Ukraine Invasion Shows Putin isn’t as Competent as Most Assumed, Sergey Medvedev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 28 – Even those who disagree with all of Vladimir Putin’s policies have long assumed that the Kremlin leader is extremely competent in his pursuit of his strategic goals, Sergey Medvedev of the Free University says; but his moves in Ukraine show how wrong they were to do so.

            Including themselves in that number, Medvedev says he based his judgment that Putin would not be so foolish as to invade Ukraine because that would compromise his ability to achieve “his main goal, the preservation of this semi-colonial, corrupt regime based on resource rent achieved by inclusion in the world economy” (region.expert/akela/).

            But with Putin’s invasion, “all this rational scheme collapsed like a house of cards,” the result of the Kremlin leader’s “blind, irrational and pathological hatred to Ukraine, its history, statehood, identity, language, and to the very fact of its existence,” the scholar continues. Tragically, there are many in Russia who share this irrational vision.

            “Behind this hatred are hidden images about the world … about imaginary ‘Banderovtsy,’ baseless fears about the inclusion of Ukraine in NATO and about the supposed weakness [of Ukraine’s government] which supposedly would collapse with the first shelling and lead to a situation in which [the Ukrainians] would welcome Russian soldiers with flowers.”

            As a result of this irrationality, Putin has made “the greatest strategic mistake of his entire presidency.” His “blitzkrieg has failed and the number of victims among Russian soldiers is growing.” Ukrainians are resisting, and the world is uniting against Putin. Now, “every day and every hour of the war is working against him.”

            Putin’s blind hatred of Ukraine has led him to “a suicidal mistake” which is undermining the foundations of his regime – “the flows of rent, the consensus of the elites, the conformism of the population, and the reluctant agreement of the West which had been forced to cooperate with authoritarian Russia.”

            His “regime is not going to collapse instantly; but instead of keeping things as they were, Putin has radically accelerated history” and put himself and much else into “a terminal phase,” hardly the actions of a brilliant strategic planner.