Few world leaders have been able to shape their own personal mythology quite like Vladimir Putin, the inscrutable career spy who appeared in the Kremlin as if from nowhere. His backstory is a product of his own careful curation. As a result, we do at least know how he wishes the world to see him. And so, this week, Putin’s adversaries will have had reason to recall the story of the cornered rat.
It is one of the childhood memories Putin shared with his authorised biographers, and has repeated often: how, in the 1950s Leningrad of his childhood, he and his friends used to chase rats around the courtyard of his apartment building. One day, Putin’s story goes, he cornered a rat and closed in with a big stick, only for the rat suddenly to lunge forward and attack, giving him the fright of his life. He learned a lesson. “No one should be cornered. No one should be put in a situation where they have no way out.”
Seven months into his invasion of Ukraine, Putin is at risk of being cornered. How he responds will shape the outcome of the war as well as his presidency and perhaps even the future security of Europe.
In their lightning offensive in the northern Kharkiv region, Ukrainian forces have retaken 7,000sq km of territory occupied by Russia since the summer, dramatically altering the dynamic of a war in which the front lines had been static for months. The rout in itself does not signal the end of the war, and Ukraine’s next major challenge is to secure the liberated territory in the face of potential Russian counter-attacks, but it does further degrade Russia’s war effort while making it far more difficult for Moscow to attempt to take the whole of the Donbas – one of its stated aims.
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Perhaps more importantly, the events of the past 10 days have struck a powerful psychological blow. Reports of Russian soldiers fleeing in panic, abandoning their tanks and weapons as the Ukrainians swept east towards the town of Izium, have given a powerful morale boost to Ukrainians and their western partners as a tough winter approaches.
The experience will have shaken the trust of Russia’s already exhausted soldiers in their military leadership and, in Russia, misgivings about the course of the war are being openly aired on state television. Commentators in Moscow have taken care not to aim their criticism directly at Putin, but they don’t need to. This is Putin’s war, and his self-image – his entire system of power – is built around a reputation for competence and strength. His own basic miscalculations in Ukraine may have been apparent from day one, but now he faces a prospect that few would have envisaged last February: with the right support, Ukraine could well win this war.
Russia responded to its battlefield losses by knocking out the power supply and other civilian infrastructure in the Kharkiv region, but Putin himself has stayed silent. At his meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Uzbekistan on Thursday, what was supposed to be an opportunity to underline Beijing’s solidarity with an increasingly isolated Moscow instead revealed tensions between them. Putin’s public acknowledgment of Chinese “concerns” over the war in Ukraine was the clear sign of rupture in a relationship that only months ago Xi described as “without limits”.
The general assumption is that Putin’s position is secure. Given the Russian state’s repressive powers and the weakness of the opposition, its leaders in jail and its activists unable to organise, the prospect of an internal challenge is generally discounted. But western capitals have a poor record of anticipating revolutions – they failed to predict the fall of the Soviet Union – and the longer the war continues, the more volatile the situation will become.
All of Putin’s options come with domestic and military risks. Retreating now, without first preparing the ground for compromise, would provoke fury from the nationalist right. If his record in Chechnya is any guide, his instinct will be to escalate. But a general mobilisation could provoke a public backlash against a war that until now has remained remote from the lives of most Russians. And there are real doubts about whether Russia, having suffered huge casualties and lost so much hardware, has the manpower or the equipment to launch new ground offensives.
Putin’s rat anecdote has often been interpreted as a veiled threat of nuclear war. Some analysts worry that Russia could use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine – a prospect that is dismissed by Moscow. It would set off a dangerous spiral and almost certainly draw a western response.
It is more likely that Putin may decide to intensify air attacks on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure while betting that surging energy prices and possible shortages in Europe this winter will persuade Ukraine’s allies to talk Kyiv into a truce on Russia’s terms. That seems highly unlikely, however, and any attempt to raze Ukrainian cities, as Russia did in Syria, will only harden the resolve of Ukrainians and the West. After recent reversals, this is now Moscow’s dilemma: the harder it strikes back, the weaker it looks.