OPINION / COLUMN — “It’s about the future, who runs the world. Vladimir Putin made it clear when he started this war in Ukraine it’s about shaking up the status quo, not trying to preserve it. So, the idea that we in the West have of going back to the status quo, where the U.S. led the global order, is not something that Vladimir Putin – and I would say many of his new allies also — would agree with.”
That was Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, long-time CIA operations officer, and Cipher Brief Expert, speaking last Wednesday, during a Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) webinar on Putin’s War and Putin’s World, although he talked about much more than just Putin.
He also spoke about “a world that is changing dramatically around us…The possibility of strategic surprise is much greater for the United States and our policy formulation and execution. The idea that our norms, our means, our methods, our organizational structure may not be up to the 21st Century.”
His words got me thinking that it’s worth stepping back once in a while from dealing with today’s events and instead look more broadly at Russia, its President Vladimir Putin and the world we share. But first, a bit about the person taking us on this trip.
Mowatt-Larssen graduated from West Point in 1976, and after his military service, joined the CIA in 1982. As a CIA operations officer for 23 years, he held various domestic and international posts, including being assigned to Moscow twice, as well as serving as Chief of the Europe Division, Chief of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Department, and Deputy Associate Director of Central Intelligence for Military Support. From 2005-to-2008, he was the Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence at the U.S. Department of Energy. From 2008-to-2019, he was at Harvard University as the Belfer Center’s Intelligence Project Director; and in 2022, he became the inaugural William J. Perry Distinguished Fellow at NTI.
“Putin rose to power to re-establish order, credibility, and to make Russia matter on the world stage — all of which he did,” said Mowatt-Larssen during his NTI talk.
Let’s break it down starting with global order.
When it comes to the world stage, Mowatt-Larssen said, “Internationally, I believe he [Putin] feels validated.” One example is the leading role Putin has taken in BRICS, the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa group of growing economic nations outside the West that earlier this month, was joined by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Argentina.
“It’s helping to be a leader in BRICS in his mind,” Mowatt-Larssen said, adding, “I think he feels the North/South issue favors Russia in some way…And he’s starting to learn, too, about the dynamics of this new global order being reshaped. I don’t want to be harsh here, but I think a lot of this is coming at a time when the U.S. and our allies are longing for the restoration of the old status quo and Putin’s resisting that and I think he’s going to be right about that.”
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On the other hand, Mowatt-Larssen pointed out the “NATO expansion that Putin did not reckon on,” and that “NATO is stronger.” As a result, he said, “I do believe the war is a disaster for Russia in the long run, and for Putin – even with the new alliances and with the change in the new world order he’s trying to bring about.”
As for the Ukraine war, Mowatt-Larssen said, “Vladimir Putin’s interest in an offensive is limited by his desire not to get over engaged, stretched out to the point where he’s losing more tanks than he can replace or losing too many troops. Sanctions have not hurt the Russian economy as much as we thought they would. He’s got a military-industrial complex that is running up to about ten times [than] before the war.”
On Russia, Mowatt-Larssen said, “It’s now a military command economy and it’s able to replace men and key systems to a point where we can’t say he’s going to run out of missiles, or he’s going to run out of tanks, or he’s going to run out of troops. He’s in a reasonably comfortable zone as horrible as that sounds given the catastrophic losses both sides have suffered.”
Mowatt-Larssen speculated about what Ukraine may be thinking when he said of Crimea, “This is when you see the most interesting reporting about insurgent-type acts.”
He continued, “Is this [Crimea] going to be the beginning? The place where the insurgency starts to move and to develop in the belly of what Putin has said is his most important win since 2014…I think it might be the place where the Ukrainians really stock up on assets and capabilities to create more of an insurgency, low-intensity conflict, while they try and figure out any kind of planned offensive against the Russian Army.”
As an aside, Mowatt-Larssen said, “The Russians want Donald Trump to win again as badly as they did in 2016 and 2020. He then pointed out, “There is an element of ‘wait it out’ in Putin’s decision making that’s going into this year’s calculations in Ukraine and in his other activities and I think it is naïve to think there will be a lot of movement, and by the way, the same kind of calculations are going on in Kyiv and in capitals in Europe.”
As for Russia itself, Mowatt-Larssen observed, “Too little attention has been paid to the calculations internally. For example…internally he’s come to peace with a lot of the disruption as being strangely, forms of strength. The [Russian] Army is coming out of having embarrassed itself really, now becoming stronger and stronger all the time. Everyone acknowledges that…”
Economically, he said, “They replaced McDonald’s with a Russian McDonald’s. They threw out a lot of Western firms…They were never really comfortable with markets and Putin describes this as strengthening the Russian economy because now Russians are in charge of things.”
In effect, as Mowatt-Larssen put it, “Putin turns negatives into positives…Who are the patriotic oligarchs versus the corrupt oligarchs – we know the corrupt oligarchs go flying out of windows. Putin sees that as a form of cleansing.”
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In Putin’s Russia, Mowatt-Larssen said, “political parties aren’t real…It’s a way for people to express their views, but they don’t have any role in the [upcoming] March elections…For example, no opposition figure has been seen, whether they were executed or arrested and put in prison in Siberia are able to challenge Putin.”
On the other hand, Mowatt-Larssen said, “Putin is very interested in maintaining his legitimacy and justifying the governance model of authoritarian that Russia has chosen.”
Admitting it is provocative, Mowatt-Larssen said of Russia’s populace, “It is wired, I believe, into the Russian DNA to think that authoritarian is preferable to a form of representative government, democracy.”
He described the Putin system as running itself: “The very small cadre of KGB officers – FSB, SVR, GRU [the current intelligence agencies] – the people that run the country, the governors who run most of Russia, they all have this allegiance to that [authoritarian] system, and of course, to Vladimir Putin himself, the individual. But they also have a similar idea of what the country needs to assure procedure.”
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At one point, in a reflective moment, Mowatt-Larssen said that although there was a “bias against Putin early on…to think of him purely in KGB terms, he was a brutal dictator,” one should “constantly update your viewpoint, particularly about leaders, and particularly seek out psychologists, seek out people who look at things from a behavioral [standpoint]. What are this person’s motivations, plans, intentions? What are their vulnerabilities?”
Vladimir Putin’s values, according to Mowatt-Larssen: “He’s a patriot… be proud of your country, be able to defend…against their adversaries…Also essential conservatism, it’s the same kind of conservatism you see in the far right in the United States…or in Europe. It’s got the same kind of concern for traditional values going away in a secular world…Look at the role of the Orthodox Church in the [Ukraine] war, the support of the Russian Orthodox Church – a very important issue because Putin, like other leaders, has to assure that he is somewhat in sync with the Russian people. He certainly has to be in sync with the handful of people who run Russia with him.”
Based mostly on what Putin has said, not on what he has done, Mowatt-Larssen said Putin “has always been a fairly reflective man, he does think about the world, he does challenge his views. I think in the end, his weakness – maybe his greatest weakness in my estimation – is he always finds himself back in the same place, and one of the reasons for that, is the people he listens to think exactly the way he does…if there is one thing Putin hates more than anything it’s disruption to the point where disagreement is generally interpreted as being disruptive and maybe even disrespectful.”
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