Worrying about Putin’s saving face is insane

Some observers of the Russo-Ukrainian war seem to think that the greatest danger is that Ukraine may win, or win too quickly, and that this would mean a loss of face for Putin that he should be spared.

It is a deeply perverse view of things. Putin has decided to wage a war of aggression and annihilation in Ukraine. Wherever Russia gains control of Ukrainian territory, the Russians commit genocidal crimes against the citizens of Ukraine, including mass rape, mass killing and mass deportation. A democracy struggles against an autocracy, and with its success or failure the fate of all democracies is at stake.

Russia’s Carboniferous oligarchy gives us a taste of the cataclysm that awaits if we don’t rid ourselves of oil and gas. Russia is blockading the Black Sea, preventing Ukrainian grain exports and threatening to starve tens of millions in the Middle East or Africa this year. Those are the things we should be concerned about, not Putin’s self-image.

Closed information environment

However, there is a more fundamental problem with this reasoning, which stems from a misunderstanding of how power works in Russia. The Russian media and political system is designed to keep Putin in power regardless of what happens in the outside world. Russian politics takes place in a closed information environment that Putin designed and controls himself. He doesn’t need our help in the real world to create soothing fictions for the Russian people. He’s been doing this for twenty years without our help.

There is always a way out in virtual reality, and for this reason Putin cannot be “cornered” at all.

Ukrainians understand that, and that’s one of the reasons why they get irritated when we hear suggestions that Ukraine should cede territory or even victory to Russia out of concern for Putin’s internal well-being. They know that this would not only be unfair but would also be pointless. What really matters in Russian politics is not Putin’s feelings or the realities on the battlefield, but the regime’s ability to define the spin of history for Russian media consumers. Ukrainians have learned that letting real people suffer and die in real territories doesn’t pay for Russian narratives. Because these narratives do not depend on reality at all.

What happens if Putin decides that Ukraine is defeating him? He will take steps to protect himself – by announcing a “victory” and changing the subject. He doesn’t need a docking station related to the real world, because that’s not where his power resides. All he has to do is change history in Russia’s virtual world, as he has been doing for decades. It’s just a matter of redefining the agenda in a meeting. There is always a way out in virtual reality, and for this reason Putin cannot be “cornered” at all. (Nor does the real Russian army in real Ukraine, by the way. If Russian units threaten to be defeated, they simply retreat across the border into Russia.)

Putin’s power is synonymous with his ability to change the subject on Russian television. He does that all the time. Remember how the war began. By the end of February, all the Russian media were saying that an invasion of Ukraine was unthinkable and that all the evidence was only CIA warmongering. The Russian people believed that – or pretended to believe it. When the Russian army actually invaded Ukraine, war was presented as inevitable and justified. The Russians believe that too, or at least they pretend to. In 2015, when Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine failed to achieve all of its goals, the Russian media switched from one day to the next: from Ukraine to Syria.

That’s the way Russia is governed: with invasions and stories about invasions. If the invasion doesn’t work out, another story will be told.

Inexperienced apprentices

Should a real defeat occur, Putin will sell it as victory on TV, and Russians will believe him or pretend to believe him. He will find a new topic to draw public attention to. How he does it is the Kremlin’s problem, not ours. They are internal mechanisms for which external actors are basically irrelevant. There is no point in offering Putin a soft way out in the real world when all he needs is a way out in his virtual world. It will be built from pixels by its propagandists, it doesn’t need us for that. Indeed, there is something more than a little humiliating when Western politicians offer themselves up to Russian television channels as unpaid and unskilled apprentices.

The odd thing is that Western leaders know all this – or at least should know. After Russia’s last invasion of Ukraine in 2014, there was plenty of time to think. The primary role played by political fiction in Russian life became evident. Anyone involved in the public debate about the Ukraine war should be aware that Putin is governing through the media and not on the basis of reality. Just three months ago, all of us could only watch as Putin changed the story from “War is unthinkable” to “War is inevitable.” And yet, for some reason, quite a few Western politicians ignore this fundamental structural fact of Russian politics when promoting appeasement gestures towards Putin.

Of course, Putin could be wrong, in this war or any other. He might wait too long to announce victory in the virtual world. Then he loses power – and someone else takes power over the television channels. We in the West cannot protect him from such a misjudgment. It will happen sooner or later. It is quite possible that power in Russia will change hands during the war. We will know this happened when the Russian media landscape changes face. Whether Putin falls during the Ukraine war or later, his control of the media will be extensive by the time it comes to an end. There is no temporal connection by which our own actions in the real world could influence this process.

One has to know what we are asking of Ukrainians when we say that they should cede Ukrainian territory in order to allow Putin a smooth “exit”. We require people who are victims of genocidal wars to create a comfort zone for the perpetrator. We expect Ukrainians, who know perfectly well that Russian politics is only a fiction, to make sacrifices in the world where their families and friends really live and die. We demand that Ukrainians abandon their own people to ethnic “cleansing” just to make life easier for Russian television producers whose genocidal hate speech is a cause of the atrocities.

As Ukrainians keep trying to tell us, stereotypes about a “cornered” Putin who should be given a “face-saving way out” prolong the war because they detract from the sheer necessity of a Russian defeat.

misguided empathy

When we focus on Putin’s psychological needs and succumb to our own misunderstandings about Russian politics, we marginalize Ukrainian democracy. Instead of forming an alliance of allied democracies, we engage in lay therapy for a dictator. There is no blessing in it. We direct our empathy towards a dictator who will only take advantage of it to continue his war and away from a people who must win this war to end it.

Russia’s appeasement distracts us from the people who are really cornered: the Ukrainians. They are threatened with physical extinction and that is why they are fighting. Indeed, President Zelensky must find a way to end this war because he does not rule by fiction, because he is an elected leader, and because he feels responsible for his people. Unlike Putin, he cannot simply change the subject. He must gather his people behind him.

At present, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians believe that the war must be won, and they are not at all willing to cede territories. Unlike Putin, Zelensky will have to make arguments by referring to actual events on the ground. So he really needs help to win the war as soon as possible, but also to give the Ukrainians a perspective for the post-war period.

Any sane person wants this war to end. But that means thinking more about the welfare of the Ukrainian people and less worrying about problems that Putin actually doesn’t have.

Timothy Snyder, Born in 1969, is an American historian and professor at Yale University specializing in Eastern Europe and Holocaust research. The text printed came first published on its website. – Translated from the English by Andreas Breitenstein.