The summer evening at a beachside nightclub in the Black Sea resort of Sochi resembled a modern-day version of a gladiator fight in imperial Rome. Russian fighters pummeled a \u201cworld\u201d team in a mixed martial arts contest. Scantily dressed women waved Russian flags and the crowd roared as the home squad racked up victories. The highlight was the knockout of a 44-year-old American fighter.<\/p>\n
It was August 2013 and sitting in a front-row seat in a white dress shirt and flanked by security guards and political acolytes was Vladimir Putin. Six months later, Russia\u2019s president set his country on its path to war by seizing Crimea from Ukraine, and ultimately a full-scale invasion entering its third year next week.<\/p>\n
The scene in Sochi encapsulated Putin\u2019s world view: a staged demonstration of Russian might in the face of what he sees as disrespect for his country\u2019s place in the global order. As the authoritarian leader prepares to tighten his grip on power in an election next month, the question of how to handle him has become even more urgent after Republican frontrunner Donald Trump indicated that if he\u2019s back in office in the U.S. he could let Russia pick off NATO countries not meeting their defense spending pledges.<\/p>\n
In Ukraine, Putin is attempting to strike his own decisive blow against the U.S. and Europe to reshape that global order to Russia\u2019s advantage. Putin\u2019s gamble \u2014 backed by military force and grudges \u2014 is that he can bend the world to his will. China, with its own territorial ambitions, is watching carefully how much Russia is able to push the boundaries.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe is sitting right there on his throne, keeping an eye on the entire plot and trying to figure out how he can manipulate and take advantage of every set of international circumstances to push forward,\u201d said Fiona Hill, a former top White House advisor on Russia. \u201cPutin can look like he\u2019s losing colossally, but he\u2019s actually winning \u2014 and he\u2019ll think he\u2019s winning.\u201d<\/p>\n
Encouraged by Trump, Republican opposition in the U.S. to continuing to arm Ukraine is growing. Billionaire Elon Musk also urged Americans to lobby Congress to oppose funding for Ukraine on Monday, saying there\u2019s \u201cno way in hell\u201d Putin can lose the war.<\/p>\n
How Putin got here is a story in three parts, based on previously unreported scenes and conversations with former heads of state, diplomats and senior Kremlin officials spanning more than a decade. <\/p>\n
He was the KGB agent who came out of the shadows to lead his country after the turmoil of the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin; the president who dismantled the oligarchy that morphed out of communism and became its all-powerful ruler; and now the wartime leader trying to ensure his invasion of Ukraine doesn\u2019t turn into an Afghanistan-like failure that helped usher in the demise of the Soviet Union he so reveres.<\/p>\n
Aged 71, Putin is on course for a fifth term even as hundreds of thousands of Russians have been killed or wounded in the war that\u2019s largely reached a stalemate against Ukrainian forces who are themselves struggling to make progress as weapons supplies falter from their U.S. and European allies. <\/p>\n
He faces no serious challenger in the March 17 election that will hand him six more years as president, a job he wasn\u2019t even sure that he\u2019d last in beyond his first term, which ended 20 years ago, according to people who worked with him at the time. The Kremlin is determined to present his victory as a public endorsement of the invasion.<\/p>\n
Putin, meanwhile, is reshaping Russian society in his image at an unprecedented pace. He\u2019s stoked patriotic fervor with a mix of nostalgia for Russia\u2019s imperial and Soviet past in parallel with the harshest repression for decades. He casts himself as the defender of Russian sovereignty and traditional Orthodox Christian values against the \u201cliberal\u201d West.<\/p>\n
While his invasion of Ukraine triggered Europe\u2019s biggest conflict since World War II, the scale of the rupture between Russia and the West in the past two years still seems hard for many to conceive.<\/p>\n
Months after Putin was last re-elected, in 2018, Russia hosted hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors for football\u2019s FIFA World Cup. Emmanuel Macron sat with Putin at the Moscow final to see France lift the trophy.<\/p>\n
The French president was among those who tried to leverage his personal relationship with Putin. Top of his concern was that Russia might court China should Europe turn its back. Macron invited him to his summer residence in 2019, where Putin showed up with flowers for his wife, Brigitte. The turning point was a year later when Putin told Macron it was possible that opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who\u2019d survived an assassination attempt in Russia, had poisoned himself. <\/p>\n
Former Czech President Milos Zeman, who was regarded in Moscow as well-disposed toward Russia, said he misjudged Putin, especially over his intentions in Ukraine.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought that Vladimir Putin was rational, not emotional, that he can’t take a step that would objectively weaken the interests of the Russian Federation,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cSo that\u2019s why I publicly said, shortly before the Russian aggression, that Russians aren\u2019t fools to attack Ukraine. And unfortunately, it came to pass that they are fools.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s all a very long way from the energetic, judo-loving leader who replaced the ailing Yeltsin, eager to partner with the U.S. and Europe. In that honeymoon period, Putin even suggested Russia could join the NATO alliance that he now declares an existential threat to his country.<\/p>\n
