Art as in Life: The Asymmetry of Vladimir Putin

Does he look “asymmetric”? While viewers of the George W. Bush paintings may find that an amusing question, the oxymoron of overt-covert asymmetry employed by Vladimir Putin’s perplexing powerplex is itself asymmetric.

The word “asymmetric” was recently used by the Kremlin to describe its retaliation against the West should deeper sanctions bite after the Crimean coup. Now, as NATO and the West seem to not be taking Russia seriously enough, a short review of events surrounding the Putin international agenda is due.

Chechnya was Putin’s bloody self-assertion that Russia could win a conflict as if to redeem itself after the retreat from Afghanistan and the dissolution of the USSR. At the same time, Chechnya signaled to opponents and would-be opponents at home and abroad that Putin had the willpower, ruthlessness, and potency to avenge wrongs against Russia, perhaps including the one that helped put Putin the strongman in power: the NATO-wrapped Clinton Administration bombing of Serbia. As such, Russian journalists who poked their penlights into the collateral damage facts of Chechnya wound up dead, including the Russian journalist and writer Anna Politkovskaya.

The 2006 radiation poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko (polonium-210) was a turning point in Putin’s covert methods of eliminating his opposition and personal enemies. With it, Putin signaled his willingness to use Soviet-like fiat to strike personal opponents not only at home, but abroad, including NATO members’ sovereign territory. This also may have ended the life of Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky. With these exploits it seemed Vladimir Putin was intimating to the world what he would do on a larger scale when it suited him. Yet a bevy of Soviet scholars continued to analyze Putin’s Russia as if it would behave consistent with the former Soviet and Russian historical profile, thinking that sympathy would cool the KGB-run regime. Perhaps the thinking was that they would be won over to Western ways beyond return.

However, Putin was, and is not a continuation of Soviet leaders, which seemed at some point to accept two or three poles of power in the world. Putin was and is a new founder of a new Soviet state, using a militant, not ideological, approach to taking what he wants to restore the glory of a different kind of Russian empire. He ratcheted up his power in 2008 by slicing Ossetia from Georgia with little or no opposition. Georgians were in no position to defend themselves, and NATO refused them membership such that their defense by NATO could be triggered. Spheres of influence and other balance-of-power jargon was used to rationalize Georgia’s humiliation.

However, when an entire Polish government administration (mostly aligned against Putin’s regime) died near a former Soviet landing strip at Smolensk, conspiracy theories arose that fit within the rule that not-all-conspiracy-theories-are-equal. The ongoing theory, given Putin’s background, and his record for implying hostility against opponents whose bodies piled-up over time, took hold when this very early, authentic, homemade video was uploaded to YouTube hours after the crash by a resident of Smolensk:

You can find English translated subtitled versions, enhanced, and analyzed versions. I remember viewing the original myself. I was struck by the eeriness of it, and its consistency with the press photos of the wreckage site. Believe what we may about that video, the context could not have been better engineered.

Vladimir Putin had invited only the Kremlin-friendly members of Polish government to attend the ceremony admitting Stalin’s responsibility for the historic massacre of Polish military and civilian leaders in the Katyn Forest. This disparate treatment set the stage to marginalize and upstage the administration of Polish President Lech Kaczyński, the majority bloc. For if President Kaczynski failed to attend the Katyn memorial ceremonies while the opposition did, he would at once appear rigid, archaic, and insensitive on several levels regarding Katyn and Russia, thereby jeopardizing future elections. Thus Putin prepared the political bait for the Polish delegation to insist on hastily arranged travel to Smolensk aboard a Russian-made and maintained TU-154 airliner, putting the president and 90-plus high level government civil and military executives of Poland at-physical-risk. The presidential plane had been made and most recently upgraded at the Aviakor plant in Samara, Russia. That plant was owned by Oleg Deripaska’s company Basic Element, which Russian oligarch had served Putin for years as a charming Russian business-envoy to the West. Deripaka’s leashed-loyalty was ultimately rewarded with a contract to build the Olympic Village in Sochi.

Anyhow, the spurned Polish presidential delegation, determined not to lose a PR battle, attempted to land at a less-than-updated landing strip near Smolensk under foggy conditions, crashing into the forested lowlands shy of the runway. Shortly thereafter, the above video showed up on YouTube with the sounds of shouts and gunshots. Many maintain that Russian agents shot the crash survivors. Retired-CIA Cold War veteran Eugene Poteat’s analysis was a minority voice at the time, with the US too dependent on Russian support for supply of Afghanistan operations to make a stink about it. Still, Poteat’s view was posted by the families of the Smolensk / Katyn victims.

In 2012, the issue came alive again when Rzeczpospolita, a top Polish newspaper claimed the existence of a report showing explosive residues, namely TNT and nitroglycerine, in the wreckage.

Now, in 2014, after Russian forces coerced a Crimean referendum to secede from Ukraine, NATO members considered intensifying sanctions. During the exchanges, Vladimir Putin’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov threatened “asymmetric measures” by Russia, prompting many to wonder what that meant. James Rosen and Luke A. Nichter discussed this as a possible psychological leveraging trick once employed by the Nixon Administration against North Vietnam and the USSR. Rosen and Nichter note that the word “asymmetric” usually modifies non-state terror, or guerrilla warfare.

As the NATO allies have begun to make public their military analyses of Russian capabilities and intentions to further invade Ukraine, there is that old mood of brinkmanship reminiscent of the Cold War, complete with appearances of standing-down without standing-down. Yet ethnic Russian control of the homeland could also be at stake here, with each annexation an acquisition of Russian ethnic populations in-place, complete with the geographic resources beneath them. The objective? To help bolster the shrinking ethnic Russian population in post-Soviet Russia’s population and to continue to reverse the overall population decline.

As Putin continues a clear expansion agenda, to what length would his regime go to divert and preoccupy NATO? Is Putin interested in Russia’s survival, or does he want to reverse fortunes with the United States? Increasingly, the reversal of fortune argument is gaining ground. The sentiment of his propaganda seems to be consistent with this old KGB officer’s prognostication for the U.S., that it will break-up and be divided among world and regional players:

 

Link to Wall Street Journal resources.

Some contemporary voices subscribe to the view that Russia has long waged an “asymmetric” war against Europe designed to drive a wedge between the traditional NATO allies.

The upshot from here: To remain politically well, NATO powers, the EU, and the U.S. must take seriously the written, spoken, and enacted goals of Putin’s Russia in concert with the clear mission of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) which includes Russia, China, and developing nation states aligned in dependence on them. As the SCO reaches into the American future with ambition, Western policy-makers must marshal their many strengths in unity against these regimes without lumping their populations together with the regimes themselves. For with subtle turns and change, and perhaps natural, ecologic, and geologic forces adversaries could be driven together to common interest.

Finally, every developing world event that could distract, divide, paralyze, or preoccupy the Western powers and allies should be analyzed in the context of the ambitions of the power cults and politburos still operating in the world. Our leaders must remember that to be divided comes before being conquered. While security against terrorists remains important, security must resume against those great powers with deep inroads into Western economies — Russia into the EU’s and China into the US’s. To have a commonwealth in which to prosper, accountability and checking are warranted. Time for the North Atlantic allies to wake-up and adapt to all that has happened, overcoming internal and external challenges to leadership, autonomy, and freedom at once. Meanwhile, old and new friends along the Pacific rim must be recruited for the difficult times ahead in dealing with literal tectonic and climatic changes that will affect the basics of food and energy supply.

It is a tall order, but all the parties at the table have overcome worse odds. Considering what the world faces, old political wranglings look more and more like eternal follies.