What Putin Fears
What Putin Fears
November: the month of the drowned dog. Ted Hughes’ poem marking the bleakness of the dying year sums hits me when I wake up from a snooze to learn that Kyiv has come under another swarm attack of Russian cruise missiles. Yet again, I’ve slept through the bombs. Yet again, they’ve gone for the power stations, knocking most of Ukraine off the grid. You lose power across the country, you have to switch off the nuclear power stations for fear of uncontrolled criticality. You lose power, the water pumping stations stop. This isn’t academic. I go to the bathroom and open a tap: nothing. I piss, flush the loo: nothing.
Right now the power has gone. This means that I walk the five storeys from my rented flat down to the street and cross the road to a bar with a generator that provides some light, working loos but no internet. At night, with the streetlights dead, the whole city is cloaked in darkness. You can break your ankle on an unseen step. Candles, lighters are not romantic extras. They are necessities.
This is the Russian reworking of the computer game, Civilisation. Their version is De-civilisation, slowly degrading a great city like Kyiv. And there is nothing more degrading than not being able to use your own toilet. Vladimir Putin is the flatmate from hell. And civilisation is more fragile than you imagine. Making the coupling gear that allows a power station to keep a city lit and watered takes months. Smash fifteen in one go and Ukraine will freeze this winter. Is freezing now.
Everything is made worse by a heavy fall of snow a few days before. The pavements are now layered with treacherous ice. My fancy boots turn out to be a bit rubbish and I keep on skidding, deepening the Kafkaesque gloom. I get an Uber to ZigZag, a sweet bar owned a Ukrainian friend who found me a flak jacket and helmet in March when that was impossible. I am a loyal customer and then some.
They’re serving food but the catch is the water is off, here too. So the loos are locked, the menu restricted, the cutlery wooden, the wine glasses gone, replaced by plastic cups.
“Picnic?” says the waiter, with a sardonic grimace that, were it not Ukrainian, would be so very British. Yeah, yeah: this isn’t the end of the world but it’s depressing.
Three good friends rock up. After a month out of the war in London, I’m behind with the gossip but everything seems grimmer, madder than before. One of us, not Ukrainian, has just come back from Moscow: “I knew I would be followed by the secret police. I knew I couldn’t get in touch with many of my friends, especially everyone on the run from the draft.” He is brave and good. His news is all bad. The lights are still on in the Russian capital; the Rolls Royces and Mercedes still circle the ring road as sharks the deep; he sees no sign of a revolution from below.
So the war continues. Who will give up first? Not the Russians, it seems.
What about the Ukrainians? Will they trade some land for peace? Back in the spring, when the Russian killing machine was at the gates, they didn’t knock off power and light because they thought they were carrying out a coup d’etat. And you don’t switch the lights out if you think you will be running the country the next day. Now that the Kremlin understands they are never going to conquer Kyiv or most of Ukraine, it’s nigh-on total war against the civilian population, seeking to bully it into submission. The architect of this plan is General Sergei Surovikin aka “General Armageddon”. Bald, bloodless and ever so very creepy, his cv carries its own indictment. In 1991, during the KGB coup against then President Gorbachev, three pro-democracy protesters were killed by his men. He spent months under some kind of arrest before new Russian President Yeltsin released him because “he was only obeying orders”. Afghanistan, the Second Chechen War, Syria: now taking out the lights out in Ukraine, he is a man, like his master, of pitiless inhumanity.
Words at this level carry the weight of lead. When I write “pitiless inhumanity” I mean it. A few days ago the Russians shelled a maternity hospital in the south, killing a two-day-old new-born. The coffin was the size of a shoebox.
In my patch of central Kyiv, I bump into a Swedish guy who had seen my video diary from the crater made by a Russian cruise missile in the children’s playground in Taras Shevchenko Park on October 10th. The Swede, who has been living in Ukraine for twenty years, told me that his eight-year-old daughter called him from school to ask if he was OK. He said yes. “Then she asked me about the playground. Is it OK, Dad? How do you answer that kind of question?” I asked him what he did for a living. He works for a NGO that helps Ukrainian children who have been raped by the Russian army. Once again, I met my Swedish friend entirely by accident. Hearing about the brutality of the Russian army is not exceptional in Ukraine. It is commonplace.
