James Sherr, the former head of the Russia and Eurasia programme at Chatham House, is a very distinguished analyst who understands the condition of Russia better than almost all the commentators on that subject. Over the years I have learned that his views of Russia ring more and more true. One idea that I find particularly compelling is the idea that Russia is in many ways an unreformed absolutist state, more similar to the time of the early Stuarts in Britain than to any modern political system. Furthermore, far from modernizing Russia, the Soviet period set back Russian political reform to an even more primitive political era. The impact of this insight is to change the way that we analyse decision taking in Moscow. Rational expectations must be put aside in favour of a psychological or even slightly mystical analysis.
Thus we examine Russia's unfolding disaster in Ukraine.
There have been several Western analysts who have argued that the attempted seizure of Ukraine is an inevitable result of Russian geopolitics, and that if not justifiable in that context, is still logical. The defence of Russia, they have suggested, requires military control over the various choke points that control access into the Eurasian heartland. Yet that is not how the Kremlin has justified its own actions. Figures such as Alexander Dugin draw on an almost mystical sense of Common Slavic connection. That Russia has a mystical right to lead the Slavic states, and that these states are in some sense given divine sanction for their actions, no matter how reprehensible they may appear to outsiders. Thus Putin justifies his brutal attack as a mystical return of Slavic unity under Russian domination. Any rejection of such domination is not only a political mistake, but almost a certain kind of heresy- Russian control is justified by Orthodoxy as much as by geopolitics. Yet these irrational claims have not been supported on the ground. Far from welcoming the reassertion of Russian control, the various states, especially Ukraine, have resisted very strongly.
Thus, whether justified by geopolitics or mystical Russian nationalism, the Russian "neo-irredentism" has failed. The expected more-or-less peaceful reincorporation of Ukraine into the Russky Mir has led the Kremlin into a disastrous war which has seriously weakened Russian capacity in every field: economic, political, military and of course reputationally. As casualties have mounted, the damage to the power of the Kremlin, both domestically and internationally has reached critical levels.
No country has launched a failed war without serious consequences. No government can expect to be unpunished if they choose a policy that ends in disaster. Eventually the chickens come home to roost.
As Ukraine pushes back in the Donbass, the Putin supporters suggest that if Zelensky would only concede a little, then the war would be over. "better to lose what is already lost in the Donbass than continue and loss Odessa too". The thing is that in a war, the enemy always has a vote- as the dotard Trump is finding in Iran. The Ukrainians are inflicting the highest losses of the war of the Russian invasion force and the relentless pressure is crushing the Russian economy.
The question is now not, "what will Putin do next?", but rather "what's next, after Putin?"
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