Analytical and Opinion articles about Putin and Ukraine

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For many people, watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine has felt like a series of “He can’t be doing this” moments. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has launched the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War. It is, quite literally, mind-boggling.

That’s why I reached out to Fiona Hill, one of America’s most clear-eyed Russia experts, someone who has studied Putin for decades, worked in both Republican and Democratic administrations and has a reputation for truth-telling, earned when she testified during impeachment hearings for her former boss, President Donald Trump.

Maura Reynolds: You’ve been a Putin watcher for a long time, and you’ve written one of the best biographies of Putin. When you’ve been watching him over the past week, what have you been seeing that other people might be missing?

Fiona Hill: Putin is usually more cynical and calculated than he came across in his most recent speeches. There’s evident visceral emotion in things that he said in the past few weeks justifying the war in Ukraine. The pretext is completely flimsy and almost nonsensical for anybody who’s not in the echo chamber or the bubble of propaganda in Russia itself. I mean, demanding to the Ukrainian military that they essentially overthrow their own government or lay down their arms and surrender because they are being commanded by a bunch of drug-addled Nazi fascists? There’s just no sense to that. It beggars the imagination.

Putin doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to make a convincing case. We saw the same thing in the Russian response at the United Nations. The justification has essentially been “what-about-ism”: ‘You guys have been invading Iraq, Afghanistan. Don’t tell me that I can’t do the same thing in Ukraine.”

This visceral emotion is unhealthy and extraordinarily dangerous because there are few checks and balances around Putin.

Reynolds: So Putin is being driven by emotion right now, not by some kind of logical plan?

Hill: I think there’s been a logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way, at least to 2007 when he put the world, and certainly Europe, on notice that Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO. And then within a year in 2008 NATO gave an open door to Georgia and Ukraine. It absolutely goes back to that juncture.

Reynolds: Do you think Putin’s current goal is reconstituting the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire, or something different?

Hill:It’s reestablishing Russian dominance of what Russia sees as the Russian “Imperium.” I’m saying this very specifically because the lands of the Soviet Union didn’t cover all of the territories that were once part of the Russian Empire. So that should give us pause.

Putin has articulated an idea of there being a “Russky Mir” or a “Russian World.” The recent essay he published about Ukraine and Russia states the Ukrainian and Russian people are “one people,” a “yedinyi narod.” He’s saying Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same. This idea of a Russian World means re-gathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.

Putin’s view is that borders change, and so the borders of the old Russian imperium are still in play for Moscow to dominate now.

Reynolds: Dominance in what way?

Hill: It doesn’t mean that he’s going to annex all of them and make them part of the Russian Federation like they’ve done with Crimea. You can establish dominance by marginalizing regional countries, by making sure that their leaders are completely dependent on Moscow, either by Moscow practically appointing them through rigged elections or ensuring they are tethered to Russian economic and political and security networks. You can see this now across the former Soviet space.

We’ve seen pressure being put on Kazakhstan to reorient itself back toward Russia, instead of balancing between Russia and China, and the West. And just a couple of days before the invasion of Ukraine in a little-noticed act, Azerbaijan signed a bilateral military agreement with Russia. This is significant because Azerbaijan’s leader has been resisting this for decades. And we can also see that Russia has made itself the final arbiter of the future relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia has also been marginalized after being a thorn in Russia’s side for decades. And Belarus is now completely subjugated by Moscow.

But amid all this, Ukraine was the country that got away. And what Putin is saying now is that Ukraine doesn’t belong to Ukrainians. It belongs to him and the past. He is going to wipe Ukraine off the map, literally, because it doesn’t belong on his map of the “Russian world.” He’s basically told us that. He might leave behind some rump statelets.

Reynolds: How far into Ukraine do you think Putin is going to go?

Hill: At this juncture, if he can, he’s going to go all the way.

Reynolds:You say he has an adequate number of troops to move in, but does he have enough to occupy the whole country?

