We Need to Talk About Putin: Why the West Gets Him Wrong

Chapter 1: Putin Is a Judoka, Not a Chess Player

There’s snow, there are bears, there’s vodka – and then there’s chess, one of the irritatingly durable clichés for Russia and Russians. Consider the classic Russian film villains: there’s the brutish thug, of course, but there’s also the unemotional chess player, ten moves ahead of his rival. American politicians seem especially to love this metaphor. During Barack Obama’s presidency, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers complained that ‘Putin is playing chess and I think we are playing marbles.’ More recently, Hillary Clinton asserted that Donald Trump ‘is playing checkers and Putin is playing three-dimensional chess’.

Of course, this is not actually about chess. The prevailing tendency of seeing Putin as a Machiavellian grandmastermind plays to a Western fear that he is behind everything that goes wrong, and that each setback is part of some complex Russian strategy. Donald Trump’s election, Brexit, the rise of populism in Europe, the migrant crisis and even football hooliganism have all at some point been blamed on Moscow; as a result, we run the risk of giving him too much power. As will be discussed in a later chapter, much of Putin’s international adventurism is bluff, a little like the way an animal when confronted by a predator may puff itself up or bristle its fur to look as big and formidable as possible. We have a tendency to not look past the bristle.

There is no denying that Moscow is often trying to manipulate elections and widen social division in the West, although – as we will see later – rarely with anything like the kind of impact that we sometimes fear. But the main point is that this all implies some fiendishly subtle long-term plan to take the world step by step where Putin, the archetypal Bond villain, only without a lair in an extinct volcano, wants it to go.

In fact, there is no evidence that Putin plays chess, and in any case, it is not his sort of game. Chess is a contest of inflexible rules, transparency and of an intellectual competition where the options are strictly constrained. Everyone starts with the same pieces, and everyone knows what a pawn can do and when it’s their turn to move. Putin doesn’t want to limit his options like that. He does know judo, however. A black belt, he has been honing his skills since starting as a teenager, and his approach to statecraft seems to reflect this. A judoka may well have prepared for a rival’s usual moves and worked out countermoves in advance, but much of the art is in using the opponent’s strength against him to seize the moment when it appears. In this respect, in geopolitics as in judo, Putin is an opportunist. He has a sense of what constitutes a win, but no predetermined path towards it. He relies on quickly seizing any advantage he sees, rather than on a careful strategy.

As a result, both he and the Russian state he has shaped are often unpredictable, sometimes even acting in contradictory ways, especially regarding foreign policy. Many apparent short-term ‘successes’ prove to be long-term liabilities, having been neither thought through beforehand or followed through afterwards. But this helps explain why we are so often unable to predict Putin’s moves in advance – he himself doesn’t know what he’ll do next. Instead, he circles us in the ring. He is aware that overall and when united, the West is so much more powerful than Russia, with twenty times its gross domestic product, six times the population, and more than three times as many troops. But he’s waiting for us to make a mistake and give him what looks like a good chance to strike.

Quite what Putin’s goals are I will explore more in Chapter 3. For the moment, it is enough to say that he wants power and stability at home, and recognition abroad. To this end, he needs the country to be quiet, any opposition to be silenced or muzzled, but also for the Russian economy to work, at least after a fashion. That means business with the West, which provides irreplaceable markets for its oil and gas, as well as the investment and technology its modernisation will require. But we are also the main obstacle preventing him from achieving his geopolitical goals, refusing to give Russia the status he demands, and interfering when he tries to assert dominance over neighbours such as Georgia and Ukraine. He realises that the West, when united, is more powerful than Russia on almost any terms, but at the same time believes that our weakness is that we are a constellation of often-fractious democracies. He wants us to be divided, demoralised and distracted to the point where either we are willing to do a deal with him or, more likely, not in a fit state to challenge him.

But Putin doesn’t have any master plan of how to get there. Instead he has, whether by chance or design, stumbled on a way to capitalise on the ambitions and imaginations of all kinds of individuals, institutions and organisations, from journalists and diplomats to spies and businesspeople. On the face of it, Russia looks like any other country. It has all the familiar institutions: a cabinet and ministries, a two-chamber parliament, a constitution, courts and consulates. In practice, things are very different. Putin’s predecessor and patron Boris Yeltsin shelled his own parliament to resolve a constitutional crisis and impose hyper-presidential rule; Putin has gone even further, creating a system that, at least at the top, functions in a similar way to a royal court.

