Russian President Vladimir Putin likes to present himself as a strong man. But his record in dealing with recent crises in Russia reveals another side of his presidential personality: a side of paralysis and indecision – as published in an article on CNN today (Friday).
It was also written that a day and a half after Ukrainian forces broke through a Russian border crossing and continued, almost unhindered, through the wide green fields of the southern Kursk region, Putin finally made his first comments on the matter. He called the invasion a “massive provocation,” accused Ukraine of indiscriminate firing on civilians, then quickly moved on to other government business, including how to mark Russia’s “Construction Worker’s Day.”
It took another five days, and the loss of nearly 30 settlements, before he promised a military response. There was no visit to the area to meet the tens of thousands of evacuees, no declaration of martial law, the writer added.
In March, after the terrorist attack at the Crocus City concert hall in Moscow, the deadliest in Russia in decades, Putin took more than 24 hours to address the nation. Despite ISIS-K claiming responsibility, he continued to insist that Ukraine and the West played a role. The US actually warned Russia that an attack could be imminent. Putin never visited the site of the attack, or any survivors in the hospital, it said.
When Yevgeny Prigozhin, then leader of the Wagner mercenary group, launched his failed coup last June, the Russian leader’s response was characterized by inconsistency. After initially denouncing the incident as “treason”, Putin waited two days before speaking publicly again, then thanked the Wagner soldiers involved for withdrawing, and offered them military contracts. He then invited Prigozhin to tea in the Kremlin. Two months later Prigozhin was killed in a mysterious plane crash in Russia, a CNN reporter recalled.
According to him, it is easy to find even more distant parallels, and Putin chose this week to emphasize one of them. For the first time in 16 years, he visited School No. 1 in Beslan, more than a week before the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the school that killed more than 300 people, many of them children. In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that not only did the Russian authorities not act on the basis of prior knowledge of an imminent attack, but that the security operation was “disorganized and suffered from a lack of leadership.”
“He’s not good at solving crises,” Boris Bondarev, a former Russian diplomat who resigned two years ago in protest of the war in Ukraine and still lives outside Russia, told CNN. “It’s dangerous, it’s unpredictable. Putin likes comfort, he likes when he creates the crisis for others, when he controls the situation.”
The shock attack left the Kremlin stunned, and experts say Russia’s military response in Kursk somewhat mirrored the clumsy responses of its president.
“The initial reaction when they got over the shock of what was happening was who do we have in the closet left to protect,” retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan, author of the new book “The War on Ukraine: Strategy and Adaptation Under Fire,” told CNN. “Whether it’s conscripts, whether it’s substandard battalions from the Ukrainian arena, or strategic reserves.”
Reports from the field backed up the feeling that a diverse selection of Russian troops had been drawn in, while Moscow grappled with the dilemma of how to balance defending its soil with maintaining slow momentum on the Eastern Front. Ukrainian officials said some forces were redeployed from the Kharkiv region and the southern front. Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov initially claimed that his special forces unit, the Akhmat Brigade, had been deployed. Naval officers from the Black Sea Fleet in Crimea are also involved.
The diverse groups have complicated Russia’s efforts to coordinate its resistance, with a pro-Russian military blogger even noting on August 14 that Ukraine is deliberately creating disruptions and then withdrawing, “taking advantage of the fact that our diverse forces, which do not always have good communication with each other, have been deployed to repel this invasion.”
Russia’s bureaucratic response to the invasion was equally cumbersome. Defense Minister Andrey Belusov established a coordinating council to handle security in the border areas and this week announced that he is dividing the responsibility between no less than five different parties.
This, according to the Institute for the Study of War, “is likely to create further confusion within the Russian Ministry of Defense and friction between the Russian Ministry of Defense, the FSB, and Rosguardia (Russia’s National Guard), all of which are trying to operate in Kursk Oblast,” and could jeopardize Russia’s ability to launch a counterattack effective
However, more than two weeks later, there are now signs of a more concerted resistance. Dmytro Kholud, the commander of the Ukrainian “Nightingale” battalion, which is currently in Kursk, told CNN by phone on Wednesday that he noticed a change in the behavior of the Russian soldiers. “Now, the forces that they brought into this area are trying to attack us somehow,” he told CNN. “They no longer surrender by the hundreds. They try to shoot and fight back, but they still surrender when we attack them.”
Ryan, the retired Australian general, agrees that Russia is moving beyond the initial reaction phase, and should begin to look more organized in the coming days and weeks. But, he believes the last two weeks have also revealed Putin’s priorities and his people are not currently at the top of the list.
“The decision will be Putin’s: what is the most dangerous for him? Ukrainians in Kursk or failure in the Donbass. I think right now he has decided that it is more dangerous not to advance in the Donbass than to throw everything at Kursk.”
Experts agree that the invasion of Kursk did not fundamentally change Putin’s overall strategy of attrition – to wear down Ukraine, and try to outlast its allies. And yet, Ukraine’s surprise move has emboldened those who previously questioned the West’s policy of limiting certain types of military aid, and their use within Russia.
And that could have been part of Ukraine’s strategy. On August 19, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky allowed himself to lift for a moment the veil of gratitude carefully held towards his Western allies.
“The whole innocent and illusory concept of so-called ‘red lines’ in relation to Russia, which dominated the assessment of the war by some of our partners, has collapsed these days somewhere near Sodzha,” he told a gathering of Ukrainian diplomats, referring to a Russian town that Ukrainian forces had captured.
His point is that Western fears that Russia might interpret the use of American or British long-range missiles on its soil as a conventional threat worthy of a nuclear response – Russian nuclear doctrine does allow for this – are now more remote than ever, given the lack of a coherent military response to its first foreign occupation since World War II .
“NATO’s current strategy for helping Ukraine is a strategy of defeat. It’s simply a strategy to perpetuate the war and allow Russia to wait for us all,” Ryan said. “We need a thorough reassessment.”
Former Russian diplomat Bondarev argues that Putin’s own response serves as further proof that the West needs to formulate a more decisive response to Putin’s aggression.
“When some Westerners say we shouldn’t corner Putin because he’ll turn into a scared rat and fight with all his might,” he told CNN. “Now we see that when he’s really facing a crisis, he’s not a scared rat, he’s just like an impostor.
“And that’s why you shouldn’t be so afraid of him.”