Hill:If there is serious resistance, he may not have sufficient force to take the country for a protracted period. It also may be that he doesn’t want to occupy the whole country, that he wants to break it up, maybe annex some parts of it, maybe leave some of it as rump statelets or a larger rump Ukraine somewhere, maybe around Lviv. I’m not saying that I know exactly what’s going on in his head. And he may even suggest other parts of Ukraine get absorbed by adjacent countries.

Reynolds: How much of what we’re seeing now is tied to Putin’s own electoral schedule?

Hill:I think it is. In 2020, Putin had the Russian Constitution amended so that he could stay on until 2036, another set of two six-year terms. He’s going to be 84 then. But in 2024, he has to re-legitimate himself by standing for election. The only real contender might have been Alexei Navalny, and they’ve put him in a penal colony.

It may not just be the presidential calendar, the electoral calendar. He’s going to be 70 in October. And 70 you know, in the larger scheme of things, is not that old. There are plenty of politicians out there that are way over 70.

Reynolds: But it’s old for Russians.

Hill: It’s old for Russians. And Putin’s not looking so great, he’s been rather puffy-faced. We know that he has complained about having back issues. Even if it’s not something worse than that, it could be that he’s taking high doses of steroids, or there may be something else. There seems to be an urgency for this that may be also driven by personal factors.

Reynolds:Speaking of Chechnya, I have been thinking that this is the largest ground military operation that Russia has fought since Chechnya. What did we learn about the Russian military then that’s relevant now?

Hill: It’s very important, that you bring this point up because people are saying Ukraine is the largest military operation in Europe since World War II. The first largest military action in Europe since World War II was actually in Chechnya, because Chechnya is part of Russia. This was a devastating conflict that dragged on for years, with two rounds of war after a brief truce, and tens of thousands of military and civilian casualties. The regional capital of Grozny was leveled. The casualties were predominantly ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. The Chechens fought back, and this became a military debacle on Russia’s own soil.

Reynolds: What have we learned about NATO in the last two months?

Hill:In many respects, not good things, initially. Although now we see a significant rallying of the political and diplomatic forces, serious consultations and a spur to action in response to bolster NATO’s military defenses.

But we also need to think about it this way. We have had a long-term policy failure going back to the end of the Cold War in terms of thinking about how to manage NATO’s relations with Russia to minimize risk. NATO is a like a massive insurer, a protector of national security for Europe and the United States. After the end of the Cold War, we still thought that we had the best insurance for the hazards we could face — flood, fire etc. — but for a discounted premium. We didn’t take adequate steps to address and reduce the various risks. We can now see that that we didn’t do our due diligence and fully consider all the possible contingencies, including how we would mitigate Russia’s negative response to successive expansions.

Reynolds: And then there’s the nuclear element. Many people have thought that we’d never see a large ground war in Europe or a direct confrontation between NATO and Russia, because it could quickly escalate into a nuclear conflict. How close are we getting to that?

Hill:Well, we’re right there. Basically, what President Putin has said quite explicitly in recent days is that if anybody interferes in Ukraine, they will be met with a response that they’ve “never had in [their] history.” And he has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. So he’s making it very clear that nuclear is on the table.

Putin tried to warn Trump about this, but I don’t think Trump figured out what he was saying.

Reynolds:Do you really think he’ll use a nuclear weapon?

Hill: The thing about Putin is, if he has an instrument, he wants to use it. Why have it if you can’t? He’s already used a nuclear weapon in some respects. Russian operatives poisoned Alexander Litvinenko with radioactive polonium and turned him into a human dirty bomb and polonium was spread all around London at every spot that poor man visited. He died a horrible death as a result.

The Russians have already used a weapons-grade nerve agent, Novichok. They’ve used it possibly several times, but for certain twice. Once in Salisbury, England, where it was rubbed all over the doorknob of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who actually didn’t die; but the nerve agent contaminated the city of Salisbury, and anybody else who came into contact with it got sickened. Novichok killed a British citizen, Dawn Sturgess, because the assassins stored it in a perfume bottle which was discarded into a charity donation box where it was found by Sturgess and her partner. There was enough nerve agent in that bottle to kill several thousand people. The second time was in Alexander Navalny’s underpants.

