There is no doubt that the West, and the US in particular, has an implacable foe in Vladimir Putin. He hated us as a KGB agent, and he still hates us as President of Russia. As he himself once said, “there is no such thing as a ‘former’ KGB man”. And in his later years he seems to have formulated a wildly distorted view of Russia’s history, and apparently of his own military’s competence. It would certainly be convenient for everyone – Russian and non-Russian alike - if he were suddenly not in power anymore, by whatever means. But that seems unlikely. According to reports from inside Russia, most of the Russian populace is either unaware of what he is doing in the Ukraine, or simply won’t believe the Western news stories. But in any case, the regime is sufficiently repressive that it is unlikely – not impossible, but unlikely - that any public movement could unseat him. The odds are somewhat better that the oligarchs who support him and are now having their toys and lifestyles taken from them by Western sanctions might remove him, but it is by no means clear they have the power to do that.
So the odds are we will have to live with him and his unpredictable actions for the foreseeable future. What is our best strategy?
Lenin said "They [the capitalists] will furnish credits which will serve us for the support of the Communist Party in their countries and, by supplying us materials and technical equipment which we lack, will restore our military industry necessary for our future attacks against our suppliers. To put it in other words, they will work on the preparation of their own suicide.". It does seem rather stupid of the West, out of simple greed, over the past decade or so to have financed his military refurbishment and supplied him with the advanced components (like microchips) to put in the missiles he wants to fire at us. And we are now paying the price for that error.
Well, now finally we are on our way to crashing his economy. Do that enough, and for long enough, and he will have difficulty replacing the military equipment he is wasting in the Ukraine. It is in any case a holding action, because Russia is in a sharp demographic decline, and within a decade or two will have too few young people to amass much of an army. But that intervening decade or two may be quite dangerous, because I’m sure he knows this too, so he has a limited window in which to “restore” the extent of the “Imperial Russia” he so fondly remembers or fantasizes.
We need to walk a knife edge, because Russia is a nuclear power with what seems to be an unstable ruler, though he needs to remember that we (including the UK, France, and some other allies) too are a nuclear power, probably with better and more accurate delivery systems. Still, a nuclear exchange will be won by nobody, so it’s like (in fact it is) dealing with an armed madman – keep them talking and don’t make any sudden moves!
However the Ukrainian crisis is resolved – with a Russian win, a Ukrainian win, or a stalemate, we ought to have a long-term strategy of assuring that the West no longer finances or aids the current Russian regime. If we do that, probably the Russian military’s own obvious corruption and incompetence will take its toll, and eventually reduce the magnitude of the threat. Painful as it may be to some corporations and nations, economic attrition is less damaging by far than military attrition.
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