Russian barbarism is in your face, placed there for all of us to see, so long as we keep our eyes wide open and try not to avert our gaze. Yevgeny Prigozhin is the career criminal whose Wagner Army is a private fiefdom, running its own war within the war, like the SS in the second world war. Take the story of Yevgeny Nuzhin, a Russian man convicted of murder in 1999 and serving a 24-year-prison sentence. Nuzhin was recruited from his prison cell, signed a contract, joined Wagner, surrendered to the Ukrainians and made a video. He told his Ukrainian interviewer about the Russians recruiting convicts, adding he deliberately joined the Wagner Army so as to be taken prisoner in Ukraine. He then decided he wanted to go back to Russia and was traded in a routine prisoner swap. It’s hard to work out why he thought he would be welcome back in Russia but a reasonable guess would be that he assumed that he would tell the Wagner people that he had had to go along with the Ukrainians or else. Prigozhin thought otherwise. Video was revealed of the man’s head, fixed to a breeze block by clingfilm. Then a man comes in and knocks his brains out with a sledgehammer.
Prigozhin said: “As for the executed man, it’s clear from this video that he did not find happiness in Ukraine, but met with evil but fair people. I think this film should be called ‘A dog deserves a dog’s death’. Excellent director’s work, you can watch it in one go. I hope no animals were hurt during the filming."
The European parliament protested and then a second video appeared, seemingly of a man delivering a violin case to the parliament. Inside the case was a sledgehammer covered in blood.
After the snuff movie appeared on Russian social media, Putin’s PR man Dmitry Peskov said “it was not our business”. This is nonsense. The video would not have stayed online without the acquiescence of the master of Kremlin. The Wagner Army’s militarily insane repeat attacks on Bakhmut, a city in the Donetsk oblast still held by the Ukrainians, is not possible without the Kremlin’s OK. The Wagner Army would not exist without the Kremlin making it so. Like Mao, Putin likes killing. He likes Prigozhin’s way of doing things. Deep down - his pretend democracy is a fraud - it’s his way too. In my book, Killer In The Kremlin, I set out Putin’s history of killing since the moment he became the power in the land in September 1999 and ordered the blowing up of 300 Russians in apartment blocks in Moscow and elsewhere, blaming the outrages on Chechen terrorists. Two great Russian journalists thought the same and investigated the apartment bombings. They were Yuri Shchekochikhin: poisoned; and Anna Politkovskaya: poisoned, later shot.
The problem with Putin’s barbarism – and that of his acolytes, Surovikin and Prigozhin and his Chechen quizling, Ramzan Kadyrov – is that it sickens people who come into contact with it, the Ukrainians first and foremost. The torture, the child rapes, the castration of Ukrainian soldiers, the blitzing of power stations, the enforced darkness, the cold, the waterlessness does not make Ukrainians want to submit. On the contrary. If President Zelenskiy tried to sell a land-for-peace deal to his country, he would find it hard to stay in office for a single day.
I have been reading “Overreach: The Inside Story of Putin’s War Against Ukraine” by Owen Matthews. We disagree on a lot but his book contains some great insights. My “Killer In The Kremlin” says that much of recent Russian history – and death – can be explained by Putin’s peculiar psychopathy. Owen does not go there, or, at least, not to the same extent but he knows his Russia backwards. Read both our books. We are both sceptical of opinion polls in Russia. When your grandmother tells you never to share what you really think with a stranger, you don’t. That said, he believes that although the better part of Russia is against the war, the better part is, by far, the smaller part: “Putin was right. His propaganda machine did work – at least insofar as it produced a wide, publicly accepted consensus in favour of the war. The simple truth is that Putin did speak for most Russians. That might be depressing for me…” – and me – “But the fact that we wished it were not true did not make it so. The invasion of Ukraine was the brainchild of Putin and a tiny group of highly paranoid men around him who became convinced that a pre-emptive blow against Russian aggression was necessary for Russia’s survival. But in an important sense it was not only the Kremlin’s war. It was genuinely supported by a critical mass of the Russian people.”