So if anybody thinks that Putin wouldn’t use something that he’s got that is unusual and cruel, think again. Every time you think, “No, he wouldn’t, would he?” Well, yes, he would. And he wants us to know that, of course.

Reynolds:So how do we deal with it? Are sanctions enough?

Hill: Well, we can’t just deal with it as the United States on our own. First of all, this has to be an international response.

Reynolds: Larger than NATO?

Hill: It has to be larger than NATO. Now I’m not saying that that means an international military response that’s larger than NATO, but the push back has to be international.

People don’t want to talk about Adolf Hitler and World War II, but I’m going to talk about it. Obviously the major element when you talk about World War II, which is overwhelming, is the Holocaust and the absolute decimation of the Jewish population of Europe, as well as the Roma-Sinti people.

But let’s focus here on the territorial expansionism of Germany, what Germany did under Hitler in that period:

Germany eventually engaged in a burst of massive territorial expansion and occupation. Eventually the Soviet Union fought back. Vladimir Putin’s own family suffered during the siege of Leningrad, and yet here is Vladimir Putin doing exactly the same thing.

Reynolds: So, similar to Hitler, he’s using a sense of massive historical grievance combined with a veneer of protecting Russians and a dismissal of the rights of minorities and other nations to have independent countries in order to fuel territorial ambitions?

Hill: Correct. And he’s blaming others, for why this has happened, and getting us to blame ourselves.

If people look back to the history of World War II, there were an awful lot of people around Europe who became Nazi German sympathizers before the invasion of Poland.

Reynolds: And you see this now.

Hill: You totally see it. So sadly, we are treading back through old historical patterns that we said that we would never permit to happen again. The other thing to think about in this larger historic context is how much the German business community helped facilitate the rise of Hitler. Right now, everyone who has been doing business in Russia or buying Russian gas and oil has contributed to Putin’s war chest.

Reynolds: I gather you think that sanctions leveled by the government are inadequate to address this much larger threat?

Hill: Absolutely. Sanctions are not going to be enough. You need to have a major international response, where governments decide on their own accord that they can’t do business with Russia for a period of time until this is resolved. We need a temporary suspension of business activity with Russia.

Reynolds: So ordinary companies…

Hill: Ordinary companies should make a decision. This is the epitome of “ESG” that companies are saying is their priority right now — upholding standards of good Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance.

Reynolds: And you do not think he will necessarily stop at Ukraine?

Hill: Of course he won’t. Ukraine has become the front line in a struggle, not just for which countries can or cannot be in NATO, or between democracies and autocracies, but in a struggle for maintaining a rules-based system in which the things that countries want are not taken by force. Every country in the world should be paying close attention to this.

Reynolds: The more we talk, the more we’re using World War II analogies. There are people who are saying we’re on the brink of a World War III.

Hill: We’re already in it. We have been for some time. We keep thinking of World War I, World War II as these huge great big set pieces, but World War II was a consequence of World War I. And we had an interwar period between them. And in a way, we had that again after the Cold War. Many of the things that we’re talking about here have their roots in the carving up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire at the end of World War I

But this is also a full-spectrum information war, and what happens in a Russian “all-of-society” war, you soften up the enemy. You get the Tucker Carlsons and Donald Trumps doing your job for you. The fact that Putin managed to persuade Trump that Ukraine belongs to Russia, and that Trump would be willing to give up Ukraine without any kind of fight, that’s a major success for Putin’s information war.

Reynolds: So just as the world didn’t see Hitler coming, we failed to see Putin coming?

Hill: We shouldn’t have. He’s been around for 22 years now, and he has been coming to this point since 2008.

Earlier this month, as the Russian military bore down on Ukraine, Foreign Affairs published an influential article asking what was at the time an imponderably terrible question: “What if Russia Wins?”

In the interim, Ukrainian resistance and the West’s response to Russian aggression have taken the prospect of a swift victory off the table. We’re now forced to confront what is in some ways an even more unnerving crisis than the one that would have followed the outright conquest of Ukraine: What if Russia loses?

As dawn broke on the fifth day of Russia’s campaign in Ukraine, Moscow had still not secured any of its primary strategic objectives. Western intelligence clearly underestimated the capacity of Ukrainian forces to resist the Russian onslaught, and the Kremlin seems to have neglected the tactical and logistical preparations needed to quickly occupy and pacify the country.

