with Ukraine on the border it felt again as if Putin was testing Zelensky, the Ukrainian President. It is like a game of cat and mouse. He started an invasion, then paused it, waiting to see if the other side had got the message that it would be wiser to give in. And if not, well, we were all warned, the gloves will come off and we asked for it. It is chilling.  

Putin is also often prepared to wait. When the protests of 2011 erupted, spreading across major Russian cities and looking potentially devastating for Putin, he simply sat them out for several months until the momentum had subsided. Eventually, after he won the next presidential elections the following year and had secured his control over the country for the next six years, he made sure that the crackdowns were harsh.

So be prepared for Putin to wait, in anticipation that Western outrage over Ukraine will in time subside, and that the Ukrainians themselves will become too worn down and too desperate to resist, and then he’ll make his move. We may be cheered that he hasn’t managed to take Ukraine yet, but he may feel he still has forces in reserve, has time and options.

That is, of course, if events are unfolding in a way he can control. The big question this time is whether he has disastrously miscalculated, and whether the plan was to get this invasion over with quickly, or take it slow by laying siege to Ukrainian cities, it will backfire on him.

If there is too much unease back home in Russia, from too many Russian soldiers killed, or news filtering through of mass Ukrainian casualties, plus the continuing collapse of the Russian economy and deepening of Russia’s pariah status in the world, then it could be dangerous for him to string this out. But that may also make his decisions more unpredictable and more high-risk – more dangerous for all of us.

I think from now on the information war will be crucial, as well as what happens on the ground. We must be very wary of presuming that the media narrative of the conflict we are exposed to, which is very powerful, is the one that Putin even hears, let alone accepts. It certainly is not what Russian official media channels are saying, and many Russians will – initially at least – find it safer and easier to go along with the news they are told, unless they seek out alternative sources on the internet.

Putin may try and turn the story at home. At the moment Russians are being told that what is happening is a ‘limited special operations’ in Eastern Ukraine, and any claims of ‘war’ is fake news, exaggerated by the West and by Ukraine. But Putin may shift the story to one of NATO forcing Russia to react by its aggressive actions in Ukraine.

The EU breaking precedent to supply weapons is much needed by Ukraine, but may also be used by Putin to feed a new narrative to justify unleashing more destruction on Ukraine, claiming NATO and its Ukrainian proxies are the aggressors and Russia the victim. A back-to-front argument maybe, but it would be typical.

Bridget Kendall joined Peterhouse in 2016 as its first female Master. Prior to that, she spent over 30 years working for the BBC. She was BBC Moscow correspondent from 1989 to 1994, covering the final years of the Soviet Union and the first years of post-Soviet Russia. She was BBC Washington correspondent from 1994 to 1998 during the Clinton Presidency. From 1998 to 2016 she held the senior role of BBC Diplomatic correspondent.