Putin the Pacifier!

24 October 2021

When we discuss these times in the coming decades, there will be a case for how Russia was a missing piece in the plot to keep our global order in balance. How the great animosity of the West to the legacy state of the Soviets was quite unjustified and how a series of American negligences, some benign some borne from pettiness, were to ensure that a crucial balancer in the Post Industrial Age was missing. We hope we can write of these times with a sense of how narrowly we managed to keep the world largely as we now intended, an orderly transition of capital and goods, broadly defined by Breton Woods and Global High Finance as ‘Free Market’ and which is sought to be defended around the tall words of ‘Freedoms’ and Alliance of Democracies now. History has for us the clear lesson of Russian pragmatism, particularly as it was experienced under Tsarist, Soviet and now Post Soviet leadership in Moscow, one which could have been of far greater assistance to Paris, Berlin and London, not to mention Washington itself in this Climate of Strategic Uncertainty!

What Vladimir Putin has done is quite remarkable for Russia, which is why, somewhere within those shadows and stones within the Kremlin, there remains a charm that protects this man. Personified by many as Evil, he is one victor who trumped the Jehadi Islamists within the Russian Federation in the early string of military victories, some brutal like the one where an auditorium full of innocent spectators were gassed to eliminate Chechen rebels holding hostage there! If there is a clear example of how any modern state has eliminated this form of revisionist terror, supported largely by the Western addiction to oil and the Persian Gulf being dominated by the Saudi Kingdom, you can look no further than Putin’s Russia.

If today, Putin has managed to modernise Russian ballistic missiles, including perhaps acquiring hypersonic glide weapons, modernised the submarine fleet and inducted Su57 FGFA into the Russian Air Force, it all began with the revival of dying Russian armament industry at the end of the Cold War, after the Soviet collapse, through orders from India! Why one wishes to draw merit to this mention, is because, today, in the middle of Mr Modi’s second term, Indian ties with Russia are at a nadir. India’s ties with Iran and through Iran to Afghanistan and beyond took a serious blow due to the disruption that Mr Trump brought to the US Presidency. Yet, it is clear, that even after the Biden administration has taken over, India has not sought to press any restart button with respect to its traditional world view of Eurasia which accorded centrality to Persia/Iran. India chose to not induct major weapon platforms too, from Russia, after the much celebrated induction of Su 30 MKIs, with Mr Modi’s Atmanirbharta creed, even less likely, since the only program to sail through is the S400 Triumpf missile defence system/Theatre defence system, which is likely to get CAATSA waiver from the Biden administration and be inducted in due course. Unfortunately with the Chinese PLA on heavy indigenisation pitch and with Russia itself wary of transferring key platforms to the PLA and its sister services, Russian hitech weaponry will largely remain on inventory of the Russian Federation in the coming future. In any case, Putin’s Russia was unfazed at the prospect of losing out India as a main weapons importer, even though India will continue to have small arms (AKs manufactured under license), MBTs (T90s) fighters (Su 30s, MiG29s) and naval platforms which are Russian in design, including India’s SSNs for the foreseeable future.

This is where observers felt that India’s lukewarm response to the Russian Sputnik Vaccine for Covid19, which was the first to be developed globally, and its single shot version the Sputnik Lite was perhaps stretching the context of Atmanirbharta a little too far, rubbing salt into the neglected Russian wounds…If one sees how India lags behind in the race to vaccinate her huge population against the Pandemic, we can clearly see how Sputnik could have played a far greater role than that of being made in India under license for export abroad. Unlike most global leadership, Putin as a leader has demonstrated an individual stake in his goals, one which could go to an extent of actually trying to assassinate the then Presidential candidate in Ukraine, Mr Yushchenko by poisoning, and recently the stubborn support he has for President Lukashenko of Belarus after the last Presidential election on 23 September was disputed by independent observers from EU as well as opposition leaders there! It is tantalising to see how Putin would react now, to a conflagration in the Indo Tibetan borders like Galwan Valley clash last year, when the Defence Minister of India rushed to Moscow and obtained critical spares and weapons and solidarity from the regime. It would appear to be reasonable to conclude that Putin’s Russia will no longer be a key or reliable ally for Delhi. This was even more acutely evident from how Moscow played her cards in the final months of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan and how the whole world of diplomatic corps retreated leaving the Russians unfazed and on ground.

Clearly Russia never saw India as a stakeholder in Afghanistan, a view equally held by the Americans. Yet going further, it is Russia that has made the first pitch post Taliban takeover of Kabul for an ‘inclusive government’ for that country.

