PUTIN WILL NEVER AGREE TO DE-ESCALATE, AND RUSSIA IS BRACING FOR A LONG WAR

[VIK LEWA]

Why Putin Will Never Agree to De-escalate

Regardless of Ukraine's counteroffensive, Russia is bracing for a long war.

There is no doubt that Russian elites and society largely share Putin's resentment of the West and belief that Russia is a great power. Still, many Russians significantly diverge with Putin on how much they are prepared to sacrifice in the standoff with the West. For Putin, the invasion presents an easy way to implement the goals he had struggled for years to realize in peacetime. This has always been Putin's trademark style of ruling: He believes that direct attempts to steer the leviathan of the Russian state are futile, and instead prefers to force the system to adapt to crises and to faits accomplis.

For years, Russia's businesses and bureaucracy struggled to develop the infrastructure needed for cooperation with Asia. But the war has led Russia to mobilize its resources and finance a range of Asia-oriented transport projects, from a railway link to the Indian Ocean via Iran and Azerbaijan (which had been discussed since 2005) to a new gas pipeline to China, which is now within reach after more than a decade of talks. Decreasing Russia's dependency on the U.S. dollar and Western financial system has been the government's priority since the 1990s, but it took a full-scale war to reduce the share of Russian exports paid in U.S. dollars or euros from nearly 90 percent in January 2022 to below 50 percent in December of the same year. Objectives such as substituting Western imports with domestic products, having Russians vacation inside the country, and restoring the prestige of the Russian armed forces have been on Putin's agenda for decades, but in the end, only war proved capable of making Russian bureaucrats, businessmen, and wider society implement them for real. Parts of the Moscow elite might still enjoy their Italian villas, Mediterranean yachts, and French delicacies, but their numbers shrink every time the West introduces another package of sanctions.

The international developments brought on by the war dovetail even more closely with Putin's long-held ambitions. Minsk's involvement in the aggression against Ukraine has sealed Belarus's isolation from the West and pushed the country into unprecedented integration with Russia—with little pressure required from Moscow. Meanwhile, Europe's loss of access to cheap Russian gas is a permanent thorn in the side of trans-Atlantic unity, potentially creating new sources of tension between Europe and the United States. The freezing of the Russian Central Bank's foreign reserves has flamed fears around the globe that Washington and Brussels will weaponize their currencies for other purposes. Russia's war has also created a new bone of contention between the West and China. Many developing countries have seized on it to be more assertive toward the United States and Europe.