Vladimir Putin bet on a short war because he did not think that Ukrainians would resist invasion. Now he is betting that Russians will tolerate a long war and that the West, amid noisy complaining, will let him finish it.
In the first phase, that involves using every weapon at the Kremlin’s disposal with indiscriminate savagery until Russian tanks can roll from Kharkiv to the Polish border.
It is possible to conceal the horror of that onslaught from most Russians much of the time, but not from all of them indefinitely. The story told by state-controlled media is a grotesque pastiche of reality, featuring a drug-addled Ukrainian neo-Nazi junta tricking civilians into the line of fire. Truth has been chased off air, designated false by law. Sharing it carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison.
But the propaganda seal is not tight enough to keep out all the blood being spilled in Ukraine. Russians who get their information online are less supportive of Putin. That amounts to a generational divide, although the president still has plenty of younger fans. My Russian friends report with sorrow that no surge in demand for regime change feels imminent. They go to the demonstrations, flee when riot police move in and talk about emigration once safely back home. They burn with the shame that Putin is branding on to their country.
Those who understand what the Kremlin has started also know what comes next. Ukraine can be seized but not pacified. That means prolonged occupation of a nation that will not surrender. It means a vicious counter-insurgency campaign in which demoralised Russian conscripts are harried by highly motivated Ukrainian volunteers. Putin’s claim yesterday that no general call-up is planned will be heard by many parents across Russia as the opposite: a warning that their teenage sons are being lined up for duty.
Putin did not plan that kind of war and has no idea how to end it. Independent analysts think it will be a disastrous quagmire for the Russian military. Credible reports out of Moscow say there are factions around the Kremlin that agree. The same sources say that Putin has insulated himself from dissent. He is high on his own ideological supply. In his nationalist hallucination, post-Soviet borders are wounds inflicted on the Slavic motherland by a malevolent West. The butchery of Ukraine is an act of redemptive vengeance.
Aggression of that kind is not swayed by economic arguments. Putin did not anticipate sanctions on the scale that have been imposed, or didn’t fully understand the prospect. He is a graduate of the Soviet school that treats economics as a zero-sum power game between states. The purpose of trade is to assert national strength and exploit foreign weakness. Natural resources are levers for geo-strategic influence, with profits diverted to fund the lifestyles of a kleptocratic elite.
An economic model predicated on rulers stealing from the public is incompatible with democracy. The unwritten contract in Russia, inherited from the Communist party and not updated much, is that state revenue and the trickle-down from corruption buy a level of stability. Propaganda and coercion do the rest. When the state gets poorer, the propaganda has to be more hysterical and the hand of coercion has to get heavier. That effect is well under way. Russian politics is degenerating from a thuggish authoritarian system that occasionally mimicked democratic process into something more martial, monolithic, totalitarian.
Putin expects repression to silence any dissatisfaction that might grow in an economic crisis brought on by sanctions. The cost will be presented as proof of western hostility and an opportunity to purge society of foreign junk. If Ikea wants to leave, good riddance, say Kremlin cheerleaders. Better to buy authentic Russian furniture.
That message has a receptive audience, especially among older Russians. It isn’t yet clear how it will go down with the digital generation. A brain drain is inevitable. Official fear of that is reflected in a decree waiving taxes for tech firms and exempting IT specialists from military service. The Russia that speaks a language of rational engagement with the West is heading into exile.
Having withstood the immediate blow from sanctions, Putin now expects economic pain to rebound on to the West. The war is stoking energy prices and fuelling inflation. Disruption of Ukrainian grain exports will affect food supplies. If Russian firms can’t service debts, western creditors take a hit.
The underlying bet is that democratic governments are hamstrung by their need to satisfy impatient consumers. The will to maintain sanctions will be depleted by the appetite for oil and gas. That is an extension of the Putinist view that liberalism is a decadent creed. It turns people flabby, feeds them drugs, debilitates national virility with gay pride and other violations of traditional morality. Such societies are expected to blink first in a war of economic attrition when pitted against Russia’s manliness and its historically vaunted capacity for stoicism and self-sacrifice.
Putin is hardly the first tyrant to think this way. The doctrine is as hackneyed as might be expected from a 69-year-old former KGB mediocrity who was carried to power on the shoulders of gangsters and then spent so long basking in myths about himself that he forgot they were cynical lies.
Dictators underestimate the strength of democracies because they see only weakness in leaders who submit themselves to the risk of regime change in free elections. They see robust oppositions and free press as vulnerabilities to the system, making it harder to control from the top. They do not realise that those are the qualities behind the resilience and adaptability that have made liberal democracy the most successful model for organising society in the history of human civilisation.
There is a reason why young, educated Russians with access to the truth are leaving. They know what happens in the end when a dictator stakes everything on a bet that the future belongs to militarised nationalist delusion. It is a bet Putin loses. He loses faster if he is wrong about the willingness of citizens in free democracies to make sacrifices and withstand some economic pain to help their neighbours and defend their way of life. I think he is wrong. I hope he is wrong.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist