Many explain the latest Russian attack on Kyiv and the Kyiv region as Putin’s desire to take revenge for the humiliation he felt during the preparations for the May 9 parade in Moscow. Some believe that in this way Putin is trying to compensate for the effective halt of his troops in the Donetsk region. Others think that with this attack Putin is demonstrating strength to the West and an unwillingness to seek any compromises — just as he does with nuclear exercises conducted simultaneously in Russia and Belarus.
But to me, this attack — which I had to wait out at one of the Kyiv metro stations — was striking прежде всего for its meaninglessness and unnecessary nature. The Russian president spent billions of rubles to destroy a market and a shopping center, cafés, and a racetrack. The “Oreshnik,” which Putin has been boasting about in recent months, was used to strike a garage cooperative in Bila Tserkva. Even if we believe the explanations that Moscow wanted to destroy some military facility in this Ukrainian city, drones and a few ballistic missiles would have been more than sufficient.
Putin, as I remember him from the first days of his presidency, has always been cruel, devoid of empathy, cold-blooded, and self-absorbed. These traits were evident from the very beginning of his political career — during the Chechen war or the tragedy of the submarine Kursk. But that Putin clearly knew what he was doing and why. Real signs of inadequacy could already be observed in February 2022, when the Russian president was seriously intent on overthrowing the Ukrainian government and sincerely believed that Ukrainians would greet his army with flowers. But that was likely ideological inadequacy. The Russian president genuinely believes in the ideological myths he promotes, having been raised on them as a KGB officer. He truly believes that there is no Ukrainian nation, that people cannot defend their own future and are incapable of organizing protests on their own. And indeed — why would a man who once believed that the protests in Dresden at the end of the German Democratic Republic were paid for suddenly change his view of Ukrainian Maidan movements?
But this attack is rather evidence of bureaucratic, positional inadequacy — something Putin could never have afforded in the past. He does not have extra money for the army — yet he spends billions on an attack that changes nothing. It did not affect Ukraine’s military-technical potential in any way. It cannot intimidate people, because intimidation works in the first months of a war, not in its fifth year — those who remained in Ukraine have already adapted, in their own way, to such horrific испытания. The only thing such an attack can achieve is to increase the level of hatred.
That is why I am not surprised when I read in Western publications that the Russian president is causing disappointment among members of his own circle — the political and business elite of Russia. These people are not liberals either — they share the same program as Putin, believe in the necessity of restoring control over Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, and in the importance of confrontation with the West. For most of them, Putin is an ideal leader, while the rest are simply intimidated.
What unites these people is the desire for their leader to be rational in his actions and to realistically assess the situation in Russia and around it. But Putin has not shown any rationality lately at all. This is evident both in public perception — his rating is noticeably declining — and in conversations between Russian officials and Western journalists. That is why I can assume that even such representatives of Putin’s inner circle as Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov and First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Sergey Kiriyenko may indeed have tried to dissuade Putin from imposing harsher restrictions on Russians — but failed.
And yes, these people will remain dissatisfied — but they will do nothing to change the situation because they fear Putin. They will wait either for his return to common sense or for his end — and this will make the Russian president even more unpredictable and dangerous. This is a new Putin — crushed by years of futility in the Russian-Ukrainian war and betrayed by his own inadequacy. And the next actions of such a Putin should be treated with even greater caution.
Author: Vitaly Portnikov