Is Putin Secretly Tired Of The War?

Last week, during his annual ask-me-anything-a-thon, Vladimir Putin was as brash and defiant as ever.

“Either we get an agreement or we solve this by force,” Putin, who’ll award himself another six-year term next year following a mock election, declared. “There will be peace when we achieve our goals.”

He was, of course, referring to his “special military operation” in Ukraine. The standard narrative around the war goes something like this.

Kyiv’s counteroffensive achieved little in the way of concrete results, and although ideological support for Volodymyr Zelensky’s cause remains strong among Ukraine’s many allies across the democratic world, Western leaders are finding it more difficult to secure consensus around the provision of additional financial and military aid.

In Washington, Republicans have tied funding for the war to an intractable immigration debate, and in Brussels, Putin ally Viktor Orban is earning his reputation as a kind of witting Kremlin dupe, going so far as to suggest the conflict isn’t even a war. (“This is a military operation,” Orban said this week, echoing Putin while regaling the media at a press event in Budapest.)

The implication: Putin was right to believe that even if he grossly underestimated Ukrainian intrepidity, he could probably outlast the flow of Western money and arms, which was all that ultimately counts. Although the Russian economy could’ve done without the war, it held up ok all things considered, and it anyway wouldn’t matter: Putin is a dictator who has no qualms whatsoever about disappearing, imprisoning and even murdering his own people, which means barring an economic meltdown that brought the whole of Russia (not just Yevgeny Prigozhin) to the Kremlin’s doorstep, pitchforks hoisted and torches lit, Putin could depend on people suffering in silence. Thanks to the complete lack of independent media, a lot of suffering Russians aren’t even aware they’re suffering.

That narrative isn’t wrong. But it’s not quite right either. As discussed at some length last month in “The Peril Of Ukraine Fatalism,” it often seems as though we’ve forgotten that Russia was supposed to win this war outright, and quickly. The expectation among outside observers, and almost surely inside Putin’s head, was that Russia would take Kyiv within days of the initial invasion. Had you suggested, in March of 2022, that Kyiv would still be free in 2024 and that Russia would’ve made less than no progress in nearly two years of fighting, you’d have been thought naive.

With that in mind, The New York Times on Saturday reported that in fact, Putin has repeatedly indicated through go-betweens that he’s open to a ceasefire, the conditions of which would simply “freeze the fighting along the current lines” which, as the Times noted, would be “far short of [Putin’s] ambitions.”

The information came from a pair of former senior Russian officials, corroborated, apparently, by American and international officials who received the outreach from Putin’s intermediaries. In addition, the Times said Putin inquired as to the possibility of a ceasefire a mere six months into the war after the Russian army was forced to abandon efforts to seize territory around Kyiv. At that juncture, American officials say, Putin “indicated that he was satisfied with Russia’s captured territory and ready for an armistice.”

Of course, none of that means much in the context of a scheming, devious spy-turned dictator czar, but it does at least suggest that far from being ideologically committed to a quagmire that’s reportedly cost Russia more than 300,000 dead and injured, Putin is just playing it by ear — putting out ceasefire feelers when it’s going poorly for the Kremlin and insisting on concessions when it’s going well.

As the Times put it, “opportunism and improvisation have defined [Putin’s] approach to the war behind closed doors.” By contrast, Zelensky’s demands haven’t much changed and don’t seem especially likely to: He intends to recapture every inch of occupied Ukrainian territory or die trying.

For Western leaders, and particularly for Joe Biden, that juxtaposition is vexing. The unwavering fortitude and valor on display in Kyiv is awe-inspiring, whereas the Russian military’s underwhelming performance virtually screams “paper tiger.” But if the Times‘s reporting is even a semblance of accurate, it suggests Putin is just as ready to walk away as he is to push the envelope, as long as “walk away” gives him something he can wave around and call “victory” at home. In all likelihood, that something would need to include Ukrainian territory.

This is, admittedly, a difficult calculus. The primary justification for supplying Kyiv will money and guns is a narrative that says any territorial concessions to Putin would be a “peace for our time”-style mistake. That Putin would take it as a sign of weakness, and sooner or later redouble his efforts to capture the whole of Ukraine or worse, invade somebody else. If in fact he just wants to save face, and has made as much clear, then the case for writing a blank check (denominated not just in dollars and euros, but in blood and human suffering) is less than straightforward, especially as it relates to territory that was a hotbed of Russian separatism in the first place.

Plainly, it’d be better (for Russia too, I’d argue) if Putin just packed up, went home and told the separatists to — I don’t know — use their powers of rhetorical persuasion to convince Zelensky on the merits of holding a legitimate, fair referendum in the Donbas. But that’s all laughable. Or as laughable as tragedy can be.

With sincere admiration for Ukraine’s tenacity and while acknowledging the existential imperative of defending sovereignty as an ordering concept that should be considered sacrosanct, the discussion in Western capitals turns on whether Putin, at 71, with a tiny economy and an army the entire world now knows would be summarily routed in a non-nuclear confrontation with NATO, actually does intend to push the proverbial envelope. If he doesn’t… well, I fear the price of defending an absolutist interpretation of Ukrainian sovereignty may prove too high for some voters in the West to happily pay.

To be sure, Putin’s an incorrigible, conniving murderer. And, like Rick James, he’s a habitual line-stepper. But on a realistic assessment (and again ruling out the use of nuclear weapons and assuming Xi Jinping’s China isn’t interested in participating directly in any European military conflict), the notion that Putin’s army is capable of invading, let alone conquering, multiple countries seems extraordinarily far-fetched, particularly given the scope of the losses incurred over the past 22 months trekking through the mud in Ukraine.

Writing on Saturday, the Times‘s Anton Troianovski, Adam Entous and Julian Barnes described “dozens of interviews” with Russians who know Putin, and also with officials from around the world who, for different reasons, have “insight into the Kremlin’s inner workings.” Those interviews, the Times said, reveal “a leader maneuvering to reduce risks and keep his options open in a war that has lasted longer than he expected.” Putin, the article went on, “privately telegraphs a desire to declare victory and move on.”