Don’t let Putin fool the West while he tries to dismember Ukraine | Trudy Rubin

KYIV, Ukraine — I never expected to be on a Sunday TV talk show in Ukraine.

But the reason I was invited to appear on Real Politics with Yevgeny Kiselyov last Sunday reflects how Ukrainians view Vladimir Putin’s war on their country. Their outlook is very different and far more cynical than the war hype on cable news in the United States.

Kiselyov called on me because I asked a now-famous question at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2000 that became a long-running meme in Russia.

The relatively unknown Vladimir Putin had just become Russian president, and the world was uncertain whether his mentality reflected his years as a KGB colonel in Germany or his time as a protege of the liberal mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak.

So I asked, “Who is Mr. Putin?” — and the four leading Russian officials on the Davos stage all refused to answer, a bizarre scene that was broadcast over and over on Russian television. These officials’ reluctance to speak clarified their fear of Putin’s KBG mentality as early as 2000.

When Kiselyov asked me whether I finally had the answer two decades later, he was tongue-in-cheek joking.

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Yet Ukrainians (and liberal Russians like Kiselyov who left Moscow because of Kremlin repression) believe U.S. and European officials often misunderstand Putin’s outlook, believing he will negotiate like a rational Western leader. This, they say, is a dangerous mistake.

“Are you dealing with a rational chess player, or someone who knows his time is limited to restore his dream of Russia as a great state?” Kyiv Post editor Bohdan Nahaylo, asked rhetorically over a dinner in Kyiv. “He does not recognize Ukraine as a separate state.”

For that reason, Ukrainian analysts deride negotiations with Russia over returning territory that Moscow and proxies occupied in 2014. These talks — known as the Minsk process — only distract attention from Putin’s war on Ukraine.

Indeed, Putin is playing on European hopes that these talks will avoid a Russian invasion. He insists falsely that only his proxies can negotiate on the future of Donbas territory they seized in 2014, with Russian military assistance. This would legitimize the Russian-led occupation of chunks of eastern Ukraine. Never mind that Russia is an official party in these talks, not the Moscow-backed goons with guns, whom I watched seize the city of Donetsk in 2014, and drive out anyone who did not want to return to Moscow’s control.

“Western leaders don’t understand that Putin is a liar,” Kiselyov told me, as we sat in the Intercontinental Hotel’s cafe, jammed with TV crews in jeans and sweats, awaiting some war action. “Shaped in Western traditions, they can’t imagine a leader of a great power could be such a liar. Putin is lost in his own illusions, surrounded by similar people.”

Under such conditions, negotiations can achieve nothing, unless the U.S. and Europeans accept Putin’s goal of dismembering the Ukrainian state.

Yet the prevalent view among security experts here is that there will be no mass land invasion of Kyiv because there would be too much popular resistance from volunteer brigades whom I have watched train on the weekend and who are eager to confront the Russians. Instead, Putin is more likely to use hybrid warfare, a form that Russian intelligence has perfected, and aims to frighten or stir up the population .

Putin’s goal — if the West won’t sell out Ukraine into his hands — is to so weaken and divide the country that it can never join the European Union or NATO. The Kremlin can’t succeed in restoring a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine, now or in the foreseeable future, I was told by Oleksiy Melnyk on a visit to the Razumkov Centre think tank, where he is codirector. “But they can try to sow chaos,” he said ruefully.

One of the options on the table is for the Kremlin to officially recognize as independent the chunks of the poor, coal-mining Donbas region that its proxy forces now occupy, including the districts of Donetsk and Luhansk. Then the “independent” leaders of those statelets could officially invite Russian troops to openly base there. Russian arms and missiles would permanently occupy a large slice of the country. “This is another way of destabilizing Ukraine,” Melnyk says.

Some Ukrainian politicians privately say “good riddance” to losing the occupied areas, so a wall can be built between there and the rest of Ukraine. But others fear that this will only embolden Putin, without any consequences.

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“If Putin marches into the occupied east is this a breach of the West’s red lines?” asked Parliament member Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, when I met her at her parliamentary office. “It seems there are no answers from the West.”

Yet unlike in 2014 when Putin sent “little green men” without Russian military insignia to seize Crimea, the world is onto the Kremlin’s tricks. The Biden administration says it has evidence that Moscow has produced a fabricated video claiming Ukrainians are carrying out atrocities against Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine.

These are the same kinds of fake stories I watched Russian proxies spin in Donetsk in 2014 when they first took over this part of the Donbas, spreading tales about Ukrainian fascists about to rape Russian-speaking girls. The proxies cut access to Ukrainian TV and local Russian speakers were filled with horror stories about fascist Ukrainians dispensed by Moscow state television, a practice that continues.

Once again, Putin, the KGB manipulator, is testing the West to see how much he can get away with, and how far he can advance while he stonewalls serious talks.

So the big question now is not “Who is Mr. Putin?” but whether the former KGB colonel will surge troops into Donbas, blockade the Ukrainian coast, or stage provocations inside the country.

The other big question is whether European and U.S. officials will act now, not after Putin moves, to move more defensive arms into Ukraine and to cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline taking Russian gas to Germany. That would demonstrate to Putin he can no longer fool the West about who he is and what he wants.