Why Putin Decided To Invade Ukraine And Why It Led To War Crimes

Writing in this column on January 24^th as the Russian forces built up, I was one of the very few commentators who got it right. The passing days seem to confirm those prognostications ever more. “Images of charred buildings, destroyed neighborhoods and weeping relatives…will virulate.” And much else. So it behooves me to have a crack at the question haunting us all – why did Putin do it? The attentive reader will recall that I compared his situation to Macbeth’s, an evaluation now truer with each passing day: “I am in blood/ Step’t so far that, should I wade no more/ Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” The column came out on the day of invasion; I’d written it the day before when almost none of my peers believed it would happen.

Droves of highly-respected experts got it wrong. Embarrassingly so. Many had even grown so confident as to mock the few of us who foresaw disaster. They laughed at the US government for acting hysterical with all those shrill warnings of the Russian buildup. Putin merely intended to make a massive gesture and at most take a little slice of Ukraine and declare a victory, they crowed. On the face of it, one can’t blame them. His conduct seems inexplicable. The answer to why he did invade involves three interlocking parts: psychology, strategy, and timing. As in, what was he thinking, what was the plan and why now.

After so many horrors, most people still can’t quite fathom why the Russian President made such an irretrievable blunder having placed his geostrategic moves so deftly for so long that the world overlooked all his crimes. Grozny, Georgia, chemical weapons in Syria, Crimea, Donbas – you know the list. It happens that I covered most of his conflicts on the ground or nearby, unlike most opiners. Amid all the zillion social media posts and media comments, very few have hinted at what (in my view) explains the true blockchain of momentum behind the decision to go ahead. But two points up front. First, Putin’s vaunted tactical genius was always really Moscow’s accrued campaign blueprints from Czarist times to the present: they’ve studied every mountain and river and littoral in the near abroad for centuries. Second, don’t believe the nonsense rumors that the debacle in Ukraine happened because his military brass kept vital knowledge from him. Read on and you’ll see what I mean.

As some have pointed out, Putin was always a KGB guy, not a military general or logistics expert or politician, but rather a psy-ops and special ops connoisseur. (I use the old term KGB to cover all Moscow’s spy agencies, FSB, GRU, SPD, etc.) That is to say, a natural believer in disinformation, propaganda, dirty tricks, manipulation, confusion, and control. Remember his closest advisor for many years was Vladislav Surkov, a theater aficionado who handled the mind-control of near-abroad separatist zones in Georgia and Ukraine as well as the shadow-puppetry of media and politics at home. Every act of force by Putin, from the KGB’s 1999 apartment bombings justifying the obliteration of Grozny to the poisoners of Salisbury to Crimea’s ‘Little Green Men’ and beyond, was deeply steeped in a loud swirl of false narratives and illusionist sorcery.

It came to the point where such outrages barely pretended to hide behind the flimsiest gestures at fakery. So the poisoners in the UK claimed they were tourists visiting Salisbury to see its famous cathedral – transparently absurd, provocatively see-through. The message was, yes it’s nonsense, we know it and you know it, and we both know you can and will do nothing about it. He came to trust in the infinite efficacy of a kind of sadomasochistic mesmerism with the West as the primary masochist being relentlessly disgraced in public for its passivity. This kind of thing happened routinely, often at the highest level. Remember when Putin invited huge dogs into the personal meeting with Angela Merkel, knowing full well about her canine phobia since childhood. She did nothing about it. Nothing really happened after the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Or the murder of numerous Russian dissidents in Britain, or even the one in America’s capital. Yes that’s right. The one the Feds covered up.

During the 2008 invasion of Georgia, Putin allowed French President Sarkozy to act as a go-between to Georgia’s then leader, Mikheil Saakashvili. Putin had thoroughly shaken up and overawed Sarkozy by physically manhandling him in a previous one-on-one meeting. So unnerved was Sarkozy that he could barely stand and many in the media thought they’d been overdoing the booze in private. During the war, Sarkozy went to Moscow then came to Tbilisi where he immediately took Saakashvili aside and told him “Putin is totally crazy; he will destroy your country. You have to do everything he says.” This, I heard directly from Saakashvili. In the event, the Georgian president refused, saying he’d be lynched by his own populace if he acceded, in effect, to being ruled by Moscow. Putin made do with taking slices of Georgia. But he wanted to establish the principle of the ‘mad dog’ threat in order to subdue opponents and even interlocutors. He was capable of anything, any atrocity, even nukes, if a gesture didn’t suffice to get his way. Hence the massacres in Ukraine.