This is exactly the point made by friend, the film-maker Vlad Demchenko, who, now serving in the Ukrainian army, arrested me on Day Two of the war on suspicion of being a Russian spy. I believe that there is another Russia, a country that will one day join the great family of democracies. But it is also true that Owen and Vlad are right, that the big invasion of Ukraine is not just Putin’s war. It is, more or less, Russia’s war too. Iranians and Chinese are taking to the streets to protest at the tiny clique of stupid old men who rule their countries with dead hands. The failure of the Russian opposition to do the same proves Anna Politkovskaya’s fears, before she was silenced, that Putin was zombiefying Russia. It feels like he has succeeded.
Owen has some original reporting on China’s stance that backs up my take, that when it comes to Russia’s threat to use nuclear weapons, Chairman Xi is on our side. The chairman is a dark actor but he fears for the Chinese economy. The Chinese have maxed out their credit cards, COVID terrifies Xi and the country suffered a terrible drought last summer. Any Russian use of a tactical nuclear would deliver a global recession that would worsen Chinese fragility and endanger Xi’s grip on the machinery of oppression in Beijing. Owen suggests that there has been a deal between the Chinese and the Americans, that the Chinese keep the pressure on Putin not to use tactical nuclear weapons and, in return, the Americans limit their help to Ukraine. The details are not clear – none of this is articulated in public – but it seems that in return for China keeping Putin’s nukes in the shed the Americans promised that none of their fancy tanks or planes, or the western European equivalents, would go to Ukraine. None have: fact. This is a version of nuclear blackmail where Putin is leveraging western fear of Armageddon to limit its supply of the right kind of heavy metal to Ukraine. That, too, is another success for Putin.
And then there is the curse of tomorrow.
People high up in the Pentagon, Westminster, the corridors of NATO, the Élysée Palace, the German Chancellery are scared about what Russia will look like after the fall of Putin. Their nightmare is of the world’s second biggest country, armed with the world’s biggest stockpile of nuclear weapons, becoming a second Iraq, that chaos would follow, that he who follows Putin won’t be a nice liberal democrat but someone very much like Prigozhin or Surovikin. (Kadyrov may fancy his chances but he would be a fool to do so. Russia won’t follow a Chechen leader.) Fear of a Russian tomorrow without Putin and with someone worse means that the West is dragging its feet. That complete victory for Ukraine, the crushing of the Russian killing machine, is not the true policy of the West. Instead, western leaders are looking for some version of an ending where Putin can survive. This policy, too, is unarticulated.
But that, too, is a third success for Putin.
Western rhetoric is fine and dandy but the Ukrainians note that delivery doesn’t match the words. The great game-changer of the autumn was the Ukrainians’ successful use of American hyper-accurate rocket artillery, the HIMARS system, enabling them to blow up a series of Russian ammunition depots well back from the frontline. The Ukrainians – at war - have two dozen HIMARS. As Owen Matthews points out, the Poles – at peace, for now – want 500 for their military needs. Modern western tanks are not in the Ukrainian armoury, modern western jets not defending their skies, thanks to the deal with Chairman Xi. The Ukrainians note, too, that western manufacture of ammunition is far below the level of ammo they are burning through just to get the Russian meat-grinder at bay.
So, behind the arras, Putin has got a zombie Russia at his back, more or less; Putin has won the game of nuclear blackmail to the extent that the Biden administration won’t send its tanks and jets to its ally; and Putin has managed to spook the West that a Russia without him would be worse than one with, so its foot is feathering the gas.
All of this is wrong. Vladimir Putin is a real and present danger to every democracy in the western world worthy of the name and has been so since September 1999 when he rested power from Yeltsin’s alcoholic senility. He is a secret policeman to the core, an enemy of free speech, democracy and the rule of law. His cunning has been to mask that enmity with a veneer of civility for two decades. I first called him a war criminal twenty-two years ago and I stand by that judgment. But he is far worse than that. Sitting in a chilly bar in Kyiv, waiting with some dread for the rumoured big attack of two hundred cruise missiles any hour, I cannot imagine that any other Russian leader or chaos would be worse than the one we have got.
What Putin fears is that people might puncture his fake veneer and see him for what he is: a serial killer, addicted to killing, who hates everything we care about.
It’s long since time we called his bluff.
Overreach by Owen Matthews is published by Mudlark
Killer In The Kremlin is published by Bantam Press