How big a threat is Vladimir Putin to world peace? This is an important question, and one the West needs to address immediately.

You have only to read Putin’s state of the union address made in Moscow early this month to realise that he is a dangerous man, not least because of his threat to use nuclear weapons to achieve his aims. Were he to take that step it would invite obliteration of Russia: US president Joe Biden has made it clear that in retaliation he would wipe out all of Russia’s ports, effectively ruining the country’s ability to export the raw materials and merchandise on which it depends.  A more probable threat than nuclear conflict is perhaps Putin’s ambition to crush the European Union, the biggest single market for goods and services in the world, but few of the EU’s 27 member states are yet prepared to go to war. Many still seek some kind of rapprochement with Russia concerning the war with Ukraine, and this is giving Putin the upper hand in the current conflict.

Putin will continue to fight the war in Ukraine as a battle of attrition, despite failing in his initial aim to overcome Kiev and the Russian army experiencing heavy losses. He knows that the West’s support for the Ukrainians is softening and that by continuing to roll out reconditioned old Soviet era tanks and greatly increasing the production of armaments, particularly shells, he can gain more ground in the short run.  He appears to have no desire to enter negotiations of any kind despite appeals, including from the Pope, for both sides to waive a white flag. Putin knows that if the West were to harden its resolve to support Ukraine, he could not win in the long run. The birth rate in Russia is one of the lowest in the world and if the Ukrainians can hold out for several years Putin will run out of young men to send to the front lines, but that day is still some way off. Moreover, Western sanctions and other actions have yet to inflict sufficient harm on Russia for the 71-year-old ruler to give up his expansionist push.

One of Russia’s biggest problems in the medium term is the failure of its navy, which had once challenged the mighty United States navy but is now starting to fall apart. In theory, the Russian navy has access to the oceans of the north-east Arctic, the Pacific coast, the Baltic, and the Black Sea. Ukraine has had some success in heavily restricting Russian naval operations in the Black Sea around Crimea, while the decision by Finland and Sweden to join NATO restricts the ability of the Russian fleet to use the Baltic, unless Putin decides to mount an attack to recapture Russia’s former Soviet satellites of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, all now members of the European Union and NATO. On the Pacific Coast the US navy is on patrol, supported by the formidable Japanese navy. Meanwhile,  the Chinese, who are allies of Russia, are not likely to want to enter any kind of major confrontation at sea.

Putin, of course, is gambling on several fronts. First, that the United States Congress will not pass a US$60 billion package of support for Ukraine any time soon. He knows that were Washington to do so it would take weeks, even months, for the shipments to be transported across the Atlantic and western Europe to Ukraine, not to mention the time taken to train Ukrainians in the use of highly sophisticated new technologies. A second gamble is that European nations are not sufficiently cohesive or organised to provide the support that Ukraine now so desperately needs, despite brave words coming from some leaders. Central to the gamble is that Europe’s leaders will never show the muscle to challenge to any significant extent Russia’s push against the EU.

For years Putin has built relationships with high status European leaders, the most significant of which is his longstanding friendship with the former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who has continued to refer to the Russian leader as a close friend despite his aggressive actions. After Schröder retired as Germany’s Social Democrat leader, Putin appointed him chairman of Nord Stream, the offshore natural gas pipeline.  In 2014, Schröder celebrated his 70th birthday in style in St. Petersburg at the invitation of Nord Stream. He greeted his special guest, Putin, with a big hug and described him as an extremely reliable friend with whom he had developed a relationship based on mutual trust. At that time Russia had recently violated international law by annexing the Ukrainian Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, while in the east of Ukraine, a civil war had broken out between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists.

By 2016, Putin had built a much more significant Western friendship – with Donald J. Trump. Russian leaders openly and exuberantly backed Trump’s candidacy for the US presidency. Arguably, Putin’s grandest campaign was a cyber war to destroy Hillary Clinton’s bid for the presidency. The details of this have been well chronicled in a number of books, none more graphically than the brilliant volume by Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, which describes how significant Russian operatives and media leaders made up stories to damage Clinton and promote Trump. Snyder quotes Alexei Pushkov, chair of the Russian parliament’s foreign relations committee, as having said “Trump can lead the Western locomotive right off the rails” and says that Russians knew Trump for what he was: not the very successful businessman of his tweets but an American loser who became a Russian tool.”

Putin used his intelligence network to build contacts among Europeans who were antagonistic to the further integration of European nations, as advanced by the European Union. Russian secret services went into overdrive when David Cameron, then British prime minister, called a referendum on Britain leaving the EU. Putin must have jumped for joy when, against expectations, Britons voted to leave in 2016, depriving the EU of one of its principal economic drivers. Meanwhile, Putin has been trying to promote the concept of a united Eurasia stretching from Ireland and Portugal in the west to Vladivostok in the east, with Russia at its centre. This remains a pipedream with few supporters, but his efforts to disable the European Union remain more than a gleam in the eye.

Colin Chapman FAIIA is a writer, broadcaster, public speaker, who specialises in geopolitics, international economics, and global media issues. He is a former president of AIIA NSW and was appointed a fellow of the AIIA in 2017. Colin is editor at large with Australian Outlook.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.