What Does Putin Want?

The short answer to the question presented above in the title is – Putin wants Ukraine -- for now -- and a return to the vanished glory years of Joseph Stalin, known during the pre-World II years as “the breaker of nations.” Ukraine was among the nations broken by Stalin. Others were the Baltic States and Poland, which simply disappeared from Russian maps following its forced incorporation into the Soviet Union.

 

It was not until 1946, when Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, that the West shook off its partly self-induced slumber. Russian historians date the Cold War from the delivery of Churchill’s speech.

 

The Churchill speech – The Sinews of Peace (‘Iron Curtain Speech’) – may be found here. The speech, even today, gives voice to what Abraham Lincoln once called “the mystic chords of memory.”

 

“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic,” Churchill declaimed in what historians have called his most important speech, “an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.”

 

Ukraine went down Stalin’s throat like a porcupine with its quills dangerously extended. In 1932-33, Stalin contrived a famine in Ukraine, later called the Holodomor, that resulted in the death by starvation of 8 to 10 million Ukrainians. The figures are fungible because, for reasons known only to Stalin, the census data figures covering the years of the Stalin induced famine went missing, as did many vocal Ukrainians.

 

Stalin did not believe in half-measures. Stalin’s shock troops descended upon Ukraine and destroyed even the ovens used by small farmers. Starving Ukrainians who were forced to eat the leaves off the trees in their despair were hidden from word view by Pulitzer Prize winning reporters such as Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ chief reporter about whom Malcomb Muggeridge said that Duranty was the worst pathological liar he had ever encountered in journalism.

 

Putin’s most serious mistake involves the reorientation of Russia, historically and culturally a western not an eastern state. Not only the Russian Czars -- principally Peter the Great, who modernized the country, quickly transforming it into a major European power -- but its greatest and most intellectually gifted writers and artists are western to the core. By reorienting his country east towards China, a neo-fascist state, Russia cannot help but surrender to China its much prized insularity – its freedom from foreign influence. Geographically China lies beneath Russia’s 2,615.5 mile long soft underbelly, one of the longest international borders in the world. The northern province of China boasts a population of 123 million, while the population of Eastern Siberia, about half of Russia, is a scant 14 million.

 

 

 

The map pictured above outlines Russia’s vulnerability to China. Geography matters greatly in world affairs, and cultural affinities are determinative.  Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Chekov are all read and admired in western nations. Imprinted with centuries of cross cultural pollination, they carry to Russians and Americans the fructifying ideas of western civilization.

 

Putin’s peace offensive and his war offensive are exactly the same. During the Stalinist period, the second worst terrorist in modern history rightly considered Ukraine, brought to knees by means of the Holodomor, the gateway to Eastern Europe and Poland. Once Stalin annexed Ukraine through terror and bullets, the door lay open to the Baltic States and Poland. In the construction of the Soviet Union, Germany itself was Stalin’s ultimate prize. When Russia’s Stalinists met a principled opposition from Western Europe, including the United States, the Berlin Wall went up. Stalin knew that war was diplomacy by other means. Putin has been Stalin’s faithful student.

 

The West, including weak and vacillating presidents of the United States, know what Putin wants --because Putin told the West what he wants when he said the loss of the Soviet Union was the worst calamity in modern post-World War II history.

 

Russia under Putin, a Potemkin Village of a country, is – and here this writer chooses his words carefully – an unholy mess. The Russian economy is what one would expect of a South American drug cartel holding at bay through unspeakable terror a quasi-democratic country such as Mexico.

The pro-Kremlin Moskovskij Komsomolets newspaper reported recently that the "overwhelming majority of [regional] governors are experiencing problems with filling their budgets this year… due to a general slowdown in the economy, a drop in business profits, the closure of and restrictions on the work of enterprises, [and] problems with the export of key products." Inflation, hovering at 10%, is out pacing revenue gains by a substantial margin, partly because nondefense government expenses are also increasing significantly. Regional government budgets are running a total deficit of nearly $5 billion over the first part of 2025. The Washington Examiner notes, “That's no small amount for an economy 13.5 times smaller than that of the United States.”

 

But Putin is right about one thing: War, if one may call the unremitting bombing of civilian targets a war, really is diplomacy by Iranian manufactured drones and bullets. So far, Putin’s diplomacy has been partly successful, if not victorious. Ukrainians know their own history. When Abe Lincoln, in the midst of a civil war, was pressured by everyone, including important members of his cabinet, to ditch Ulysses Grant, he said he could not get rid of Grant – “That man fights.”