The long table used by Vladimir Putin illustrates more than his notorious dread of contracting Covid. If the intelligence passed to reporters in Washington on Wednesday is correct, the dictator’s isolation includes crucial details about the army he sent to Ukraine.
There is growing tension between the Kremlin and the military command caused by the massive Russian losses on the battlefield and the resistance offered by the Ukrainians. According to the briefing provided by a Biden administration source, Putin was not even aware that his Defense Minister Sergei Choigu had dispatched large numbers of poorly trained recruits to die in Ukraine.
Putin’s ignorance would also extend to the real damage caused to the Russian economy by the economic sanctions imposed in the first month of the war. “His aides are afraid to tell the truth,” said the source.
In an interview with a group of independent Russian journalists, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky revealed a detail that seems to confirm Putin’s misinformation: Ukrainian soldiers found formal uniforms inside the first captured Russian tanks, in an apparent sign that the butcher tsar counted on a military parade to celebrate a quick victory.
Since Russian troops began piling up on the border late last year, the Biden administration has been revealing intelligence-gathering details. It’s a delicate dance aimed at not compromising sources in Moscow while denying Russians the advantage of the element of surprise, as well as renting a vast space of distrust over loyalties in Putin’s mind.
The atrocities of Russian troops that are beginning to emerge come as no surprise to anyone who has been informed of the devastation they have left in wars in Chechnya and Syria. Multiple reports of rapes of Ukrainian women and mass murders uncovered in retaken areas should shut up anyone who refers to the invasion of Ukraine as an outcome of NATO’s expansionist mistakes.
But in the case of Russia, it is not just populations chosen as enemies by Moscow that have something to fear. An estimated 200,000 Russians left the country in five weeks of war. It is an extraordinary brain drain that should prolong the ill effects on the economy when sanctions are lifted.
Even if Putin emerges weakened from the war or even leaves the Kremlin horizontal, Russia has a solid history of persecuting exiles. The most recent examples are the successive murders of dissidents in Europe, but the most famous victim was Leon Trotsky, killed in Mexico City by a Spanish communist recruited by Stalin’s intelligence in 1940.
Putin, who claims to be a historian but is intellectually mediocre, shares a long line of Russian tyrants with a terror of revolutions. He believes that the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was accomplished by a small group of exiles, financed abroad, and that Lenin was an agent of Germany.
The new diaspora interests Putin, in the short term, by reducing the ranks of opponents in the well-educated urban populations. But it should not dampen the appetite of Russian intelligence services to monitor, stalk or even kill exiles.
