The World Deserves Better than Putin and so do the Russian People

OPINION — Vladimir Putin has brought war back to Europe.  The invasion of Ukraine has resulted in approximately 575,000 casualties including an estimated 50,000 Russians killed in action and 31,000 Ukrainians. Property damage estimates in Ukraine as a result of the war are estimated at over $155,000 billion. 

In addition to the cost of his war in human life and property damage, Putin’s attacks in and around the Zaporizhiya Nuclear Power Plant—Europe’s largest—have brought the world to the brink of an ecological disaster. 

And if this were not enough, Putin feels obliged to frequently remind the world that Russia is a nuclear power, holding periodic drills to reinforce the point. His lackeys are less subtle, with former Russian president Dmitri Medvedev among others, threatening the use of nuclear weapons if various “red lines” are crossed in western support for Ukraine.  As we near the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, the world deserves better than Putin.

On a strategic level, Putin’s war has been disastrous for Russia. Sweden and Finland have joined NATO, making the Baltic Sea essentially a NATO lake.  The war has turned Ukraine into a powerful military force—probably the most powerful in Europe and has likely put Ukraine on the path to securing security guarantees from the United States and other western countries. 

The irony is that Putin put Ukraine on the path to likely membership in the EU. And as a result, Putin is bringing about what he feared most at the time of the Maidan Square demonstrations in 2014—a free, market-oriented democracy in Ukraine. 

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Putin has forced the west to realize it needs to increase defense spending and begin to rearm.  Western security services are again focusing on the threat posed by Russian intelligence operations.  As a consequence, dozens of Russian operatives have been expelled from western capitals and a number of western officials have been arrested for cooperating with Russian intelligence. 

Russian cyber operations and threats of cyberattack have forced renewed focus among western governments and industry of the cyber espionage threat and steps to mitigate that threat have been energetically undertaken.

But the cost to the Russian people of Putin’s war – and the paranoid dictatorship he has built -has also been huge. The relative prosperity and freedom Russia enjoyed in the immediate post-Soviet era have largely vanished.  Today, Russia suffers from crippling sanctions which will set it back for decades in terms of economic development. 

In addition to sanctions causing shortages of spare parts for aircraft among other machinery, Russia is suffering a brain drain of historic proportions.  Some estimates show over a million Russians have left the Russian Federation since February 2022, 86 percent of those who have left are under the age of 45 and 80 percent of those have a college education.  Over 2,500 scientists left during the same period.  An estimated 11 to 28 percent of Russian software developers have left the country since the outbreak of the war. 

Putin is rapidly turning Russia into a third world country.

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Russian consumers face the loss of access to western products that had been available in the 1990s.  Western enterprises have pulled out of Russia and the Russian replacements for these franchises are not the same standard.  The standard of living in Russia which had largely risen steadily in Putin’s tenure (mostly due to rising commodity prices)—has stagnated and begun to decline. 

Moreover, Putin’s war has cost Russian athletes to lose the opportunity to participate in international competitions or, if they participate, it is without national affiliation.  Sports were once a source of enormous pride for the average Russian.  Now, even that is gone, and Putin is responsible. Putin also brought about the horrible and humiliating cheating scandal at the 2014 Sochi Olympics which has cost Russia dearly in Olympic circles.

Today, Putin is showing classic signs of a leader who has been in power and exercised absolute authority for too long.  He is paranoid, has ruthlessly eliminated political opposition and has turned the press and national media into Kremlin propaganda machines. 

He is leading Russia and potentially the world, on a path toward global conflict.  Putin is the problem, and it is time for the world to take steps to help the Russian people change the trajectory of their fate.

Putin’s support among the Russian population remains strong and he has effectively used the tools of repression to keep himself in power.  But he is not invincible. 

The Ukraine invasion has been a disaster.  The U.S. in particular, and the West in general, have been slow to try and message the truth to the Russian people with the goal of undermining the Russian war effort and weakening Putin’s regime. 

The USG and the west could and should target sections of the Russian population that could galvanize a movement to throw Putin and his gang of kleptocrats out of power. 

This is not an easy task. 

Putin is the longest serving ruler of Russia since Stalin and he has fine-tuned the tools of repression, but the task is not impossible.  Here are some ideas for messaging:

• Don’t waste time on his closest advisors (Patrushev and most of the St. Petersburg crowd). They are completely bought in to the structure Putin has built, their children, eg, Dmitri Patrushev—just named Deputy Prime Minister—are also completely bought in.  No sense even trying to target this crowd. 

• The Siloviki, the leaders and members of the FSB, SVR, Rosgvardia, and then Ministry of the Interior, ie., police and militia.  This crowd, especially the FSB, has benefited enormously from the structure Putin has built.  They have reacquired and even expanded on power they had in the Soviet era but lost during the 90s.  This target set is vulnerable if there is any regime change and they are completely bought in to the Putin structure.  No sense targeting them, either.

