-Analysis-
TURIN — Certain alarm bells are ringing in the Kremlin. Once boosted by wartime spending, Russia’s economic growth is now slipping and looks close to bottoming out. Consumer prices keep climbing. Fears of inflation are holding interest rates above 20%, a level that clearly chokes off investment.
Yet this is not Vladimir Putin’s most serious problem.
Despite the tempting contracts on offer, the army is now struggling to recruit. The payouts do little to erase what everyone knows even in the most deprived regions of the Russian Federation, including that seemingly inexhaustible reservoir of manpower, that more men die in combat than come home. And then there is the front, which does not move.
The maps tell the story. In just a few months it will be four years since Russian troops entered Ukraine, but the gap between today’s front line and the areas Putin had already carved out before 2022 with the help of pro Russian proxies is still that same thin red trace, no thicker than a pencil line on the map.
Static war
Kremlin forces are not retreating, but they are not advancing either. Russia has not managed a deep push into Ukrainian territory, despite its edge in weapons and manpower. Its ships have had to shelter in home ports for fear they cannot fend off Ukrainian naval drones.
Instead of the swift offensive he imagined, Vladimir Putin has had to settle for a static war with no end in sight, as the mine belts between the two sides have grown both vast and impassable. The Russian army has been reduced to bombarding civilian neighborhoods in an effort to divide Ukrainians and break their morale. For him, however, the worst lies elsewhere.
We are looking at a Russian leader who had the extraordinary luck of counting the president of the United States as a political ally and, better still, of bending him to his will. Donald Trump had every reason to remember that Vladimir Putin actively supported and eased his first run to the White House, and he admires Putin’s rejection of democracy at home. On top of that, the two men shared a desire to weaken the European Union, which the former saw as an economic rival to be crushed and the latter as an obstacle to rebuilding a tsarist style empire.
They were aligned to such a degree that, cutting out the Europeans and of course the Ukrainians, Donald proposed to his friend Vladimir a peace plan that would have let him save face, rebuild his forces, and return to the assault on Ukraine and its neighbors within five or six years.
It was an unexpected gift with no strings attached
It was an unexpected gift with no strings attached, hugely advantageous because the American president hoped it would pull Russia away from China and thus shift his balance of power with Beijing.
Too many mistakes
Anyone other than Vladimir Putin would have taken that deal, but he chose to refuse because he is convinced the West is a decadent weakling that can be dispatched with one bite. The Europeans, he told himself, do not matter. As for Trump, he thought he could twist him around with an hour of sweet talk. Instead, Trump now feels humiliated by the Kremlin, and the Europeans have kept strengthening and internationalizing their support for Ukraine.
Putin will likely try to patch things up with his friend in the White House. It is not out of the question that he might succeed one day. Yet the Europeans, too slowly but steadily, are asserting themselves as a political and military force, and for now the United States has slapped sanctions on Russia’s two largest oil companies.
The ruble and the Moscow exchange have taken a hit, and for a man whose economy and army are already flagging, this is one mistake too many, avoidable and costly, harmful to Russia and to himself. His fall is not exactly imminent, but if I were in his place, I would be worried.