Putin’s Assumptions about Western Weakness Pushing Russia toward Strategic Defeat, Gallyamov Says, Just as Happened to USSR at Its End

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Sept. 6 – Like the leaders of the Soviet Union in its last decades, Putin believes that the West is weak and will collapse if Russia simply makes a little more effort, a conviction that is giving Russia now certain tactical victories but is setting the stage for his country’s strategic defeat, Abbas Gallyamov says.

            The former Putin speechwriter and now prominent Putin critic argues that Russia has the resources to achieve some tactical victories. Indeed, examples of Western weakness can “unleash Putin’s hands tactically;” but the real resources of the West mean that pursuit of a strategic victory would lead to Russia’s defeat (vot-tak.tv/95251668/putin-zhdet-krakha-zapada).

            Any decision to engage in a strategic escalation, Gallyamov says, such as a new mobilization, the use of nuclear weapons, or pursuing the destruction of NATO in the short term would mean that Russia’s resources would decline faster than those of the West in whose weakness he is now counting.

            Putin’s approach in recent years, one based on waiting for his opponents to “run out of time” has meant both that “he hasn’t noticed how this ends for himself” or that he is in a position to recognize that “this is what happened to the Soviet Union” in the years leading up to its defeat and demise.

            In the last decade of the Soviet period, Gallyamov reminds, “Moscow has many foreign policy successes: the victory of North Vietnam over America … the fall of the pro-Beijing Khmer Route in Cambodia, the success of the MPLA in Angola and the expansion of a Soviet military presence” in many parts of Africa.

            The Soviet leadership also gained by the geopolitical shifts of Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Iran, Palestine and the GDR, he continues. Given all these trends, the Soviet leadership was certain that if it just pushed a little harder and for a little longer, the USSR would triumph because its Western opponents were retreating.

But then the situation developed in ways that Putin has failed to remember, Gallyamov says. These triumphs, genuine but tactical, rapidly became “expensive for the country. To finance this geopolitical glory, money was needed and money wasn’t there anymore.” To support them, Moscow turned to economic reforms and then the USSR collapsed.

The lesson from this is clear, the commentator says, “going from success to success, you can actually come to the edge of the abyss; and then, without noticing it, take another step forward toward collapse.”