Based on this morning's reporting — good or bad, depending on one's point of view — the Ukrainian journalist I quoted yesterday, Irena Yarosevych, of the pro-democracy English-language newspaper Kyiv Post, had Vladimir Putin pegged quite accurately.
The news is that Russia's foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, "suggested" today that, well, what do you know, "there may be room to negotiate with the United States on at least some [Ukrainian] issues" — possibly on the West's "missile deployments and military exercises" in Eastern Europe. The U.S.'s fresh negotiating position contains, in Lavrov's words, "a kernel of rationality." This kernel sprang from Putin's initial irrationalities; demands he knew would go nowhere, but one can always play a bad hand with a bluff.
[Update: I should add that the report quoted above was from the NY Times, whose take — initial take, anyway — was far more optimistic than the Washington Post's.]
Channeling, perhaps, students of U.S.-Russian diplomatic history and the Cold War ghosts of the Eisenhower/Kennedy era — who would be less than shocked to hear that such "room" has suddenly become available — the Ukrainian journalist and Putin's psychoanalyst, so to speak, wrote this in a follow-up piece yesterday:
"Heaven knows the U.S. is not getting anything out of these talks underway in three European cities, nor is NATO getting anything, nor is Europe, and definitely not Ukraine. These entities are only at the table to give. As he takes, Putin is not giving anything other than the promise that he may not wreak havoc at a future date....
"Now that the adults are finally paying attention to him, he will offer to discuss with them options of how they can help him put out the fire that he started."
Sound familiar? It should. For Putin's tactical maneuvering has been akin to Trumpian tactics — and much, much worse than that. They are the rather reliable tactics of bigger, nastier bullies, demagogues and dictators with whom the world became acquainted over the past two centuries.
As Yarosevych previously noted: "[Putin is] hearing that there is no actual commitment of manpower from NATO," which has been key to his larger strategy. Observed Yarosevych, now he's "exploring what he can extort for a promise to not attack at all."
It may be that a new, revanchist Russian war in Ukraine has been averted (for now). In itself, that of course is good news. The bad news is that Vladimir appears to be only partially rational, what with his Stalin Complex and unhinged reveries of a Greater Russia and all. "Putin" — not Peter — "the Great." His unpredictability is wretchedly predictable, as is his utter indifference to human life.
"The big unknown is whether or not Putin is actually cruel and irrational enough to go ahead" with an insane war at some undetermined point, as Yarosevych mused. "While Putin may pay a price for beating the shit out of somebody," she continued, "he is the kind of guy who actually is willing to beat the shit out of somebody – the kind of action that repels civilized people."
Such, in general, are the bloody tactics of bullies, demagogues and Hitlerian dictators, which, to our eternal regret, we once dismissed as mere bluff. The eponymous autocrat was informed by knowledgeable advisors as early as 1941 that he could not win a European war; no way, no how, Germany would be doomed, it couldn't hold out, it hadn't the resources, they told him. Yet the dictator's irrationality, indifference to human life and iron hand prevailed. He was, indeed, "willing to beat the shit out of" a whole lot of people, whatever the price.
In confronting the ghoulish likes of a Vladimir Putin — as destined to doom, for sure, as some of his likeminded predecessors; after the squalid wreckage — I confess a certain, Audenesque turn to hardness. The British-American poet and philosopher (b. 1907) himself confessed a certain, erstwhile obliviousness to the seemingly otherworldly dangers of monomaniacal authoritarianism. Yet he came to see that "Evil is unspectacular and always human / And shares our bed and eats at our own table." His most memorable reflection was that which came belatedly, titled "September First, 1939":
More than ever
life-out-there is goodly, miraculous, loveable,
but we shan’t, not since Stalin and Hitler,
trust ourselves ever again: we know that, subjectively,
all is possible.
It was, perhaps, with such sorrow and historical remembrance that the journalist Yarosevych remarked: "It feels as though the West is bringing a laptop to a gunfight."