• The oligarchs:  this group benefitted and fattened their pockets during both the 24 years of Putinism and the Yeltsin years.  Putin taught them a hard lesson on loyalty early in his tenure, remember Mikhail Khodorkhovsky?  But their loyalty to the regime is suspect.  A number of them, Oleg Deripaska for example, have reportedly tried to cut quiet deals with western governments as a ‘get out of jail free’ card if things go south. Moreover, they have enjoyed the ability to travel and use their palaces in London, Miami, New York and elsewhere.  Their children have as well. This group is not as important to Putin as his St. Petersburg mafia or the Siloviki, but with Russia turning into a wartime economy, Putin has increased the pressure on this group and some of them might be looking to build bridges and escape tunnels to get out. Some of them have the firepower to create problems for Putin if they were willing to take the risk.  I think our outreach to this cadre has been feeble.  

• The Russian military.  This is a target set worth examining.  The most senior officer set is/was completely bought into the structure Putin built and benefited enormously from the endemic corruption in the Russian military industrial complex.  Until very recently, Putin turned a blind eye toward this corruption but now, with the Ukraine disaster having exposed this corruption and it materially impacting the performance of Russia’s military in Ukraine, Putin can no longer ignore it, hence the removal of Sergey Shoigu and the arrest of one of his deputies and other senior military officers. Those who have not yet been arrested, must be wondering when the late-night knock on their door is coming.  They could be vulnerable to targeted messaging.  The mid-level officer corps and combat soldiers know first-hand the corruption and incompetence of the senior cadre.  Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s messaging was spot on.  That is why he could march hundreds of kilometers, occupy the command center of the Western Group of Forces, capture Voronezh, and continue toward Moscow without facing any but token resistance from the Russian military. This is like a group of Blackwater operatives marching on Tampa and capturing CENTCOM.  This doesn’t happen if everything is well and good with the rank and file.  Since Prigozhin’s mutiny, things have not improved in the Russian military, casualties are enormous and are being actively covered up by the regime.  Tactics are World War I—massive artillery barrages followed by infantry charges, logistics are still a disaster, morale is rock bottom.  This is a target set worth further exploration and bespoke messaging. What Putin fears most is a repeat of 1917, the Russian Army collapsing on the field and returning to Russia and marching on Moscow. 

• The Russian people:  this group is so battered and oppressed they are almost not worth the effort to target.  The brain drain has been enormous and costly for Russia’s economy.  But repression has taken its toll.  The Russian people are as nationalistic as any other people and, frankly, are proud of what Putin has done to make Russia a player on the world stage again. The average Russian—particularly Muscovites—are highly prejudiced against Ukrainians and generally support the war. They just can’t understand how those Ukrainian farmers have resisted the mighty Russian army for so long.  But the two segments of the general population worth targeting are:  mothers and widows of casualties from the war and the population—largely not ethnic Russian in Russia’s far east regions.  As for the widows and mothers, conscription is enormously unpopular.  That is why Putin has been so careful in announcing anything close to a general mobilization. He is worried about massive protests. This is a target set worth exploiting.  The regions are looking for an excuse to get out from under Moscow’s iron fist.  Conscription has disproportionately impacted ethnic minorities from Russia’s Far East.  There is also a population set there worth exploiting.

The key to effective messaging of the oligarch target set is that there is a way for them to get themselves, their family, and some of their fortune to safe haven in the west—even if currently sanctioned, but the cost of entry is evidence of having put sand in the gears of Russia’s military industrial complex.

The key to targeting the Russian military is messaging that the enemy of Russia is not the West or Ukraine, but rather Putin and his corrupt bunch of thugs whose incompetence has led to the disastrous campaign in Ukraine, has changed the strategic dynamic in Europe against Russia with now both Sweden and Finland having joined NATO, and destroyed a generation of Russia’s young through war casualties, injuries and brain drain. 

The messaging should be patriotic but also needs to re-label the enemy.  Team Navalny’s work on exposing Putin’s Black Sea palace outside Sochi was marvelous.  Some people talked to Navalny’s team.  If they haven’t been arrested or killed, I’m sure there is a lot more material that could be had and exposed.

The theme for targeting the population needs to be built around patriotism but as with the military, re-vectoring the enemy as the Putin regime rather than the West, NATO or Ukraine. 

There needs to be focus on the casualties, the cost to Russia’s economy, the loss of travel and creature comfort privileges that sanctions have taken away. 

The growing influence of China bothers the average Russian. If you go to Vladivostok for example and many parts of southeastern Siberia, the signs are all in Chinese.  It is conquest by immigration. The average Russian sees this and feels threatened by it.

Putin is the problem, and he is driving the world toward a global conflict. This conflict can still be avoided. In my view, a key piece to this approach is strategic leadership by the west.  The most powerful message for both the people of Ukraine and the target audiences in Russia is the commitment to victory. 

We are at a historic crossroads. The leaders of the greatest generation recognized the criticality of their moment in history and seized it. The 1943 Casablanca Conference at which key decisions were reached such as the commitment to unconditional surrender of the Axis forces.  Now is the time for a similar gathering of the leaders of the free world. 

Use the opportunity to send a clear message to Putin that the world will not let Ukraine fall. It is entirely possible that there will be an audience at more than one level in the Russian Federation who would hear such a message and begin the dangerous process of taking actions to end Putin’s dictatorship. 

While a movement like this has to come from inside Russia, those who would make this move need to know they are not alone, and that the world and the Russian people deserve it.

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