Over the years, Putin came to believe that he had his adversaries paralyzed, at home and abroad, by a serpentine KGB hypnosis composed only in part of mere violence – and in equal parts by threats of escalation and intimidation and sheer cruelty laced with bribery, blackmail, endless phony diplomacy and treachery. That kind of poisonous concoction was his master-key to all locks, his main weapon. The Kremlin, as psychological terror, has always utilized brutalization and torture in wars, in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Syria, and their Serb allies in Bosnia.

Hence the massacres in Ukraine. The point is, at no stage in his foreign wars did he depend entirely or chiefly on the performance of his armed forces on the ground. He saw each violent conflict as an alternate kind of performance, a drama of psychological domination, publicly flaunted, rubbed in your face, so you would get used to your own shame and grow inert. It’s an old KGB technique used on individuals such as idealists and dissidents to crush their will.

Sometimes, often in fact, it involves implicitly presenting a mirror to the West’s hypocrisy or powerlessness. Sadism and humiliation are built-in, simultaneously sending a message to his own people enfolding multiple lessons. Look, Russia/Putin is so powerful that nobody can stop it – not even using chemical weapons in Syria or poisons in Britain. If they do nothing about that, nobody from abroad will help you should you protest in Russia. You don’t want help from those moral midgets anyway. The West has no ideological purity for you to aspire after. And you, as a Russian, should take pride in such impunity in the world. Hence the brutality in Ukraine.

Each time Putin violated all universal norms of civilized conduct and the West reacted supinely – to the shooting-down of the MH17 civilian airliner over Ukraine for example – he had forced the free world to live knowingly with its own helplessness and the Ukrainians to feel isolated and friendless. That is, Ukrainians and everyone else in their position, from the Baltics to the Stans. Putin has always felt that his struggle begins with the West and it’s a personal one, conscious and intentional on both sides, mano a mano. Anything done that couldn’t have been done by the US or Nato during the Soviets, he experienced as a personal humiliation, an act of deliberate hubris against him. He resented the Obama administration for constantly picking women to negotiate with him, for example.

His supreme satisfaction came in taking revenge by enacting on the West what it had forced on Russia and allies during late Soviet or post-Soviet weakness. To quote the renowned Russia expert Ivan Krastev, “Did you know that in parts of his declaration on the annexation of Crimea, Putin took parts almost verbatim from the Kosovo declaration of independence, which was supported by the West. Or that the attack on Kyiv began with the destruction of the television tower just as Nato attacked the television tower in Belgrade in 1997?” This kind of holding a mirror up to you while he uses your methods to abase you… he has done to the Western alliance from early on in small and large ways. We just didn’t pay attention. The use of huge ‘private’ companies to conduct foreign policy by proxy, such as Gazprom imitating say Aramco. The use of private wealth to undermine state power abroad (oligarchs). Exploiting free speech principles in foreign countries to attack their faith in free speech. Stoking chaos in democratic processes abroad to justify the ‘stability’ of his sham version.

The mirroring protocol adds up to a kind of public trolling while also implicitly asserting precedent and justification for Moscow’s misconduct. You did this to us, and to others, so it’s clearly permitted, he is saying. How do you like it? Now that it’s done to you, do you think it’s so moral and legitimate? He builds into each such gesture a teasing cruelty combined with a corrupt moral equivalency intended to destroy the West’s confidence in its own ideals. “One should not criticize a mirror,” he once said, “if you have a crooked face”. He always wanted the West to look in the mirror when seeing his actions, in order to be silenced and self-disgusted – and rendered inactive. And in the preamble to the invasion of Ukraine, he thought he had done that.

