POLITICS: Putin’s playbook is the same a quarter-century later — peace talks are pointless

President George W. Bush famously underestimated Vladimir Putin.

Asked about his impressions of the Russian president after a brief meeting in 2001, the then-US president claimed that he had “looked into Putin’s eyes” and “saw his soul.”

It is odd that Bush imagined he had some mystical ability to divine the soul of his Russian counterpart.

His secretary of state, Colin Powell, had a different reaction.

Powell said that he, too, had looked into Putin’s eyes “and I saw the KGB.”

Almost a quarter of a century has passed since then.

US presidents have come and gone.

But Putin remains, still perplexing his US counterparts.

Bush found out what was behind Putin’s eyes a little too late.

Toward the end of Bush’s second term, in 2008, Putin’s Russia invaded the neighboring country of Georgia.

Although Putin didn’t get everything he wanted from that conflict, his brutal invasion did allow him to purge Georgians from South Ossetia and Abkhazia and install Russian forces in those regions.

Lesson of history

It was a relatively small war, but one that many people in the West seem to have forgotten.

Ever since Putin repeated his Georgian maneuver on a much grander scale in Ukraine in 2022, there are still people who like to pretend that Ukraine is all that Vladimir Putin wants.

To think this is to repeat a historic mistake.

In general you can weigh up world leaders in two ways: what they say, and what they do.

Putin is by turns open and sphinx-like about what he wants.

Speaking to the Russian people, he can be explicit about the expansion he wants — including the reconstruction of the Soviet Empire.

To others he can play a subtler game, bamboozling ignorant foreign interviewers and running rings around them.

But it is by his actions that you can really know Putin.

And just consider his actions lately.

This week he ordered some of the largest aerial assaults to date on the people of Ukraine.

President Trump, who believed that he was in the middle of a cease-fire negotiation with the Russian president, finally seemed to have lost patience.

“Absolutely crazy” was among the things that Trump labeled Putin’s latest assault on his neighbor.

Putin’s spokesman responded by dismissing Trump’s comments as “emotional.”

But Trump is right to be angry about what Putin is doing.

Because at the same time as dragging out negotiations — postponing meetings, reneging on promises — he is deliberately dragging out the war that he started.

And there are few signs that he is ready to stop that war anytime soon. In the past three years he has restructured the whole Russian economy onto a wartime footing.

With arms production on overdrive and billions of dollars being spent on the wartime economy, he has few reasons to stop the war even if he wanted to.

Russia is good at sitting out long conflicts, and its people are used to hardship.

Compare that to the Western powers who say they want to stand up to Putin.

Trump has rightly insisted that this country’s European allies step up to the moment and increase their share of defense spending.

He is absolutely right in that — and his pressure is already having positive ­results.

Germany’s mistake

When Angela Merkel was chancellor of Germany, she made a set of catastrophic policy decisions relating to Russia.

Not least was her enthusiasm for importing cheap Russian gas through the Nord Stream 2 project.

Worse was that during her chancellorship, Germany’s defense spending dropped to just 1% of GDP.

Today, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Germany has realized that it is going to have to step up.

Under pressure from Trump, Chancellor Friedrich Merz is promising to up his country’s defense spending to 5% of GDP.

Which is double the baseline spending commitment expected of NATO members.

But the question of when that military spending will turn into military reality is another question.

In reality we might all be dead of natural causes before Germany manages to increase its arms production and army recruitment processes.

Putin knows that. He knows that with a US which doesn’t threaten him, and a Europe that can’t get its act together, the cards are largely in his hands.

It is another reason why it seems that he can afford himself little treats, as well as monumental snubs.

The snubs include his repeated claims that he is committed to peace while bombing the hell out of Ukraine.

The little treats include some very knowing nods to the Soviet past.

This week a new monument was unveiled in the Moscow subway system.

But the new statue was of an old leader.

It is an ugly Soviet frieze-like monument of Joseph Stalin surrounded by statues of adoring works and children. Flowers were placed on the monument shortly after it was unveiled.

The sculpture tells its own tale.

It is part of a concerted effort by Putin and his regime to rehabilitate the Soviet dictator who was responsible for more deaths and misery than any other Russian leader.

As well as being responsible for the deaths of millions of his own countrymen, Stalin stands out as one of the most blood-thirsty, cunning and expansionist leaders in Russian history.

Among some serious competition.

Dreams of empire

So why would the authorities in Moscow go back to celebrating him now?

Because Russia is on a war footing, and every stop is being pulled out to persuade the Russian people of the virtue of that war.

Many Russians still revere Stalin — in spite of the gulags and purges — because he helped Russia get through and help win the Second World War.

Putin wants to draw on those same Russian reserves.

And he wants to persuade his people that his war in Ukraine is absolutely similar to Stalin’s war against the Nazis.

He is drawing on the deepest and darkest reserves that he can in order to keep his war in motion.

It is up to the West to decide whether the darkness that Vladimir Putin draws on is something we should just observe.

Or a force that we can deter.