Moscow also underestimated how the West would respond to a naked landgrab on the European continent. In response to Russia’s aggression, the geopolitical status quo that prevailed for decades melted away over the course of a single weekend. A new order is rapidly supplanting the old one, and it is entirely disadvantageous for Russia. All of Europe and partner states in the Pacific region, including Japan, South Korea, Australia, Singapore, and others, have locked arms in a campaign of crippling economic warfare against Moscow. Moreover, from Russia’s strategic perspective, its actions have compelled Europe’s more accommodationist powers to engage in the conflict.

In one breathtakingly foolish maneuver, Putin has demonstrated the limits of Russian military capabilities and birthed into existence a new European political covenant of the sort that Western hawks have spent decades unsuccessfully advocating. The Kremlin’s actions have left Russia politically isolated, economically devastated, and militarily boxed in. As much as these conditions are of material benefit to the West, they are also extremely dangerous.

The tactical setbacks Moscow is experiencing in Ukraine and the collapse of Russia’s strategic fortunes in its regional environment will tempt Russian policymakers to escalate the conflict in order to deescalate it. Vladimir Putin’s decision to announce the activation of Russia’s strategic nuclear arsenal is a clear signal to the West that it must pare back its support for Ukraine. It’s quite possible that Moscow could label Western nations providing material support to Kyiv co-belligerents in an active war against Russia. It could violently interdict weapons shipments into Ukraine, or conduct cyberattacks on vital elements of Western civilian infrastructure. Already, NATO-aligned naval vessels have found themselves in Russia’s crosshairs. Whether by accident or as a shot across NATO’s bow, it’s not hard to imagine a Russian strike on a Western asset that cannot be ignored.

At the moment, there is precisely no appetite in the West for allowing Russia a face-saving way out of this crisis. Moscow misjudged its adversaries. The West misjudged Russia. And Ukraine couldn’t possibly have imagined the outpouring of support for its efforts to sustain the fight. Everyone’s assumptions about how this conflict would play out proved inaccurate. Those assumptions will need to be replaced with new assumptions. There will, therefore, be a lot more fighting to come until all parties have discovered and reestablished a durable equilibrium in the region. At the moment, Putin has a lot to prove, and the stakes as he views them are quite possibly existential—both for his regime and the greater Russia he has set out to reconstitute. As unappetizing as the prospect is, Western policymakers must consider the circumstances that Russia needs in order to confidently deescalate this situation.

This is an exquisitely delicate moment. Among Ukraine’s Western supporters, the temptation toward triumphalism will be difficult to reject, but cooler heads must prevail.

^ The former one was better informed. Nothing strange - the first article is an interview with a specialist on the topic.

There is probably no way for Russia to walk out of this crisis with saved face other than removing Putin from office and withdrawing their army. This way, they could blame it all on Putin's insanity and save their face as a nation.

This would require extreme courage somewhere high in Kremlin.

It is going to be difficult to find a better article than the first article. That said the second one is in keeping with my purposes in starting this thread.

I started this to find perspectives and parts of the situation beyond the regular group of WP politics posters and that of the mainstream media. As said in the article the going assumption has been that Russia will win and all the predictions have been based on this assumption. What caught my attention was the source, a prominent neoconservative American publication. Neocons advocate aggressive, meddling foreign policy especially against Russia. They have a reputation as warmongers. A neocon advocating caution made me take notice.

Digital technology and the war in Ukraine

Feb 28, 2022 | Brad Smith - President & Vice Chair

All of us who work at Microsoft are following closely the tragic, unlawful and unjustified invasion of Ukraine. This has become both a kinetic and digital war, with horrifying images from across Ukraine as well as less visible cyberattacks on computer networks and internet-based disinformation campaigns. We are fielding a growing number of inquiries about these aspects and our work, and therefore we are putting in one place a short summary about them in this blog. This includes four areas: protecting Ukraine from cyberattacks; protection from state-sponsored disinformation campaigns; support for humanitarian assistance; and the protection of our employees.

