Last Wednesday, the United States and NATO gave their written responses to Russian security demands, offering Moscow what US Secretary of State Antony Blinken described as a diplomatic off-ramp from a dangerous path toward war.
Putin chaired a national security meeting on Friday. But again, the Kremlin only gave an anodyne readout and released a brief excerpt from Putin discussing a new foreign policy document.
While Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov offered a somewhat crude assessment of the letter – saying the Russians had “no positive response” to the main sticking point, calls to halt NATO expansion east of the Kremlin – it was clear That the world will have to wait for a more enthusiastic response from Putin.
And Putin can wait. While Western leaders have worked to foam themselves at the Ukraine crisis, Putin is a man who faces little domestic political pressure. His political opposition has been sidelined or imprisoned, he has a powerful state media and he doesn’t have to think about any re-election campaign in the near future. He is not required to consult an uncontrolled parliament on foreign affairs.
This makes him a talking man. On Friday, French President Emmanuel Macron held a phone call with Putin on the Ukraine crisis, with Elysee saying that Putin told Macron “he was the only one with whom he could have such a deep discussion.”
The Kremlin summary of the call indicated Putin’s dissatisfaction with the responses of the US and NATO, saying that the letter “returns to halting NATO expansion, refusing to deploy strike weapon systems near Russian borders, as well as returning”. did not take into account such fundamental concerns of Russia as military power and infrastructure [NATO] bloc for the 1997 situation in Europe,” but the statement gave little indication of when and how Putin planned to formally respond.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan made a separate bid to contain Putin, inviting the Russian president to attend a summit and offering to mediate between Russia and Ukraine. The Kremlin said Putin has accepted the solution based on the “epidemiological situation”, and no date has been set – although Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told reporters on Thursday that he was informed by the Kremlin. It was said that this would happen after Putin returned from Beijing. The Olympic Games which are starting from 4th February.
So does Putin have all the cards? Will he spend his time at the Winter Olympics, where he will be the guest of Chinese President Xi Jinping? Is he an expert strategist, or a poor strategist? Divining Putin’s master plan may be a pastime for pundits, but the Russian president has long made his intentions clear.
No need to read Putin’s mind. His words speak for themselves.
Back in 2007, Putin placed his main complaints at the Munich Security Forum. his reasoning? The Warsaw Pact and the expansion of the NATO alliance to include former members of the Baltic states were an act of aggression directed at Russia.
“I think it is clear that the expansion of NATO has nothing to do with modernizing the alliance or ensuring security in Europe,” he said. “On the contrary, it represents a serious provocation that undermines the level of mutual trust. And we have a right to ask: Who is this extension against?
And then there was the establishment of American missile defense assets in Europe. In Putin’s view, missile defense – which Washington billed as a counter to rogue states like Iran and North Korea – was actually designed to undermine Russia’s nuclear deterrent.
More ominously, Putin said this: “I am sure that future historians will not describe our conference as the conference in which the Second Cold War was declared. But they could.”
That conflict – call it Cold War Lite, or Cold War 2.0 – has slowly gained momentum since then, through successive crises: Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the war in the Donbass; Kremlin’s intervention in the Syrian civil war in 2015; Russian interference in the 2016 US election; 2018 Salisbury poisoning in England; And so on.
Putin also made an argument for war in the summer when he published a 5,000-word historical essay arguing that Ukrainians and Russians were one nation. Independent Ukraine was, in his view, an “artificial division” of two peoples – and therefore not a real state.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said Putin and his government “will not rush to make a decision.” Now that the second Cold War is threatening to turn into a very heated war, the world must wait to see whether Putin’s next move signals a turn for the worse in global affairs.