Cornered, Vladimir Putin plans to escalate his war

His refusal to back down is rooted in Russia’s gangster politics

On August 29th, meeting with staff and students at a university in Moscow, Vladimir Putin observed that orcas feed on polar bears. “That’s the food chain,” Russia’s president stated. “Children should be taught about this, so that they understand what kind of world we live in and why we are conducting the special military operation”—his term for Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (Pool Sputnik Krem via AP)

The claim was fanciful: there is no known case of an orca eating a polar bear. But it provided some insight into Mr Putin’s predatory worldview. Recently NATO countries have become increasingly concerned about the direction his thoughts might be taking. Russia’s army has been largely stalemated for years, suffering tens of thousands of men killed or severely wounded each month. The war has become a ruinous contest of drone and missile attacks that, while devastating to Ukraine, are inflicting visible damage on Russia too. But Mr Putin shows no sign of backing off. The worry is that he may try to escape from what Russians call a tupik (dead-end) as he has in the past: by finding some new way to escalate the conflict.

The signs of Western anxiety are all around. On August 25th John Ratcliffe, the director of America’s CIA, unexpectedly flew to Moscow. Accounts differ on whether he went to warn Mr Putin not to attack NATO countries, or to deliver a bleak assessment of Russia’s prospects and persuade him to negotiate. Three days later Finland requested the help of Swedish aircraft and warships in monitoring its border with Russia for incursions. Germany is preparing to openly blame Russia for a drone attack at Leipzig’s airport on August 4th, and will probably impose further sanctions. On August 20th Romania says it destroyed a Russian naval drone that targeted a drilling platform in its waters. On August 25th Slovakia foiled an arson attack on a drone factory.

Meanwhile Mr Putin has ended his long silence over Ukraine’s increasingly successful drone attacks on Russian oil refineries and logistics centres, including warehouses belonging to Wildberries, Russia’s largest e-retailer. In an address on August 22nd he accused Ukraine of opening a “Pandora’s box” and promised “blowback on the most sensitive sectors of your economy”. Earlier that day, speaking to United Russia, the Kremlin’s political party, he dismissed any notion of ending the war. “The special military operation continues,” he vowed. “We will move only forward.”

Sources close to the Kremlin say that, after several weeks of consideration over the summer, he seems to have chosen to escalate. Indeed, a longtime associate of Mr Putin says he is likely to have seen Mr Ratcliffe’s visit as a sign of American weakness. That, the source said, was the president’s interpretation of the visit to Moscow in November 2021 by Bill Burns, Joe Biden’s CIA director, to warn him against invading Ukraine. He went ahead three months later.

No one can know what is inside Mr Putin’s head. But his reasons for escalating the war, like the decision to invade in the first place, are internal. His key objective has always been preserving his own power, and ultimately his life.

One concern for the Kremlin is the evaporation of the public’s silent assent for the war. Deep strikes by Ukrainian drones on refineries and e-retailers, along with internet restrictions imposed by security services, have shattered the veneer of normal life. The Levada Centre, an independent pollster, says 57% of Russians describe the situation as “tense”; respondents cite the war, the death toll, mobilisation, drone attacks and the lack of a sense of the future. Public trust in television propaganda is falling, and young people post calls to end the war on social media. Mr Putin’s approval rating is sliding.

The mood among elites is even more sour. The biggest issue, one insider says, is not so much the economy or the lack of military success, but the time the war has wasted: whatever the outcome, nearly five years is a failure. There is a growing feeling that the tsar is naked, says another member of the elite. None of Russia’s economic or political problems is fatal to Mr Putin: he has the economic resources and the repressive apparatus to carry on. But perception matters.

Mr Putin may express his aims using the language of geopolitics, but in fact he is guided by the criminal logic of his regime: never show weakness. Russia’s system has a high tolerance for violence, but is unforgiving of failure. He probably believes that ending the war without achieving even his minimum goal, taking all of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, would put him physically at risk. (“They will hang me,” he told some of his cronies at one point during the war, according to an insider.)

Carrying on the war in its current form, meanwhile, is no solution. “Inertia-driven scenarios are disadvantageous to the Kremlin,” one member of the Russian elite says: they simply consume economic resources and waste political capital.

All this might make escalation seem attractive. But it is not clear what it would entail. Russia is likely to intensify hybrid warfare and sabotage against Ukraine’s allies and target supply routes from Europe to Ukraine. Western intelligence agencies worry that Russia might target factories in Europe that make materiel for Ukraine’s war effort. But they think Mr Putin does not want a direct military confrontation with NATO.

Within Ukraine, escalation largely means scaling up things Russia is already doing. On August 30th Russia’s ministry of defence said it was preparing a massive strike on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure. But Ukraine already expects such attacks as part of Russia’s all-out offensive to break its will this winter. As for the ground war, Russian sources say Mr Putin is committed to throwing an additional 300,000-400,000 men into the meat grinder. He does not need to announce a new wave of mobilisation: he never suspended his initial mobilisation order. Extra men will probably be recruited using coercion by regional governments to keep any political discontent localised. The authorities are already testing the new recruitment system in Penza, a region 750km south-east of Moscow.

Mr Putin might also intensify repression of supposed “internal enemies”, not because they pose any threat to his power but because he needs to demonstrate strength. None of this will solve any of Russia’s problems. It is only likely to increase popular suffering and contribute to instability, both inside and outside the country.