Writing in The Hill, Aron quoted Russian opposition columnist Sergei Medvedev as recently observing: “Putin has forged a nation of war that has battened the hatches and looks at the world through a lookout slit of a tank. “Putin concluded that if he was going to be a president for life, he had to be a wartime president for life.” “Putin’s response to this economic stagnation and the political peril it represented was to shift the basis of his regime’s legitimacy from economic progress, which made Putin so popular in his first two terms in office, to Putin as the defender of a motherland besieged by the West,” Aron told me. That would require real rule of law, secure property rights and the unleashing of talented people, who ask too many questions like, “Vlad, where did your money come from?” No Silicon Valleys for him - except cyberhackers. Russians associated Putin’s first two terms - 2000 to 2008 - “with unprecedented wealth accumulation in modern Russian history,” said Aron.īut beginning in 2011 and stretching all the way to 2019, Russia’s economy stagnated because of lower energy prices and, most of all, institutional impediments to growth: Putin’s preference to tap Russia’s natural resources, not its human resources. The way Aron put it, when Putin came to power at the end of 1999, he was able to benefit from the restructuring of the Russian economy by Boris Yeltsin from significant foreign investment from rising oil, gas and mineral prices and from improved political stability. I learned this from Leon Aron, a Russia expert at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life, who is now writing a book about the future of Putin’s Russia. To understand how invading Ukraine again could serve that end, one has to go back to the shift Putin made in the last decade: He went from selling himself to the Russian people as the leader who would enable them to overcome their poverty of wealth in the post-Cold War era to the leader who would enable them to overcome their poverty of dignity in the post-Cold War era. If Putin decides indeed to take another bite out of Ukraine, it will be first and foremost because Putin thinks it will strengthen his chance of staying in power in Russia, which for him is always paramount. Which brings us back to the central question: Vlad, why are you in that tree?įor starters, don’t look for the answer in Ukraine. China is watching - and Taiwan is sweating - everything we do in reaction to Vlad right now. He has completely contrived this crisis, so there should be no give on our part. Short of that, I’d be very clear: If he wants to come down from the tree in which he’s lodged himself, he’s going to have to jump or build his own ladder. ![]() If I were a cynic, I’d just tell him to go ahead and take Kyiv because it would become his Kabul, his Afghanistan - but the human costs would be intolerable. Read more: What Putin really wants from the Ukraine crisis Somewhere in the balance of all of those identities and neuroses is the answer to what Putin intends to do with Ukraine. And he’s a politician trying to make sure he wins (or rigs) Russia’s 2024 election - and becomes president for life - because when you’ve siphoned off as many rubles as Putin has, you can never be sure that your successor won’t lock you up and take them all. ![]() He’s America’s ex-boyfriend-from-hell, who refuses to let us ignore him and date other countries, like China - because he always measures his status in the world in relation to us. He’s a retired KGB agent who simply refuses to come in from the cold and still sees the CIA under every rock and behind every opponent. Let’s see: Putin is a modern-day Peter the Great out to restore the glory of Mother Russia. Why is Vladimir Putin threatening to take another bite out of Ukraine, after devouring Crimea in 2014? That is not an easy question to answer because Putin is a one-man psychodrama, with a giant inferiority complex toward America that leaves him always stalking the world with a chip on his shoulder so big it’s amazing he can fit through any door.
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