At the outset, it’s important to note that we are a company and not a government or a country. In times like this, it’s especially important for us to work in consultation with those in government and, in this instance, our efforts have involved constant and close coordination with the Ukrainian government, as well as with the European Union, European nations, the U.S. government, NATO and the United Nations.
Protection from cyberattacks

One of our principal and global responsibilities as a company is to help defend governments and countries from cyberattacks. Seldom has this role been more important than during the past week in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian government and many other organizations and individuals are our customers. ...

Protection from cyberattacks

One of our principal and global responsibilities as a company is to help defend governments and countries from cyberattacks. Seldom has this role been more important than during the past week in Ukraine, where the Ukrainian government and many other organizations and individuals are our customers.

Several hours before the launch of missiles or movement of tanks on February 24, Microsoft’s Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) detected a new round of offensive and destructive cyberattacks directed against Ukraine’s digital infrastructure. We immediately advised the Ukrainian government about the situation, including our identification of the use of a new malware package (which we denominated FoxBlade), and provided technical advice on steps to prevent the malware’s success. (Within three hours of this discovery, signatures to detect this new exploit had been written and added to our Defender anti-malware service, helping to defend against this new threat.) In recent days, we have provided ...

Protection from state-sponsored disinformation

We are also focused as a company in protecting against state-sponsored disinformation campaigns, which have long been commonplace in times of war. The past few days have seen kinetic warfare accompanied with a well-orchestrated battle ongoing in the information ecosystem where the ammunition is disinformation, undermining truth and sowing seeds of discord and distrust. This requires decisive efforts across the tech sector – both individually by companies and in partnership with others – as well as with governments, academia and civil society.

We are moving swiftly to take new steps to reduce the exposure of Russian state propaganda, as well to ensure our own platforms do not inadvertently fund these operations. In accordance with ...

Support for humanitarian aid

One of the tragic consequences of all wars is the impact on the civilian population, including individuals and families that shelter in place and displaced peoples who flee elsewhere for safety. Recent days in Ukraine have provided a visible reminder to the world of the human impact that we work globally to help address in conflict zones around the world. Our Microsoft Philanthropies and UN Affairs teams work closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and multiple UN agencies, and we have moved quickly to mobilize our resources to help the people in Ukraine.

We are committed to using our technology, skills, resources and voice to assist in humanitarian response efforts. Our initial and immediate focus has been ...


Protection of employees

Microsoft has employees located around the world, including in Ukraine, Russia and across eastern Europe. We also have many employees of both Ukrainian and Russian origin working in many other locations, including western Europe and the United States.

As we have witnessed in other recent conflicts, we see in our employees a common bond and humanitarian spirit that spans borders, longs for peace and cares about the welfare of each other regardless of the nation in which they were born or the passport they hold. Every hour provides a powerful reminder that the darkest of days can also bring out the best in people, whether through ambitious efforts to protect against broad cyberattacks or a small gesture of kindness by one person asking what they can do to help another.

Like other multinational companies, Microsoft is devoted to the protection of its employees. This is of obvious and vital importance for our employees in Ukraine itself, and it includes ongoing and extraordinary efforts by our teams to help our employees and families, including those who have needed to flee for their lives or safety. It also includes our employees in Russia itself, who did not start this war and should not risk discrimination inside or outside their nation either because of their employer’s actions to protect others or the decisions of a government they do not control. We also remain closely focused on support for our employees in the broader region, where we are monitoring the situation closely. As a company, we are always committed to the safe protection of our employees in every country, even when they live on opposite sides of a border marked by conflict.

As we look to the future, it’s apparent that digital technology will play a vital role in war and peace alike. Like so many others, we call for the restoration of peace, respect for Ukraine’s sovereignty and the protection of its people. We not only look toward but will work for a future where digital technology is used to protect countries and peoples, helping us all to bring out the best in each other.

I recommend this article to everyone interested.

There is probably no way for Russia to walk out of this crisis with saved face other than removing Putin from office and withdrawing their army.

Fixed it for you.

I believe the russian citizens and people need to be accepted again and that this new Russia-cancel culture needs to stop!!