The 'attack' on HMS Defender gives us an insight into Putin the gambler 

The last time that the Royal Navy confronted Russian forces off the coast of Crimea was during the war named after that peninsula. This week’s incident in the Black Sea cannot be compared to the Crimean War, which cost three-quarters of a million lives, including some 40,000 British troops — the majority from disease. That the spectre of conflict has been raised in such remote waters is a reminder, however, that not much has changed about the role of British warships — now as part of Nato patrols — in preserving the freedom of the seas. 

HMS Defender was not, as the Kremlin claims, trespassing in Russian territorial waters. The annexation of Crimea has never been recognised by the international community and the route taken by the British destroyer past Cape Fiolent was a normal sea lane under Ukrainian sovereignty. Russia has always been sensitive about any threat to its main naval base at Sebastopol, but this does not give its forces the right to interdict international shipping between Ukraine and Georgia. In order to remind Moscow of this, Nato regularly patrols in the vicinity to facilitate trade and uphold international law. 

What happened when Defender arrived in the area on Wednesday morning is disputed. The Russians maintain that after the British warship ignored warnings to change course, two volleys of shots were fired across her bows by Russian coastguard vessels. The Russian Defence Ministry claims that four bombs were also dropped ahead of Defender by shadowing aircraft. This narrative fits with previous incidents when Moscow claims to have driven off Nato warships. 

The British version of events, however, differs significantly and, given the Russian Government’s reputation for spreading dezinformatsiya, is much more likely to be true. According to the Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, no shots were fired near Defender, apart from gunnery exercises several miles away of which the British had been informed. Nor were any bombs dropped in the warship’s vicinity, although she was “buzzed” by some 20 Russian aircraft and her crew were ordered to wear protective clothing in case she did come under fire. In other words, the whole affair has been blown up out of proportion by the Putin propaganda machine for its own purposes.

Despite the exaggerated display of bravado, it is clear that the resolve of the Royal Navy was being tested. The coastguard vessels that sailed within 100 yards of the British destroyer were operated, not by the Russian navy but by the FSB, the internal security service formerly known as the KGB. These patrol boats were thus under the direct control of the Kremlin. The hostile warnings they sent presumably also came from that source. 

Not for the first time, Putin is playing a dangerous game. He thrives on instability and unpredictability. In his recent encounter in Geneva with President Biden, both leaders agreed that red lines must be mutually respected. For Putin, that turns out to mean that he expects the West to accept his de facto sovereignty over Crimea and any other territorial gains that he chooses to pocket in the former Soviet Union. He expects Nato to ignore the huge concentration of troops and equipment on the Ukrainian border a few weeks ago, but treats any naval presence by Nato in the Black Sea as a provocation. The West is expected to turn a blind eye to the illegal grounding of an airliner in Belorussian airspace so that a dissident journalist could be dragged off the plane to please Putin’s crony, Lukashenko, not to mention the repeated violations of British airspace by Russian spy planes. 

In other words, Moscow’s interpretation of “red lines” is entirely one-sided. It was, perhaps, naive of Biden to take Putin’s assurances at face value. The “frozen conflicts” in Ukraine, Georgia, Nagorno-Karabakh or Moldova can be defrosted at any time and there is little that the West can do about any of them. If Russian forces were to occupy Belarus to forestall the fall of the Lukashenko regime, the United States is hardly likely to intervene, let alone the European Union. That being so, what precisely did President Biden suppose he was getting in return for treating the Russian President as an equal last week? As Roger Boyes wrote in the Times yesterday (behind a paywall), the Geneva summit “was in fact an act of appeasement”. The archetype of such acts, the Munich Agreement of September 1938, allowed Hitler to annex the Sudetenland, a border province of Czechoslovakia. There was no such explicit agreement at Geneva, but Putin appears to have inferred that the American superpower will allow him to continue his game of disruption within what he deems to be the Russian sphere of influence. After all, Chamberlain drew his own “red lines” at Munich too: Hitler promised to limit himself to the German-speaking Sudetenland. Six months later German troops occupied Prague. Putin evidently believes that he can carry on crossing boundaries with impunity. The “attack” on HMS Defender is unimportant in itself, but highly significant in what it tells us about the mindset of the man on whose orders the incident was manufactured. This is the action of a gambler — and a Russian gambler at that. To others, inventing a potentially catastrophic attack on a Nato warship might seem too risky, but to Putin this is a zero-sum game. The man who will cheerfully profess his peaceful intentions one minute will hazard everything on brutal aggression the next. As Dostoyevsky puts it in The Gambler, his incomparable dissection of this peculiar mentality: “Russians alone are able to combine as many opposites in themselves at one and the same time.” Biden has many other preoccupations, but Putin has only one: to win. 

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