How Moscow Squandered Its Power and Influence. By Alexander Gabuev.

In the 12 months since Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to invade Ukraine, the war has turned into an accelerating disaster for Russia. Although Ukrainians are the primary victims of the Kremlin’s unprovoked aggression, the war has already left hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers dead or wounded.

Unprecedented Western sanctions have squeezed the Russian economy, and Moscow’s large-scale mobilization and wartime crackdown on civil society have caused hundreds of thousands of the country’s high-skilled workers to flee abroad.

 

The Ruble has now fallen back to where it was before the war

 

Yet the greatest long-term cost of the war to Russia may be in permanently foreclosing the promise of Russia occupying a peaceful and prosperous place in the twenty-first-century world order.

The current trajectory of Russia’s foreign policy was not predestined, and there were many chances for the Kremlin to do things differently. For much of the last 20 years — even following the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 — Russia had a historic opening to build a dynamic new place for itself in the international system.

When Putin was sworn in as president, in May 2000, Russia was entering a period of greater possibility — both within and beyond its borders — than at any other point in its history. …

Then, around 2003, Russia got lucky. The U.S. invasion of Iraq coupled with China’s spectacular economic boom led to a sharp increase in global commodity prices. The Kremlin’s coffers were suddenly flooded with revenues from the sale of oil, gas, metals, fertilizers, and other products on the global market. This windfall allowed Russia to quickly repay its foreign debts and nearly double its GDP during Putin’s first two presidential terms. Despite mounting corruption, most ordinary Russians found that their incomes were rising. Compared with their troubled imperial and Soviet past, Russians had never been so prosperous and, simultaneously, so free as in the first decade of the twenty-first century. With these strong economic and political foundations, Russia was well positioned to become a global power between East and West — benefiting from its links to both Europe and Asia, and focused on internal development. …

Now, Putin has squandered all that. Driven by his growing appetite for power, Russia has been transformed into an authoritarian regime over the past decade, with Russian society and the country’s elite largely unable and unwilling to hinder the process. …

Putin and his inner circle succumbed to growing paranoia about perceived military threats from the West, and their decisions did not undergo the intellectual and institutional scrutiny they needed. Ultimately, this drove the nation into the strategic and moral catastrophe of its war in Ukraine. …

Russia had a chance to pursue an entirely different foreign policy from the one on which it ultimately embarked. For the first time in its history, Moscow didn’t need to spend the bulk of its precious resources on defending itself against external threats or making a bid for global supremacy. With the end of the Cold War, Russia seemed to be out of the game of seeking global dominance once and for all. It could have focused its foreign policy on one goal: maximizing the prosperity of the Russian people through economic growth while guaranteeing their security at comparatively minimal cost. Given its favorable economic and security relationships, Russia could have evolved into a nation with an economy similar to Canada’s, with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, a large stockpile of nuclear weapons, and geopolitical neutrality. In short, Russia had the foundations it needed to become a prosperous, confident, secure, and trustworthy major twenty-first century power—a country that could help tackle some of the world’s pressing problems. …

So why didn’t Russia choose this path? Although Putin’s foreign policy in his first term was largely pragmatic and fit broadly into this framework, after 2003 the Kremlin’s course became increasingly focused on revanchism and animosity toward the United States. …

Feeling betrayed by Western intervention in Libya and support for the Arab Spring, Putin became increasingly fixated on alleged U.S. efforts to promote regime change in Russia—an obsession that was intensified by waves of street protests in Moscow in late 2011 after a rigged parliamentary election. His overreaction to the Maidan protests of 2014 led to Moscow’s decision to annex Crimea and fuel a brutal war in the Donbas. In the years after 2014, Russia’s relations with the West were on a downward spiral, although even then there still was an opportunity for Russia to pull back and rebuild its relations with the West. Despite significant sanctions, Moscow still had significant energy ties to Europe, and it continued to play a constructive role in nuclear diplomacy with Iran.

But once again, Putin chose a darker path, deciding on the full-blown invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. …

The decision to center Russia’s prosperity on the state-controlled extraction sector instead of building a diversified economy anchored in the rule of law was also a fateful choice that set Russia on its current course. Over the past decade, Putin and his inner circle gradually suppressed the discussions that had been taking place in society and among the elite about a new, more open Russian state and replaced them with propaganda and imperial nostalgia, which fell on fertile ground following the trauma of the Soviet collapse. …

Russia’s window of opportunity to redefine itself in the world order closed when the first Russian bombs and missiles hit Ukraine. It is impossible to tell how this ugly war will end, but one thing is clear: those missed chances will never return.

How will peace return? Presumably when one or both parties are exhausted. I’m not expecting a military breakthrough by either side any time soon.

Peace in Korea in 1953 was relatively easy because, as it happens, the battle-line after three years — when exhaustion set in — was roughly at the initial borders (though it had swung wildly back and forth before that). Both sides could feel like they hadn’t lost. Also, that war had become a proxy war of US versus China, neither of whom were too invested in the minutiae of the border, and just wanted peace.