(Dobbs) What's Putin Thinking? Many Are Guessing, No One Knows
But at the best, he will rule over rubble.
What is Vladimir Putin thinking? Why is Vladimir Putin doing what he’s doing? Is he a cunning calculator, a blundering miscalculator, a cold-blooded psychopath, or so cut off after two years of Covid that he’s removed from reality?
You don’t have to look hard to find analyses that purport to answer those questions and they’re important questions to ask, because the man has barbarically bombarded civilian populations, attacked targets dangerously close to the borders of NATO, threatened the nuclear option, and persisted with a crusade— despite losses to his own nation’s economy and army— that has no foreseeable finish. It’s what Dan Rather today called “Putin’s unknowable endgame.”
But here’s the thing: everyone who addresses these questions, no matter how much expertise they bring to the table, everyone is only guessing. The only accurate answer to the questions about Putin’s mindset is, maybe all of the above, some of the above, or none of the above. Prognostications in a situation like this, and about a man like this, are a fool’s folly. There is greater wisdom in laying out the possibilities than in guessing at which one is true. We are dealing with too many wild cards, especially when trying to discern not only Putin’s frame of mind but the outcome of the war itself: there are Ukraine's ability to sustain such hellish losses, escalations or constraints in American and allied responses, China's conflicting considerations, and the possible effect of internal deprivation and discontent in Russia, as well as what’s going on in the napoleonic mind of Putin himself.
When then-Vice President Biden met Putin ten years ago, he looked him in the eye and told him, "I don't think you have a soul."
One thing we do know is, Putin hasn’t turned back, and based on his pitiless playbook in the past— in Chechnya, in Syria, in Crimea— it looks like he won’t. Through our lens, the deaths of so many and the destruction of so much might make us rethink our objectives. Just in the now-besieged southern Ukrainian city of Mariupol alone— where Russia has now demanded a Ukrainian surrender— between bombs that destroyed a maternity hospital, then a theater being used as a shelter (with “children” clearly painted in Russian outside for Putin’s pilots to see), and yesterday an art school where hundreds more sought safe haven, if we were in Putin’s shoes we might alter our battle plan and curtail civilian casualties.
Putin only presses on.
The Pope, calling the invasion “a senseless massacre” during his Sunday address, described two injured children he’d just visited who’d been transported for treatment to Rome: “One of them is missing an arm, another one wounded in the head, innocent children.”
But Putin only presses on.
Another thing we know is, Countess Alexandra Tolstoy, the former partner of an oligarch known as “Putin’s banker,” has known Putin personally and was right when she told CNN that he has a “complete lack of sort of normal human morals.” From what we’ve seen so far, that’s not guesswork, it’s a fact.
How else to explain a man who claims to be stopping the “Nazification” of Ukraine but, in mimicking Nazi viciousness, is the personification of Naziism in the 21st Century? Not only because he is ruthlessly ravaging a neighbor nation and committing murderous war crimes against its people, but because he even speaks of his own countrymen— those opposed to the war he is waging— as “scum and traitors,” threatening to “spit them out like a fly.” Such words could have been lifted from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. If Putin’s call for “self-purification” doesn’t send chills up your spine, nothing will.
A third thing we know— at least from the intelligence arms of several allied nations including ours— is that Putin pretty clearly miscalculated his campaign. It appears that he didn’t expect the resistance of Ukraine’s defiant population or its outnumbered army, that he didn’t expect the punishing economic response of most of the world’s sovereign nations and many of its global corporations, and that he didn’t expect the weaknesses of his own military, weaknesses summarized by commentator Helen Cox Richardson: “Lots of bells and whistles but outdated food, a lack of support vehicles, conscripted and confused soldiers, and compromised communications.”
What it comes down to is, Putin evidently thought invading Ukraine would be a one-sided offensive. As it turns out, it’s more of a brutal brawl. As General David Petraeus put it last week, “It is going to be an endurance contest between the Russians' willingness to destroy cities and the Ukrainians' ability to survive such destruction.”
Look at what Russia’s ruler has reaped for Russia so far: a devastated economy, a damaged military, unprecedented protests at home, pariah status overseas, a united response by global leaders of all ideological stripes, and as General Petraeus satirically said, “Instead of ‘Making Russia Great Again,’ what Putin has done is to ‘Make NATO Great Again’.” All is counterproductive to what Putin, by his own words, set out to achieve. Even if ultimately he savagely strong-arms Ukraine into submission, he will have unified against him the very people he aspires to govern, and given birth to an insurgency that will make an occupation hellish.
And he will rule over rubble.
This is the greater Russia that Vladimir Putin seeks? As one correspondent wrote from the war zone, “Even if Putin does think he can get his old empire back, how do these days of savagery make that happen?” Whether he’s a cunning calculator, a blundering miscalculator, a cold-blooded psychopath, or removed from reality, they don’t.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Is he a functioning psychopath? Was hitler? Neither cared a jot about human carnage. People are merely obstacles in his forward path.