Agencies overlap and compete, formal chains of command are less important than personal relationships, favourites rise and fall, and status and power are defined more by service to the needs of the Kremlin than by any formal institutional or social identity. In this ‘adhocracy’, your job title or even whether you are officially an employee of the state doesn’t necessarily matter. After all, ever since the billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky was almost overnight reduced from the richest man in Russia to a convict (see Chapter 8), even the so-called oligarchs, the richest men in Russia, know that their wealth is subject to the power of the state. Instead, the adhocrats are defined by their loyalty, their relationship with the boss and what they can do for him.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, for example, was a legend in diplomatic circles, but has largely been sidelined since 2014, and was not even invited to attend the meeting at which the decision to annex Crimea was made. He still sits in his office in the foreign ministry, but even his loyal underlings recognise that he is no longer in Putin’s unofficial ‘kitchen cabinet’ and can only put the best spin on policies originated by others. Showing admirable skills in double-talk, one diplomat put it to me that Lavrov had ‘adopted an essentially reactive model, dealing with such situations as arise in a complex and often unpredictable context’. I interpret that as an admission that Lavrov is no longer riding the elephant in the parade, let alone helping to direct it, but is rather following behind it, shovel in hand, cleaning up the mess it leaves.

On the other hand, consider the case of Vladislav Surkov, who was once the choreographer of Russia’s pantomime politics and is now, in effect, Putin’s proconsul in south-eastern Ukraine. In the 2000s, he essentially set up the current Russian political system, with the avowedly pro-Putin United Russia and the two notional opposition parties, the Communists and the Liberal Democrats (who are actually illiberal ultranationalists), which stage protests and grumble in the media but back the government in important votes. The idea was to create a theatrical-but-fake democracy that would keep the people satisfied, without in any way challenging the Kremlin’s grip on power. In 2008, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev succeeded Putin as president, as the constitution barred him from standing for a third consecutive four-year term. Putin became Medvedev’s prime minister, although it was clear that this was largely a formality, and he was still in charge. When Putin’s predictable return to the presidency was met with mass protests, precisely the kind of thing Surkov’s ‘managed democracy’ was supposed to prevent, his star fell. However, in 2014, after Moscow encouraged a proxy civil war in the Donbas region of south-eastern Ukraine, in order to prevent the country from aligning itself with the West, Surkov appears to have been made Putin’s man there, even though it is officially run by the unrecognised Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. The point is that Surkov has, at various times, been the architect of Russia’s constitutional politics and virtual governor of an occupied region, but this was never reflected in his official job title. Until 2011, he was Putin’s deputy chief of staff, then Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Modernisation until 2013, and since then simply a presidential aide. Yet in many ways, because of the trust Putin places in him, Surkov has more muscle in determining foreign policy than the foreign minister himself.

A dependence on personal relationships and unspoken understandings – ponyatiye in Russian and, interestingly enough, a term also much used in the criminal underworld – has become central to Putin’s style of rule. He (and increasingly often his senior people, too) rarely gives direct instructions, but defines broad objectives and hints as to what he might like to happen. As journalist Mikhail Zygar has put it, ‘They would never say, “Please steal those billions of dollars” or “Please murder those journalists.” They [instead] say, “Do what you have to do. You know your obligations; please fulfil them.”’ So the adhocrats become policy entrepreneurs, seeking and seizing opportunities to develop and implement ideas they think will please the boss, based on hints and guesses. If you get it right you are rewarded, but if you fail the Kremlin can disown you. In many ways, the vital skill in Putin’s Russia has become predicting today what the boss will want tomorrow.

Putin the judoka-tsar lords it over an army of smaller judokas, all of whom are looking for a chance to get on. Consider, for example, RT, the infamous foreign-language television network. A strange mix of good journalism, opinionated commentary and toxic propaganda, it is one of the tools Moscow uses to get its message out in the world or, more often, simply to undermine others’. Speaking to people who work there, it is clear that, while the Kremlin sometimes steps in and dictates the official line – typically in the wake of some major embarrassment, such as when Ukrainian rebels shot down a Malaysian Airlines passenger jet with a Russian-supplied missile in 2014 – more often it is a much less direct process. Every Friday, Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s inflexible-but-affable press spokesman, sits down with the editors of the main government media platforms to lay out the lines and talking points he would like to see covered in the week ahead. He doesn’t dictate copy or set headlines – he expects them to use their initiative, and they expect the same of their people. When a major event occurs, producers and presenters at RT may well have different ideas how best to frame it, to meet what they think what their bosses – and their bosses’ boss – want. These different ideas may then be played out in various programmes, with everyone hoping that theirs gets noticed and approved. Effort, imagination, enthusiasm and ambition are all harnessed, without the tedious need to micromanage everything from the top.

