How did the West misunderstand Vladimir Putin?

Fifteen years ago, a former KGB official raised his voice against US hegemony in global affairs and called the post-Cold War security order a threat to his country. In the years that followed, he occupied parts of Georgia, annexed Crimea, and sent troops to the Donbass region of Ukraine.

Mr. Putin has repeatedly signaled that he intended to expand Russia’s sphere of influence and cast the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s eastward expansion as a potential threat to Moscow’s security. He clarified that he sees Ukraine as part of Russia.

Yet until recently some Western leaders did not envision that Mr Putin would go through a full-scale invasion, miscalculating his determination to use force – on a scale that was similar to that of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Recalls the Soviet invasion – to restore Russian control over the nations. Circumference

After launching the offensive on Wednesday, Russian forces moved by air and land to attack Kiev on Friday. A Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said Russia was open to talks, but to “demilitarize” Ukraine remained the target of its war campaign.

Retired three-star Army General HR McMaster, who served as national security adviser to former US President Donald Trump, said, “It was the strategic narrow-mindedness and failure to consider the sentiment, ideology and aspiration that drove Putin and Silovicki around them.” takes away.” , referring to the small circle of fanatical advisers around the Russian President.

Mr Putin’s all-out attack on Ukraine has put the West on its back legs, where it is now struggling to find ways to deter Kremlin aggression and impress a Russian leader who has openly criticized the West. has expressed disdain for it and called it into doubt. Willingness to take decisive action.

The cost of the West’s failure to stop Russia is now being borne by Ukraine, which has existed for 14 years in a strategic refinement: marked for potential membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization but never accepted into the alliance and security. Guarantee provided.

For a long time, the invasion broke the already cold ties between the Western Alliance and Moscow.

When Mr. Putin’s army invaded Georgia in 2008, when it was finally promised NATO membership, and recognized two separate territories, the West temporarily stopped before returning to business as usual. Responded by suspending the conversation. The sanctions imposed after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 did not break.

In recent months, senior US officials have outlined Mr Putin’s attack plans. Mr Putin’s misinterpretation, however, cuts across many US administrations.

Former President George W Bush said he looked into Mr Putin’s eyes and found him to be trustworthy. Former President Barack Obama dismissed Mr Putin’s Russia as a “regional power”, threatening its neighbors with weakness. Former President Donald Trump saw this as a bigger problem than keeping America’s European allies and their reluctance to bear the burden higher for defence. On the Kremlin notice. President Biden sought to build a “stable, predictable” relationship with Mr Putin, with a summit meeting in June.

The attack highlights complacency in Europe, which has allowed its military to shrink and has done little to reduce its energy reliance on Russia, despite Moscow’s increasingly aggressive behavior, including cyberattacks on Western targets. Even though the West imposes sanctions on Russia, it is sending hundreds of millions of dollars a day to pay for Russian gas.

Western leaders took comfort in the limited nature of Mr Putin’s earlier military interventions. They were considered unacceptable, small-scale operations that sought to hide the extent of Russia’s role. Russian actions also included a 2016 hack on the Democratic National Committee and cyberattacks on its neighbors. The United States and its allies have neither used military and economic leverage to halt its invasion of Ukraine, nor offered any major diplomatic concessions such as halting NATO expansion.

“The West never underestimated Russia’s military capabilities. It saw the military modernization program set out since the Georgian War in 2008, and saw some of its fruits in a militarily successful intervention in Syria in 2015,” said Georgia during the Clinton administration and Former US Ambassador to Kazakhstan William Courtney said. “But the West may have underestimated the Kremlin’s willingness to use force in Europe, and against people who Putin claims are one with the Russians.”

Mr. Putin’s early association with the West turned into animosity in his two decades of power. The Russia they inherited had a broken bureaucracy and an economy the size of Belgium. He now oversees a government and military that has been hit by high energy prices for years.

When Mr. Putin became president in 1999, he cut a very different figure from his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. Mr. Yeltsin publicly had a gleeful, backslapping relationship with former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Putin was a closed book.

By the time Mr. Putin came to power – through the KGB and local politics in his native St. Petersburg – Russia was inside the Group of Eight and was being consulted by NATO despite being left out of the coalition.