In the context of Taiwan and over China’s ‘rise’, Mr Putin has said much recently to western media. To practitioners of statecraft, Mr Putin’s handling of CNBC and NBC correspondents during the interviews is a lesson in the art of real politik! Mr Putin laid it out very clearly that it was in his presence that President Xi announced that there would be a peaceful unification with Taiwan. Further the Russian leader placed an economic context to this geostrategic situation, offering that Taiwan itself knows that economics weigh heavily over the choice between independence and annexation by China. Due to the CCP regime’s economic prowess the gap between the US and the Chinese global footprint in economic terms has narrowed considerably and as he pointed out, in PPP terms China was now ahead of the US and was growing further. So when Putin underscored this economic reality, he was sounding so pragmatic, his countenance beaming with a Buddha like compassion to his Western audience, to accept the new reality. Further he made references to how assisted by Chinese finance and support, Russia was opening new gas fields in the Arctic and was going to help in China’s Climate Challenge goals by replacing coal which was dirty with gas which was clean. He also said that ultimately the world largest population as a country with 1.5 billion people would need to make choices that meet its requirements, thus keeping the door open for China to dodge environmental concessions!

If one thought that Putin was being Beijing’s best friend on Climate Challenge, on Taiwan, his remarks about the SCS situation were to bracket him as a spokesperson for Beijing! Of course within days of these remarks one saw Russia’s Eastern Fleet sail with Chinese PLAN vessels through straits in Japanese maritime waters in FONOPS, perhaps helping the PLAN militarily by offering tactical practise through these joint patrols, placing for Beijing’s disposal the experience of Soviet era Naval manoeuvres against NATO. So per Putin, SCS is a regional naval waters, where the trade volumes are necessarily generated by China, whose volume of imports and exports through the SCS dominates the sea lanes of communication and in whose interest it will never be to interdict these waters! Putin suggested to the western correspondents blithely that the problem was not the Chinese PLAN, but actually non regional navies that entered these waters!

It would appear that Putin is overtly batting for China if one just took his remarks and not their context. If for a moment, one would lend the weight of perspective, and turn several leaves backward to examine Putin himself as a leader, it would be clear that while Cold War was a loss for his KGB, the dismantling of their Soviet Empire was a historical loss of strategic space for Moscow, much of that loss has been repaired by Putin in his decades of leadership of Russia. Under Putin, Russian Navy remarkable reclaimed the Crimea, the restive southern underbelly of Islamic Republics that had been restive in the Yeltsin years are now peaceful, the Central Asian Republics are largely peaceful, Mongolia remains neutral, while Ukraine is reduced like how Turkey reduced Cyprus. Likewise Putin ensured that strategic Transcaucasia was annexed through novel South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia in 2008. So if and when Putin were to leave Moscow’s power centre, he could claim legitimately to have addressed the key concerns of the Soviet Russian Deep State. His legacy as the great Restorer is intact for all time. He does not need China nor does he have any global domination ambition, even the need to get back to G8 after being expelled for annexing Crimea is not there. However Putin is aware that unlike the Soviet power structure that was tempered by a desire to not rock the ‘boat’ of strategic balance beyond a point of no return, there is perhaps nothing similar in the CCP China’s current structure as assessed by him, particularly since the rise of Xi as paramount leader and the ratcheting of tensions through trade, diplomacy, alliances and military patrols which are spiralling out of control.

From Putin’s point of view, the AUKUS declaration is the proverbial last straw, which is why, he has chosen to bat for Beijing so overtly. Putin is actually attempting to play the role of a pacifier, trying to lower tempers in Beijing, trying to reign in ambitions of President Xi by taking up the cause of CCP China on a world stage in the manner he did. The flip side is, if Putin is batting for Beijing, Moscow would appear to look at Delhi differently, wouldn’t it? Yet, in Putin’s calculus, he has enough cards to play, not just in Afghanistan with the Taliban, but also with China and India, besides the energy dependence that EU has which outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel sealed for him by getting American support for the Nordstream2 project as well. He sees Russia’s own destiny interlinked to a more incremental rearrangement of the global power equation and not any abrupt grab of the totem pole by China. In that sense, his presence as a pacifier is one a grateful global commons will acknowledge long after he has left the scene…It is indeed an irony that a person who operated with a matrix of violence and intrigue in his career as an agent would now play the role he is on the global sweepstakes!