Putin: a villain hiding in plain sight

I’m obliged to Stephan Rand for picking as one of his predictions for 2025 the top of my wish list: Vladimir Putin falling from power. Putin, to misappropriate that epic worrywart Thomas Hobbes, epitomises the great philosopher’s view of life: nasty, brutish and short.

Funny how dictators tend to be boutique-sized, especially the quarrelsome ones: Stalin, Pinochet, Kim Jong-un, Ceausescu, Franco. Oxford University researchers say short people feel more vulnerable, harbour higher levels of paranoia and are therefore more aggressive: the so-called Napoleon Complex. This sounds like confirmation bias hogwash to me. But I digress.

Back to Putin. How did this political matryoshka doll go from bright young spark with the world at his feet and the possibility of inaugurating a new Russian renaissance to ever-smaller, more introverted, power-hungry versions of himself, sowing mischief, death and destruction?

This man was a spy. A functionary. Yet he now holds Europe hostage. He toys with us. Every time he rattles his nuclear sabre Europe takes a step back. He has thrown hundreds of thousands of troops into the jaws of hell in Ukraine. He has bought himself a mercenary army of North Koreans.

He may have lost Syria. But he ploughs on here, there and everywhere, playing giant monopoly, that signature little cryptic smile on his poker face. He loves the game. And to give him his due, he has a big match temperament.

Now cast your mind back to the mid-noughties. Putin is in his first term in the Kremlin. Things are going, if not exactly swimmingly, well enough. Power and wealth flow to him easily, almost gratefully. Russia loves a strong leader. The fall of communism doesn’t feel like much of a triumph. Unless you’re rich. So people believe in his big talk because they want to.

He goes bareback riding – bare-chested — in Siberia. He hands out the crown jewels (gas, coal, oil, nickel contracts) to his mates. He’s the man. Naively, the West hopes capitalism, crony or otherwise, will tame the Russian bear. Democracy will follow the money. It didn’t in China.

Then things start to happen. A pattern starts to emerge. He starts to jail and kill dissidents. Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who exposed corruption in the Russian army and its conduct in the second Chechen war, is assassinated. (Her killer was later pardoned by Putin for fighting in Ukraine.)

In 2006 FSB defector Alexander Litvinenko is served green tea laced with a fatal dose of polonium 201 in a Mayfair hotel. In 2007 Putin plants a Russian flag on the seabed at the North Pole. That should have raised an eyebrow or two. In 2008 he goes to war in Georgia. In 2012 he wins another presidential term (now six years long). Street protests in St Petersburg and Moscow are crushed.

Two years later, after the winter Olympics in Sochi Putin grabs Crimea and starts stirring in eastern Ukraine. The following year Putin sends his MiGs to support Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the self-same who (in 2013) sprays the chemical agent Sarin on his own people in a Damascus suburb.

In 2020 a referendum wipes his electoral slate clean. He can now run for two more terms. He is President for life. But just to be on the safe side, our hero is nothing if not thorough, he signs a bill granting lifetime immunity to former presidents.

And then finally, he tackles the itch he can’t stop scratching: he writes a turgid essay about the “historical unity” of Russia and Ukraine. And not very long after that, his armies invade what he calls a Nazi hotbed, populated by a jumped-up non-people. You see where this is going.

And yet while all this was pinging on our political radars, UK and EU economic activity with Russia climbed steadily from 2000, the year Putin took power, to 2007. Russian money flooded into European and American cities, fool’s gold only for the cognoscenti.

The divided island of Cyprus became the laundromat of choice for the Kremlin and its posse of oligarchs shovelling dodgy money to the West. It’s banking system became a vassal to Russian money.

This bonanza nosedived briefly during the 2008 financial crisis, before resuming its upward trajectory then dipping (a bit) after Putin grabbed Crimea. It was only after his full-scale invasion of Ukraine that the exchange of goods and services collapsed under the weight of reality.

In the days after Putin’s army invaded Ukraine in February 2022, almost every western oil company announced that they would stop doing business in Russia. Thirty years after arriving in post-Soviet Russia, the oil majors appeared to be abandoning one of the world’s top fossil fuel producers.

And yet, even now, even after the butchering of civilians for no other reason than wishing to choose freely how they live, the EU imports Russian fossil fuels worth €656 million – per day.

Hobbes said something else that seems relevant at this point. “Hell is truth seen too late.” Hobbes believed that people are essentially selfish and driven by self-preservation. In their natural state, humans are forever destined to be at war with one another — which is why they need rules.

You may agree or disagree with this curmudgeonly view of who and what we are as a species. But you can hardly argue with his conclusion: if we endlessly miss truths unfolding before our eyes, we will end up in a not so merry-go-round of regret.

So my question is this: in all these years, why did nobody join the dots?

Putin was a villain hiding in plain sight. He roams the great vaulted hauls of St Ekaterina’s Hall in the Kremlin, distrustful of everyone, surrounded by yes-men, awkward, scheming, wishing his reality on the rest of us. And, to a certain extent, he’s succeeded.

The West has made mistakes: hubris after the fall of the USSR; greed; economic necessity; wishful thinking; unhelpful differences between well-meaning neighbours (Germany and its predilection for Ostpolitik in the face of irrefutable evidence that it hasn’t worked). But this does not explain what seems, in hindsight, an abject dereliction of duty by our leaders.

We pride ourselves – especially in London and Washington- on the efficacy, indeed the sophistication of our intelligence community. What our spies and their backroom support staff – the analysts – see and conclude forms – or should form – the building blocks of public policy in the face of change.

But we’re not that good at it. The record of spotting big changes from small signs isn’t brilliant: Pearl Harbour; the fall of the Shah of Iran and the rise of militant Islam in 1979. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. We didn’t see 9/11 coming either and we certainly didn’t foresee October 7, an event which will shape the Middle East for decades to come.

A New Year’s resolution for 2025 could be: live your life with eyes wide open.

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