2.28.22
The belief that Vladimir Putin was bluffing, that he would never give the order for the nearly 200,000-man army he had spent months amassing on the borders of Ukraine to invade, persisted as late as 5:45am Moscow time the day of the attack, when, grimacing in a red tie, Russia’s ruler of almost 23 years announced in a pre-recorded statement what he called “a special military operation.” This was not just a shock on American political Twitter. It was a shock to many of the leading experts and policymakers in the United States, Europe, and even in Ukraine. The head of German intelligence was so caught off guard that he was still in Kyiv and had to be evacuated. “I cannot believe this is being done in your name,” said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, trying to address for a moment, the Russian people, “or that you really want the pariah status it will bring to the Putin regime.” However, that phrase — “the Putin regime” — which has been stuck to all discussions of Russian politics now for almost twenty years, in some ways itself helps explain why so many people who believed they understood the country turned out to be so wrong about the Ukraine conflict.
It has become clear that what exists inside the Kremlin is no longer a “regime” at all—a system of government where multiple figures can impact and feed-into decision making, from security chiefs to billionaires—as many believed. Instead, it has transformed into what political scientists call a personalist dictatorship, where the whims of one man, and one man only, determine policy, a fact that has terrifying implications for Russia and the world. The political science literature suggests that personalist dictatorships are more erratic and dangerous to the outside world than other sorts of autocracies. A key reason that many wise foreign policy hands thought Russia was bluffing about an invasion was that they assumed Putin wasn’t making his decisions alone. This assumption informed much of Western strategy. Experts believed that threatening Russian oligarchs with sanctions, for instance, would encourage Putin’s inner circle to push back against war. But the world is now realizing that the Putin regime is really just Vladimir Putin. And he is apparently no longer worried about what war will mean for Russia’s rich, much less its masses.
