Stephen Covington, a veteran Russia expert who has been advising NATO’s supreme allied commanders in Europe for the past 30 years, calls this a kind of revolution—an attempt to change the very conditions on which social and political order and security are built.
He traces its roots to 2007, when Mr Putin concluded that change inside Russia would undermine his own power. Unwilling to integrate with the West and unable to compete with it economically, since that would require a change of political system, Mr Putin felt compelled instead to set his country on a path of confrontation with the West. “Putin’s choice reflects a view that Russia can only address its non-competitiveness by changing the world around Russia, and most critically, by changing the European security system,” Mr Covington wrote in a Harvard paper in 2015.
It was not the military power of NATO that Mr Putin feared, but the principles that it was set up to defend in 1949: “freedom, common heritage and civilisation of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” They posed an existential threat to his power. “We see that the doctrine of human rights is used to destroy the sovereignty of states, to justify Western political, financial, economic and ideological dominance,” Mr Putin said in December 2022. The war he is fighting is not really about territory in Ukraine, but about an entire system of political control inside Russia and beyond it.
Inside Russia, it is experienced not just as drone strikes or the shelling of the Russian city of Belgorod by Ukrainian forces, but in Mr Putin’s direct attacks on his own people. The killing of Mr Navalny, a man who fearlessly asserted the power of human agency, is in fact a blow struck at the hearts and minds of the country.
Frieden?
Yet Mr Putin cannot do this, because his regime can now only exist in a state of war. It is safer for him to double down, imposing greater repression on his people, than to stop, which would prompt inevitable questions about the costs and causes of the war. He is not the first ruler to find himself in this situation. It is what the German high command concluded in the spring of 1918 as it adopted an “all or nothing” attitude to victory and prepared for a decisive offensive.