Remember the way the US took weeks and weeks to amass its forces publicly before the invasion of Iraq? Putin’s Ukraine demarche was in so many ways a deliberate mirroring of that second Iraq campaign. He regarded America’s conduct as the height of arrogant display, only possible because post-Soviet Russia was so weak. A kind of slow, incremental cruelty and public humiliation of Iraq, but implicitly also of Moscow. And for what? For the eradication of WMD’s. That didn’t exist. Ultimately for ‘regime change’. So, in the same way, he posited absurd ultimatums to Ukraine. De-Nazification. And ultimately regime change. He took weeks to assemble his forces, just as the US had done in Iraq and before that in Serbia, an even bigger insult to Moscow as it involved fellow Slavs. Putin hadn’t forgotten any of it, and neither should the Western alliance.

So, that answers the psychological aspect of the question, the ‘what was he thinking’ part. It was a massive, slowly escalating, looming, tortuous, psychodrama of threat and intimidation, a huge distorted mirror pointed at the Western alliance. But it was, in a way, sufficient unto itself. He demonstrated that the balance of power had changed and Moscow could, this time around, act just as portentously and unilaterally. Still, there’s no reason to suppose that, from the very beginning, he always intended to launch the full-scale invasion – with all the potentially cataclysmic consequences. After all, he had never depended so wholly on his land forces before, not even in Chechnya, a much smaller territory largely subdued by aerial bombing.

So at that poised moment, when he could have gone either way, having made his point why did he choose to go ahead? Here, we should recall Putin’s KGB mentality, the faith in the efficacy of psychological grooming. He genuinely believed that, after years of bullying and humiliation and mirroring and getting his own way, he had successfully rendered both Ukraine and the Western alliance quiescent. Putin thought he had mesmerized his adversaries. He thought they knew he could keep escalating all the way to nukes so they’d avoid confrontation. Plus, they’d grown dependent on Russian raw materials. And indeed the West’s reaction right up to the pivotal moment proved him right. The revealed divided responses, the mockery of Washington from France and Germany, the incredulity even among Ukrainians, confirmed him in his perspective. The fruit was ready for the taking. So why not? And why not show the West also that Moscow could, on a whim, decide to pull the trigger? Just as the US did in Iraq.

There is an answer. Why not? Because the army was unprepared on many levels. Because, as I predicted in my January column, it could become a multi-level cataclysm and potentially destroy Putin’s own power. Yes, but one should keep in mind that Putin did not think the military dimension was important, or even crucial. He trusted less in his generals than in KGB processes. So the planning part of the question is easily answered. He didn’t know if he would go ahead. And he didn’t think to nail down the campaign details because, even if he invaded, the reaction would be lethargic. He thought he had pre-paralyzed the enemy so he could topple Kyivan leaders within days – or threaten and commit a few atrocities, brandish nukes, create paralysis and negotiate. Moreover, he has always believed in keeping the military busy, the one pillar of power that could challenge him at home which is why, under Stalin, almost every regiment had a communist party overseer.

What about the timing? Here I differ from most of my colleagues in the significance of the debacle in Afghanistan. Many believe that it showed US weakness and possibly prompted Putin to act against Ukraine. The truth is, Putin could have acted at any point in the last decade or more with the same conviction. Against Obama. During Trump. He invaded Georgia during Bush’s presidency with no consequences. During that entire time Washington was bogged down in the war on terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and elsewhere, giving Russia a free hand. Putin had even begun to arm the Taliban (another mirroring act). Everything changed when the US ended that two-decade-long strategic campaign by withdrawing, however chaotically, from Afghanistan. Suddenly, the distraction was gone and the US no longer depended on Putin’s collaboration or abeyance. He had to act fast before Nato could regroup, reunify and refocus.

There were other, longer term, considerations of course. Germany was moving forward with fossil-free energy as was much of Europe. Putin’s core strategic power derived from dominating the world’s oil and gas supply, not least to the EU, and that leverage would fade in five to ten years, probably affecting domestic stability too. The clock was ticking in other ways. His age and health. China’s rise, indeed Asia’s rise as a whole, threatened Russia’s eastern flank and economic control over the Stans. And much else. Even so, he might have sated himself with display over destruction at the eleventh hour. But he believed he had stupefied, immobilized, the resistance and the West. So why not invade? He hadn’t and he lost.