For example, did Russia back Brexit? RT, its news agency counterpart Sputnik and a number of Russian commentators and diplomats certainly did, in addition to the infamous ‘troll farms’, where smart young Russians working to a script and on the clock, pump out social media posts pretending to be Rob from Ramsgate or Sarah from Swindon. Why on earth would they not? After all, it seems to tick so many boxes on the Kremlin wish list, dividing both Europe and Britain itself and creating a colossal distraction for years to come. But setting aside the question of how far they really affected the result of the referendum, it is hard to say whether or not Putin or the Kremlin specifically backed the campaign. They certainly did nothing to stop it, but a consequence of this bottom-up system is that it can often be hard to know where a specific initiative originated.

Does that really matter, though? Yes, it does. If we think of Putin as the subtle mastermind of the geopolitical chessboard, we will all too often give him more credit than he deserves. If people think you are powerful, you are powerful. Consider a deeply frustrating conversation I had with a Czech journalist in 2017, right before the Russians held a major military exercise called Zapad, or ‘West’, in conjunction with their ally, Belarus. At the time, a massive wave of hysteria was washing over the Western analytic community, partly generated by its own paranoia (and also by some alarmist pundits looking for some media attention), but encouraged by the Russians’ own strategic trolling. It was said that it would involve more than a hundred thousand troops (in reality, the number was not even half that), that it was really a plan to occupy Belarus and replace its president with a Russian puppet (nope), that it was a pretext to invade the Baltic states (again, no), and that it was a dry run for an all-out invasion of northern Europe (really, no). At the height of the frenzy, this Czech journalist asked with a straight face what price Putin would accept for a peace treaty. First of all, I pointed out, as far as I knew we were not officially at war. Secondly, what kind of a price was he talking about? He started a list: recognising Russia’s annexation of Crimea, forcing neutrality on Ukraine, and withdrawing NATO forces from front-line states.

I confess that I was astonished: Putin would not believe his luck if any of those massive and unjustifiable concessions were offered, especially on the basis of a long-scheduled and essentially defensive military exercise and some dramatic television footage of tanks rumbling across the Belarusian plain. This journalist, who was neither a moron nor a rookie, was articulating a minority opinion, but one that can often be encountered across the West: the sense that Putin is so dangerous and powerful that it is best to try and buy him off rather than confront him. In Chapter 6 I will go into more detail as to how wrong this is, but every time we portray Putin as the evil genius behind everything that goes wrong, we play to this tendency. The French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire once wrote that ‘the cleverest ruse of the devil is to persuade you he does not exist’; perhaps Putin’s cleverest ruse is to persuade you that he is behind everything.

If we persist with the idea that Putin is a strategic mastermind we will be looking for a grand design in the chaos that simply isn’t there. If it seems that Russia is moving in all kinds of different directions at once, it’s not a result of misdirection or because we haven’t seen the pattern – it’s because that’s exactly what Russia is doing. We’re looking for a great white shark, a single, murderous killing machine, but while we’re doing that, a shoal of piranhas, individually much less formidable, yet much harder to predict and repel, is eating the flesh from our backs.

Finally, we should not try to predict Russian strategy based purely on Putin himself – his tells and tics, his habits and his hobby horses. In fact, the political entrepreneurs in his Russia are of every sort, from businesspeople to storytellers, computer hackers to gangsters. In October 2016, for example, there was an attempted coup in the small Balkan state of Montenegro that was apparently intended to try and prevent it from joining NATO. Russian intelligence officers were involved, but according to Bulgarian intelligence, the first initiative came from a Russian not-quite-oligarch – let’s call him a minigarch – called Konstantin Malofeyev. A Russian Orthodox zealot and an ultranationalist, Malofeyev came up with the idea and pitched it in Moscow until the government gave it the green light. In some ways the system works in the same way as the start-up economy: lots of people with ideas – some good, some bad, some already being tried on a small scale and others that exist purely in their creators’ imaginations – all try to interest the one big investor in the Kremlin. Trying to predict what ideas will come out of this process based on Putin’s character is a completely futile task.

Instead, Putin’s state generally responds to opportunities. A British prime minister calls for a referendum on leaving the European Union; American Democratic Party officials practise poor computer security; people in the West begin to lose faith in their political systems and elites; opaque financial structures allow ‘dark money’ to distort economies and corrupt politics; social media bypasses the traditional press. Russia created none of these opportunities, but has demonstrably tried to exploit them. In effect, we in the West define what Putin’s state does to us, while he is simply taking advantage of the failures, broken promises and stress points in our systems.

So, rather than looking for a grand and complex strategy, we need to accept that Putin, at least abroad, is in effect following the strategy that Mark Zuckerberg encouraged at Facebook – ‘move fast and break things’. However, instead of Silicon Valley’s goal of ‘disruptive innovation’, Putin is looking for innovative forms of disruption. He encourages his agents and adhocrats to seize opportunities, fully aware that some, and maybe most, will fail. But that doesn’t matter, because the very act of launching these attacks brings chaos and uncertainty, and when they do succeed, the judoka can make his move.