This was the Putin who was the first foreign leader to call U.S. President George W. Bush to offer support after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Earlier, then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair flew to St. Petersburg for talks with Putin while he was still acting president in March 2000. The pair attended a performance of Sergei Prokofiev\u2019s opera \u201cWar and Peace.\u201d<\/p>\n
Putin blamed the West when he recalled his suggestion to join NATO in a speech to the annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, a Russian think-tank, in Sochi in October. After the Soviet collapse ended the Cold War, \u201cwe thought we became part of the crowd,\u201d he said. \u201cI guess the problem was their geopolitical interests and arrogance toward others.\u201d<\/p>\n
A senior adviser to Putin at that time said the Russian leader genuinely wanted to build closer ties with the West. He would meet not only with foreign leaders, but ministers and sometimes even just ambassadors to explain his views, including on the most controversial subjects such as his war in Chechnya. Whatever Putin said, though, the Russian military didn\u2019t believe there\u2019d be an alliance with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe in the Defense Ministry never received any orders that would signal the seriousness of such intentions,\u201d said Evgeny Buzhinsky, a former general who served in its international relations department from 2002-2009.<\/p>\n
Sense of Betrayal<\/p>\n
Resentment slowly took over. Putin often grew angry after meetings with U.S. representatives. Disillusionment with the West gradually soured into a sense of betrayal on issues such as U.S. plans for a new missile-defense system in Europe.<\/p>\n
It finally erupted into anger in a notorious speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Before an audience of Western leaders, Putin railed against NATO and called its expansion \u201ca serious provocation.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cHe fundamentally misread American interest and politics,\u201d William Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow and now CIA director, wrote in his 2019 book \u201cThe Back Channel: A Memoir of American Diplomacy and the Case for Its Renewal.\u201d The U.S. treated Russia as \u201ca power in strategic decline\u201d in Putin\u2019s early years and \u201cwe certainly didn\u2019t need to discuss long term bipartisan priorities and partnerships in Europe to buy Putin\u2019s favor,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
With booming oil and gas prices filling the Kremlin\u2019s coffers and fueling an economic recovery from the post-Soviet collapse, Putin embarked on a more than decade-long rearmament program that allocated hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize Russia\u2019s military.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe U.S. also dropped the ball,\u201d said Ben Hodges, a former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe. \u201cWe were unrealistic about the Russian threat between 2010 and 2014 and now we\u2019re paying the price for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
When NATO first opened its doors to potential membership to Ukraine and Georgia at its 2008 summit, Putin warned Bush that Ukraine would cease to exist if it entered the alliance, Russian newspaper Kommersant reported. Months later, a brief war in Georgia saw Russian troops close in on the capital, Tbilisi, cementing Putin\u2019s control over two breakaway regions.<\/p>\n
Putin was ruling as prime minister by then, having hand-picked Dmitry Medvedev to be president for four years in 2008 to comply with term limits in Russia\u2019s constitution. Medvedev announced in September 2011 he was making way for Putin to return to the Kremlin.<\/p>\n
In the background, powerful allies worried about losing influence and money to Medvedev\u2019s circle rooted for Putin\u2019s return. Medvedev was younger, more rational, a technocrat, but Putin was the guarantor of stability, one of the richest people in Russia in 2012 said in a private conversation. And without its \u201ctsar,\u201d the system would become weak, the person said.<\/p>\n
The NATO-led intervention in Libya\u2019s civil war in 2011, following a United Nations resolution on which Medvedev had abstained, was arguably the final straw. Putin was horrified when he watched a video of a mob killing and mutilating Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi, a person familiar with the matter said. He concluded Medvedev was too weak to stand up to the West. <\/p>\n
Putin took two-thirds of the vote in March 2012 elections despite the largest ever demonstrations against his rule. Those protests often involved the entrepreneurial and creative middle classes that had emerged in Russia and wanted more say in their political futures. After his presidential limousine swept symbolically through deserted Moscow streets to his inauguration in May, the Kremlin began a widespread crackdown, jailing opposition activists and labeling non-governmental organizations as \u201cforeign agents.\u201d<\/p>\n
President again, Putin increasingly turned to Russians who were nostalgic for the certainties of the Soviet past, particularly in the country\u2019s provinces, as his political base. He indulged in action-man stunts, frequently shirtless, that fanned a macho image among his core supporters.<\/p>\n
Polls showed his approval rating on the slide before his 2014 seizure of Crimea. A deluge of nationalism then sent support soaring above 80% for years.<\/p>\n
The military operation began days after Russia hosted the Winter Olympics in Sochi, on which Putin had lavished a record $50 billion to showcase Russia as a sporting superpower. The Russian team that topped the medals chart in Sochi was later exposed in a doping scandal run by Putin\u2019s security service and banned from all Olympic competition.<\/p>\n
Putin, too, sought to deceive the world. He flatly denied that soldiers dubbed \u201clittle green men\u201d who took over Crimea in unmarked uniforms were Russian. It was a brazen lie \u2014 Putin admitted a year later the soldiers were his. Russia was expelled from the Group of Eight nations and the U.S. and Europe imposed sanctions.<\/p>\n
