Russian President Vladimir Putin looks increasingly like a haggard gambler who, as dawn breaks bleakly over his losses, repeatedly doubles his bets in the reckless hope that he can recover his position and regain his swagger.
It’s too early to suggest Putin will lose the war that, under grossly false pretenses, he started. Although his armed forces are conquering Ukraine more slowly and less surely than he or the rest of the world supposed likely when he first invaded, his military is still far more powerful than Ukraine’s. The Russian tyrant can probably achieve his immediate territorial goals, even if only at far greater cost to both sides than initially expected. He is showing each day that he is willing to escalate the conflict to whatever pitch of horror is required to achieve a simulacrum of success.
Like the gambler, more enraged and desperate after each futile throw of the dice, Putin has become yet more bloody as each move fails to prove decisive. He shockingly put Russia’s nuclear forces on alert and has deployed increasingly horrific weapons such as cluster bombs against civilians, including a preschool,
and thermobaric rockets
, which create massive explosions that pound the innards of those too far away to kill.
Such barbarism prompts questions about the Russian leader’s mental state, with people who’ve met Putin before, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and French President Emmanuel Macron, suggesting that he has become a different person, more dangerous and erratic. The wealth of the kleptocrats Putin has enriched is under threat of seizure by an international community increasingly united and dynamic in opposing his aggression.
Monaco is freezing their assets and
perhaps impounding
their superyachts. Their luxury homes around the world may also be taken from them. These are men willing to be violent, as well as fathomlessly corrupt, and although Putin has long dominated them, their fealty and submission to him must be counted entirely cynical and transactional. If Putin fails them, they won’t shed a tear for him.
Down at the bottom of the economic heap, ordinary Russians have seen the ruble, their currency, fall to nearly half its value, to less than one red American cent. Their interest rates have more than doubled. International sanctions, piling up every day, are crippling the economy in which they must survive. This is stoking discontent and may add to the crowds of Russians willing to protest publicly against the war. One cannot suggest that they will soon topple the tyrant — his grip is tight and ruthless — but public truculence is a significant addition to his rapidly escalating challenges. Even his most recent and most cynical ally, China, is criticizing Putin while the ink on their compact to challenge the American-led liberal democratic order has been drying for less than a month.
Thus, Putin’s back is against the wall.
Jennifer Griffin
, Fox News’s respected national security correspondent, commented recently, “We are witnessing the end of Putin. The question is, what is he going to take down with him, and who is he going to take down with him?”All this makes him more dangerous than ever. As I’ve written before, empires often recklessly attempt their most grandiose and ill-advised moves, looking more powerful than ever before, immediately prior to their collapse. Putin, the would-be czar, may decide his only way out is forward, and no one knows what his next desperate and monumentally dangerous move might be.
All of which raises the excruciating question for the international community of when sanctions are most effective and whether, after a certain point, they could push Putin over the edge, whatever that may mean. This is not an argument for letting up on Putin. He deserves everything he gets from his long-suffering Russian subjects. But whatever his just desserts, a question already racking the free world and its political leaders is how to impose sanctions that work as intended while avoiding sanctions that force Putin to conclude he has nothing left to lose. His aggression must not be rewarded, but neither is it effective to close his paths of retreat.
It can be retorted that international sanctions have rarely broken noisome regimes — Cuba remains a prison state more than 60 years after being so isolated — but Russia is facing sanctions of unprecedented scope. Thus, while the economic and cultural screws should continue to be tightened on Putin, and the West should arm Ukrainians to fight their oppressor indefinitely, there remains the unanswerable and hideously dangerous question of how to get from where we are to where Ukraine wants to be without an intervening period of wider war.
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