In his early exchanges with Western leaders and new international ones, Mr Putin appeared respectful.

Mr. Bush attempted to build a personal relationship with him. In their first meeting at a summit in Slovenia in June 2001, Mr. Bush said: “I looked into the man’s eyes and found him very straightforward and trustworthy … I was able to understand his soul. He was such a man. who are fully committed to the best interests of their country and their country.”

After the September 11 attacks, Mr. Putin was the first foreign leader to call on Mr. Bush to offer condolences and support in the fight against terrorism.

He offered intelligence and military assistance to the US as he invaded Afghanistan at the head of some in Russia’s military establishment. Michael McFaul, who would later become an adviser to the Obama administration at the time, praised the relationship as “one more chance to truly end the Cold War.”

Thomas Graham, the senior National Security Council official for Russia’s affairs in the Bush administration, said the US-led invasion of Iraq was the first of several incidents Mr Putin would have objected if Russia exerted more influence.

“Putin didn’t believe in these things, but there was no point in opposing them because the West was going to do them anyway,” said Mr. Graham. “He told people that he was not going to publicly oppose him because it would just make him look bad.”

Mr. Putin’s suspicion of the West became more pronounced with the so-called Colored Revolutions that began in 2004, which toppled the leaders of former Soviet states, and later with the Arab Spring.

NATO meanwhile continued its expansion into the Eastern European countries that were in the Soviet-aligned Warsaw Pact in 1999, and again in 2004, when the alliance was extended to cover the three Baltic states that were part of the Soviet Union. The US and its allies saw the expansion as a way to encourage reform in newly emerging democracies. The new NATO members were looking to sit under the US security umbrella if Russia threatens to re-absorb them.

Mr. Putin’s anger at the expansion became evident in a speech given at the annual Munich Security Conference in 2007, where he surprised his audience as he raised his voice against a unipolar world dominated by the US, where he called for the expansion of NATO. Put your complaints against, leveled allegations. About broken promises from the West that NATO will not go east and shows expansion as a threat to Russia.

The enlargement “represents a serious provocation that lowers the level of mutual trust. And we have a right to ask: Who is this expansion against?” he said.

A year later the tension escalated. Mr Putin was invited to the NATO summit in Bucharest, where the leaders were discussing a route into the alliance for Georgia and Ukraine. While Mr. Bush wanted the countries to be accepted in short order, France and Germany opposed the move.

In the end, an agreement allowed Georgia and Ukraine to eventually be admitted, but did not set a date.

The result proved to be the worst for both worlds for both countries. Hard-liners in Moscow had identified them as potential future opponents – but those not yet protected by the coalition’s security guarantees. Jamie Shea, a senior NATO official at the time, said, “He had the warm breath of Russia in his throat, even though he had not received NATO membership.”

In Bucharest, in a meeting with Mr. Bush, Mr. Putin told him that Ukraine was not a real country, according to Western officials.

In August of that year, Mr. Putin invaded Georgia, passing a US-trained Georgian army. Western experts say that Russia learned from military mishaps in that incursion and later upgraded its equipment and shifted to a professional rather than an army.

When Mr. Obama went to Russia in 2009, he met Mr. Putin at his cottage. There, according to a memoir by the US president, Putin felt what he felt was an “animated and seemingly endless monologue”, including expanding NATO and invading Iraq.

After the Russian military annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, Obama dismissed the development as “the action of a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbors, not by strength but by weakness.” ” The following year, after Russian forces intervened in Syria on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad, US officials downplayed the importance, saying it could also lead to a Russian swamp.

Successive US presidents sought to preserve the possibility of cooperation in the midst of differences. Mr Shia, a former NATO official, said in retrospect that the West should have acted more strongly earlier.

Mr Shia said, “I think I should have imposed sanctions on Russia which we are putting in place today, either in 2008 or 2014, because then Putin would have got the message that the West would react strongly and that would have been stopped. “

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, days before Russia launched a war on his country, compared the West’s currency towards Russia to appeasement mistakes in the 20th century. He criticized Western countries for not imposing sanctions earlier. “What are you waiting for?” They said. “We don’t need sanctions once the bombing starts.”