The relatively muted international response to the annexation and his leap in popularity at home reinforced Putin\u2019s sense that he\u2019s not just a lucky leader, but a divinely inspired one, people close to the Kremlin said. Vyacheslav Volodin, then the Kremlin\u2019s deputy chief of staff, told foreign academics and analysts at a 2014 Valdai meeting that \u201cif there is Putin, there is Russia. No Putin, no Russia.\u201d <\/p>\n
The pattern of deceit repeated before the full-scale invasion in February 2022, with Putin denying any plans for war until the very last moment. Indeed, his willingness to lie unflinchingly at talks with fellow leaders was one of Putin\u2019s most unsettling characteristics, according to a European official who attended dozens of meetings with him over more than a decade. As the war grew nearer, Putin increasingly resorted to long speeches about the West\u2019s mistreatment of Russia, according to the person.<\/p>\n
A head of a non-NATO country who spoke to Putin shortly before the war said they spent about 30 minutes discussing Ukraine and Putin was adamant he would never invade. When asked if he felt betrayed by Putin personally, he said: \u201cHe fooled everyone, not just me.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Covid-19 pandemic reinforced Putin\u2019s special status as the Kremlin threw a protective shield around him that required anyone who met with the president for even a few minutes to first endure two weeks in quarantine. That\u2019s as Russians were subject to looser restrictions than most European countries. <\/p>\n
The isolation had an impact on Putin\u2019s thinking that was underestimated, according to Ekaterina Schulmann, a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin. His resentment of the West festered.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe president\u2019s ties with the outside world were completely severed,\u201d said Schulmann, who was declared a \u201cforeign agent\u201d in Russia. \u201cPutin found himself in an even denser bubble than he was before.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the summer of 2021, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told one of her allies that her biggest concern was that Putin or Chinese President Xi Jinping may do something impulsive, because during Covid there hadn\u2019t been personal bilateral exchanges among leaders.<\/p>\n
One person who had met with Putin in 2021 described being stunned as the president lectured him for 25 minutes about the threat posed by the U.S. and its allies to Russia. The president held a very deep grudge, the person said.<\/p>\n
For years, Putin vowed he\u2019d never change Russia\u2019s constitution to stay in power. But as the world was locking down in response to the coronavirus, he did just that in early 2020.<\/p>\n
The key amendment allowing him to reset the clock was put forward by a loyal lawmaker who\u2019d been the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova. It handed Putin the right to run for two more terms, potentially staying in power to 2036. The scope of the law blindsided even people working on it for months beforehand, according to a person who was involved in it.<\/p>\n
War, Sanctions<\/p>\n
The war in Ukraine has been a failure for Russia on many levels. The invasion that was meant to bring a decisive victory in days shows no sign of ending any time soon. It has shattered the image of Russia\u2019s army as the world\u2019s second most powerful. After Putin invaded with the declared aim of preventing NATO expansion toward Russia, his country\u2019s border with the alliance has more than doubled since Finland joined last year.<\/p>\n
The sweeping international sanctions have failed so far to crush Russia\u2019s economy. But the Kremlin\u2019s propping up the ruble with capital controls, draining the national wealth fund to aid spending on the military and support measures for businesses, and has lost access to $300 billion in frozen foreign reserves abroad.<\/p>\n
Crimea faces repeated drone and missile strikes from Ukrainian forces, Russia\u2019s Black Sea fleet has moved from its home base following attacks on its ships, and Putin still doesn\u2019t fully control four regions of eastern and southern Ukraine that he claimed to have annexed \u201cforever\u201d nearly 18 months ago.<\/p>\n
But Putin has a \u201cfixation on controlling Ukraine and its choices,\u201d CIA Director Burns wrote in a Jan. 30 article in Foreign Affairs magazine. \u201cWithout that control, he believes it is impossible for Russia to be a great power or for him to be a great Russian leader.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the U.S., meanwhile, President Joe Biden is all but set for a sequel showdown with Trump, his predecessor who has criticized military support provided to Ukraine by Washington.<\/p>\n
Putin isn\u2019t necessarily holding out for Trump\u2019s return to the presidency as his first term was \u201ca great disappointment\u201d that produced no breakthroughs for Russia, according to Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of R.Politik, a political consultancy, and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. After meetings with Trump, one Kremlin insider said Russia just didn\u2019t understand him.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a Houdini quality to Putin that convinces Kremlin circles he\u2019ll emerge from even the biggest crises as a winner. He wields his longevity as a weapon to wear down the U.S. and Europe whose leadership and policy directions change regularly.<\/p>\n
Putin once mocked a reporter who asked if he planned to rule until 2030, saying he had no desire to remain on the Kremlin throne until he\u2019s 100 years old.In fact, he\u2019ll be 77, the age Trump is now and younger than Biden.<\/p>\n
\u2014With assistance from Ania Nussbaum, Andrea Dudik, Natalia Drozdiak, Alberto Nardelli and Peter Martin.<\/p>\n
___<\/p>\n