Good morning, dear reader,
do you know where your next trip is going? Probably yes, in many federal states the summer holidays have already begun. Perhaps you stay on balconies or travel to a small holiday home just a few kilometers from your place of residence to protect the climate. Maybe you’ll fly back to the same island and stay in the same hotel you’ve known for years. Or you make a long-distance journey to a very distant place that seems unreachable on the map.
In the past few months, I have often wished for myself in a very distant, inaccessible place. However, I don’t mean a travel destination, but: the head of Vladimir Putin.
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What does it look like there? Is it the control center of a ruthlessly brutal but politically highly intelligent mastermind? Or is it rather a simply furnished room whose house rules reveal the Russian president’s crude worldview?
We are concerned with what is going on inside him. How often in recent months have politicians and experts begun their remarks with the words “I can’t look inside Putin’s head, but…”
On the one hand, this is understandable: At least since February 24, 2022 everyone knows that Putin’s troops want to destroy Ukraine as a free state. If he succeeds in doing so, he could also threaten other countries. But our political decision-makers shouldn’t let themselves be guided too much by the question of what the Kremlin ruler thinks.
And yet that seemed to have been the case recently. Anyone looking at the resolutions of the NATO summit in Vilnius could come to the conclusion that the Russian president was at the table at the negotiations even without an invitation – at least from the perspective of Ukraine.
Even if many politicians in Vilnius want to sell us a great success: The country has not come a decisive step closer to joining NATO in the near future. A concrete time frame, a worked out strategy, how the country can join the alliance after the end of the war, can not be seen in the final declaration. Instead, the NATO states are imposing nebulous conditions on Ukraine that they must meet before they can join.
At this point, the decisions do not put pressure on Putin. “This gives Russia a veto and an incentive not to end the war,” security expert Claudia Major told me before the summit began – and pointed out that the alliance had found another solution before: NATO took over in 1955 divided country. It was the Federal Republic of Germany. Of course, the two situations cannot be compared one-to-one. But the example shows that NATO had found more creative solutions in the past.
The alliance may not have wanted to provoke a backlash from Russia with its decision. After all, Putin and his entourage are still sitting on their arsenal of nuclear weapons, which they repeatedly use as a threat. Perhaps there were also fears that overly decisive action would shake the Russian President’s regime, which has been somewhat shaky of late. And who knows whether a Russia without Putin will not be even more dangerous in the future.
It’s a dilemma. We want to resist Moscow’s aggressive policies, but not cause an even worse backlash. But how do we get out of this dilemma?
As for the nuclear threat to Russia, I received some simple advice a few months ago that makes sense to me. It comes from the well-known Kremlin critic Leonid Volkov: “The position of the West must be: We do what we have to do. Putin is a sick man – and there is no way we can influence him. He’ll push the damn button at some point, or not,” he said told me last fall.
What the Kremlin critic wants to tell us: Looking inside Putin’s head doesn’t help. After the coup attempt by Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin, the situation has become even more complicated: In the future it may no longer be Putin who presses the nuclear button, but someone else who may act even more ruthlessly or brutally.
The West should prepare for a disintegration of Russia, but not freeze in fear because of it. The West will hardly be able to influence the power struggles within Russia. Prigozhin’s march on Moscow provided a foretaste of what Western governments felt like onlookers of world history for a few hours.
What Russia actually perceives as a provocation and what it doesn’t is also beyond our control. The Russian propagandists see every step we take as an affront, if they want to. The best example is the Russian ex-president Dmitry Medvedev: He’s been fantasizing about new doomsday scenarios for months and spits out new threats almost every day. “The Third World War is approaching,” he replied, for example, to the new NATO resolutions.
But what we can very well influence is how we can better protect ourselves and Ukraine from the Russian threat. Anyway, From this point of view, the NATO summit was not a total disappointment: Germany and other countries have announced further arms deliveries – and for the first time since the Cold War NATO has decided on concrete defense plans in the event of an attack. Hopefully nobody wants these plans to ever be used. But the fact that they are in the drawer may also come across in Vladimir Putin’s mind.
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