Opinion | Vladimir Putin: The World’s Most Dangerous Fool

I haven’t written much about the war in Ukraine lately, because so little has changed strategically since the first few months of this conflict when three overarching facts pretty much drove everything — and still do.

Fact No. 1: As I previously wrote, when a war of this magnitude begins, the key question you ask yourself as a foreign affairs columnist is very simple: where should I be? Should I be in Moscow, Kyiv, the Donbas, Crimea, Warsaw, Berlin, Brussels, or Washington?

From the start of this conflict, the only place to be in order to understand its timing and direction is inside of Vladimir Putin’s head. Unfortunately, Putin doesn’t grant visas to his brain.

This is a real problem because this war originated entirely from that one place— with almost no input from his cabinet or military commanders— and certainly with no mass urging from the Russian people. So Russia will only be stopped in Ukraine, whether it’s winning or losing, when Putin decides to do so.

Which leads to fact No. 2: Putin never had a Plan B. It’s now obvious that he thought he was going to easily seize Kyiv, put a lackey as president, and put an end to any further Western cultural expansion towards Russia. He would then cast his shadow across all of Europe.

That leads to fact No. 3. Putin is in a situation where he can’t win, can’t lose, and can’t stop either. There’s no way to seize control of all of Ukraine, but at the same time, he can’t afford to be defeated after all the Russian lives and treasure exhausted. So he can’t stop.

In other words, Putin has defaulted to a punitive rocketing of Ukrainian towns and civilian infrastructure — a grinding war of attrition — with the hope that he can somehow drain enough blood from Ukrainians, and instill enough exhaustion in Kyiv’s Western allies, that they give him a big enough slice of Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine he can sell to the Russian people as a great victory.

Putin’s Plan B is to disguise that Plan A has failed. If this military operation had an honest name, it would be called Operation Save My Face.

This makes this one of the most senseless wars in modern times — a leader destroying another country’s civilian infrastructure until it gives him enough cover to hide the fact that he’s been a towering fool.

You can see from Putin’s Victory Day speech in Moscow on Tuesday that he’s grasping for any rationale to justify a war he started out of his personal fantasy that Ukraine is not a real country. He claimed that his invasion was provoked by Western “globalists and elites” who “talk about their exclusivity, pit people and split society, provoke bloody conflicts and upheavals, sow hatred, Russophobia, aggressive nationalism and destroy traditional family values that make a person a person.”

Putin invaded Ukraine to preserve Russian family values. Who knew? That’s a leader struggling to explain to his people why he started a war with a small neighbor that he says is not a real country.

One might wonder, why does a dictator like Putin feel he needs a disguise? Can’t he make his people believe whatever he wants?

It doesn’t seem so. If you examine his behavior, it’s clear that Putin is quite frightened today by two subjects: arithmetic and Russian history.

To understand why these subjects frighten him, you need to first consider the atmosphere surrounding him. As a foreign affairs writer reporting from autocratic countries, I’ve discovered that no matter how tightly controlled a place is, no matter how brutal and iron-fisted its dictator, EVERYBODY TALKS.