The Facts that Putin Cannot Change

By Nick Fishwick

Nick Fishwick CMG retired after nearly thirty years in the British Foreign Service. His postings included Lagos, Istanbul and Kabul. His responsibilities in London included director of security and, after returning from Afghanistan in 2007, he served as director for counter-terrorism. His final role was as director general for international operations.

EXPERT PERSPECTIVE — As we used to say in government, it could be worse.  A single death or wounding, a single destroyed hospital, school or residential block is too much. It is the result of a war the Russians did not need to launch. Deaths on both sides are so far in four figures. The Russians will have to account for alleged war crime incidents, but we have not seen atrocities of World War Two proportions. And on day 8 of the campaign Kyiv is still holding out; the Russians have not even got control of Kharkiv in the east. When President Putin decided to invade, he must have been thinking Prague 1968. We are all now thinking Finland 1939. With just a hint of August 1991.

So, death and destruction have been terrible but not as much as feared. The Ukrainians are still fighting. The west is displaying an astonishing degree of unity, the Chinese are unhappy and ambivalent and most of the rest of the world is against Russia. Russia is headed firmly towards the international pariah status its actions merit. It is facing eye-watering economic pain in the months ahead. President Zelensky now looks like Napoleon or at least Davy Crockett.

But the key riders are words like “so far”; I fear it is going to get a lot worse.

What are the choices facing Mr Putin now? None of them looks good. He is obviously not going to say, “Sorry about that!” and withdraw. And a full-scale invasion with a regime change agenda makes it hard to claim victory with anything less than regime change achieved, with the whole country under Russian influence. He has after all assured us that this is an action to get rid of the Nazis (like the Jewish Mr Zelensky) and drug addicts apparently running Ukraine. Two weeks ago, it seemed to me that he could have grabbed the two eastern provinces of Ukraine and declared victory while continuing to criticise NATO/the west and to demand a pledge in tablets of stone of eternal Ukrainian neutrality. The west might have swallowed hard and continued to discuss this demand. They won’t now.

It seems to me that Mr Putin will not be considering any other option than: Stick to the plan. We know the saying of von Moltke, or was it Clausewitz, that a plan won’t survive initial contact with the enemy. Some leaders, seeing that the plan doesn’t fit the facts, change the plan. I fear Mr Putin leads Team B and will want to get the facts changed instead.

Against a united west he will continue to play on western fears of nuclear war and hope that that, supported by online covert operations, will weaken our resolve.

Against his own people he will continue to crack down on dissenting voices. I see, as a bizarre parody of what happens in British schools, that Russian schoolchildren are being taught to distinguish “lies” (the BBC, al Jazeera, the UN, you name it) from the “truth” they get from the Russian media that this is not an invasion and that the Russians are protecting their people from Nazis.


French officials warned this week, the worst is yet to come in Ukraine after a phone call between French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

Subscriber+Members can access Ukraine and an Assessment of how a Bad Situation Could get Much Worse by Cipher Brief Expert and former Chief of CIA’s Central Eurasia Division Robert Dannenberg.  Upgrade your access today.


Against Ukraine: he will keep fighting which means an escalation of death and destruction. If you looked at Finland in the spring of 1940, you would probably say that the Finns, however heroic, had lost the war against Stalin. If you compared Finland with the Soviet Union a few years later, say in the late 40s, you would probably revisit that judgment. It is overwhelmingly likely that Kharkiv will very soon be under Russian control and other Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, will follow. But then what?

The facts that Mr Putin can’t change are that most Ukrainians passionately support their country’s independence. Even if we eventually see Russian tanks in the centre of Kyiv and the Russian flag flying from the presidential palace, Ukrainians simply won’t accept the Russian occupation, and they are close enough geographically and morally to the west for this non-acceptance to be indefinitely sustainable. The Russian elites will have to ask themselves how long they are prepared to put up with being international pariahs, at the wrong end of a sophisticated economic war, and having their conscripts shot every day by Ukrainian guerillas.

The big question is how did the Vladimir Putin of 2000 end up, if he has ended up, in 2022? Each country has its myth, and its history. The British myth is of plucky little Britain, defeating the Spanish Armada, Napoleon and Hitler. That’s fine, but we also have to listen to history, a continuing discourse that will unearth uncomfortable realities around colonialism, slavery and so on. Most healthy societies benefit from history modifying myth. Not so Mr Putin’s Russia. To state the obvious, Russia has never been an easy country to govern and “reformers” like Alexander II, Stolypin and Mikhail Gorbachev all had their careers abruptly terminated. Quite early in his reign Mr Putin seems to have decided that he is not going to make their mistakes; myth is much better and to hell with history. Back to the myth and terminology of the Great Patriotic War. In his 70th year, not just his beliefs but his identity insist that Russia is under attack from the west, that Ukraine is full of Nazis and that Russia needs the successors of the Red Army and the KGB to keep its people safe. The more the pressure builds on him, the more he is stuck in this dark room, with its long empty table.


Read With the World Turning Against Him, Putin’s Going to Need a Way Out from Former National Security Advisor to the Canadian Prime Minister, Richard B. Fadden only in The Cipher Brief


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