Vladimir Putin: 

Crafty Strategist 

or Aggrieved and 

Reckless Leader?

Analysts puzzling over the Russian leader’s intentions say that his troop buildup around Ukraine could be a convincing bluff, but also posit that he could have fundamentally changed during the pandemic.

NOW DO YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN ABOUT PEOPLE ACTING DIFFERENTLY?!

At this moment of crescendo for the Ukraine crisis, it all comes down to what kind of leader President Vladimir V. Putin is. 

1) In Moscow, many analysts remain convinced that the Russian president is essentially rational, and 2) that the risks of invading Ukraine would be so great, that 3) his huge troop buildup makes sense only as a very convincing bluff.  

If  "In Moscow" means Russian analysts then I hereby offer this racist analysis. Russian homos, like Polish homos, are incapable of stringing together...maybe it's just two, more than two cogent thoughts at one time. Observe, #1 is the view analysts had of all Soviet leaders. #2 is self-evidently true. But then, happens every time to a Russian, they get some click in their head and come out with the like of #3. Consider, Uncle Joe ignored all evidence of Nazi-partner troop buildup on border with (psst! Ukraine); dismissed all warnings from Churchill and Roosevelt that Uncle Alf was about to invade; didn't get the memo until after Barbarossa was well underway and continued delivering supplies to the Krauts pursuant to the Non-Aggression Pact! Russian soldiers didn't believe it. One on the front lines telephoned his commander at headquarters and was told "You must be drunk!"Okay? This is pan-Russo. Molotov was snookered. Nobody believed it. All of this only "makes sense as a very convincing bluff"? Memo to Rooski: American homo not stoopid in head like Rooski homo!

But some also leave the door open to the idea that he has fundamentally changed amid the pandemic, a shift that may have left him more paranoid, more aggrieved and more reckless.

The 20-foot-long table that Mr. Putin has used to socially distance himself this month from European leaders flying in for crisis talks symbolizes, to some longtime observers, his detachment from the rest of the world. 

:) Okay! That's bullshit!

For almost two years, Mr. Putin has ensconced himself in a virus-free cocoon unlike that of any Western leader, with state television showing him holding most key meetings by teleconference alone in a room and keeping even his own ministers at a distance on the rare occasions that he summons them in person.

...

“There’s this impression of irritation, of a lack of interest, of an unwillingness to delve into anything new,” Ekaterina Schulmann, a political scientist and former member of Mr. Putin’s human rights council, said of the president’s recent public appearances. “The public is being shown that he has been in practical isolation"...

A large-scale invasion of Ukraine, many analysts point out, would be an enormous escalation compared with any of the actions that Mr. Putin has taken before. In 2014, the Kremlin’s subterfuge allowed Russian forces stripped of identifying markings to capture Crimea without firing a single shot.

Okay, that's not! That is true. It would be out of character.

...

...skeptics of the view that Mr. Putin is bluffing point out that during the pandemic, he has already taken actions that earlier seemed unlikely. His harsh crackdown against the network of Aleksei A. Navalny, for example, has contradicted what had been a widely held view that Mr. Putin was happy to allow some domestic dissent as an escape valve to manage discontent.

Okay. Skeptics of the bluff theory, of which the undersigned is a charter though undistinguished member, see a Russian head click going on with the link to Navalny. Unlikely, huh? Ever heard of Pussy Riot, Rooski critics? Assassinations within view of the Kremlin? Assassinations in Britain? NOT out of character.

...

“Starting a full-scale war is completely not in Putin’s interest,” said Anastasia Likhacheva, the dean of world economy and international affairs at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow. 

 No, it is not.

“It is very difficult for me to find any rational explanation for a desire to carry out such a campaign.”

Yes, it is. And I just wrote that I was taught in graduate school during the height of the Cold War, and found what I was taught consistent with everything else I read, that Soviet leaders were rational. As one of my professors said, "They don't wake up each morning and ask 'Are we gonna' hit 'em today?'"

Even if Mr. Putin were able to take control of Ukraine, she noted, such a war would accomplish the opposite of what the president says he wants: rolling back the NATO presence in Eastern Europe. In the case of a war, the NATO allies would be “more unified than ever,” Ms. Likhacheva said, and they would be likely to deploy powerful new weaponry along Russia’s western frontiers.

That is absolutely correct. 

At home, Mr. Putin has always been keen to project the aura of a sober statesman, overruling the nationalist firebrands on prime-time talk shows and in Parliament who have been urging him for years to annex more of Ukraine.

... he casts himself as Russia’s guarantor of stability, [yet] he could face stark economic headwinds from Western sanctions and social upheaval if there are casualties on the battlefield and among civilians. Millions of Russians have relatives in Ukraine.

Good point. I had never thought of that previously but of course it makes sense.

If Mr. Putin were to carry out a short and limited military operation along the lines of the five-day war against Georgia in 2008, he [some Russian pollster] said, Russians could be expected to support it.

..."a lengthy, bloody war"...still seems unthinkable and irrational to so many in Moscow [.] Russian foreign policy experts generally see the standoff over Ukraine as the latest stage in Mr. Putin’s yearslong effort to compel the West to accept what he sees as fundamental Russian security concerns. ...

Fyodor Lukyanov, a prominent Moscow foreign policy analyst who advises the Kremlin, said Mr. Putin’s goal now was “to force the outcome of the Cold War to be partially revised.” But he still believes Mr. Putin will stop short of full-scale invasion, instead using “special, asymmetric or hybrid means” — including making the West believe that he is truly prepared to attack.

“A bluff has to be very convincing,” Mr. Lukyanov said. And the United States, he went on, with its robust portrayals of an aggressive Russia poised for invasion, “is playing along at 200 percent.”

Whale...Fyodor sounds like a rational man, no?…A bluff can be too convincing. 190,000 Russian soldiers on the border in the dead of Russian winter that's not a bluff to any rational person, Fyodor. If Putin pulled everything back right now and said "Ha-ha! Scared you" there is damage that has occurred. No rational American trusts Russians. If this turns out to be a bluff Fyodor, Putin might as well go invade because we’ll  have no truck with him or debased country ever again. Revise the outcome of the Cold War! Fyodor, dude, lemme tell yous somethin'. If this makes sense to you as a bluff to get a rollback of NATO?—Now we are more likely to invite Ukraine. And Georgia, and the Kaluga, Ryazan, and Tula fucking Oblasts! And Fyodor, old chap, please remember, we Americanos are not making this stuff up like your advisees do, any Americano can google "border between Ukraine and Russia” and see for hisself or herself that your troops are there. Remember also, Fyodor: American intelligence is goot, we have guys and gal-guys who know ev-er-ee-thing. Do you remember Fyodor when we snuck a nuclear submarine into and out of Murmansk harbor before your predecessor advisees ever knew we had been there? Do you remember when every nuclear submarine in our fleet simultaneously pinged all of your surface vessels giving our locations around the world and just about ruptured the ear drums of your spooks listening for even one ping using the state of the art method of pressing their ears to the bottom of the ship hulls?  We have bugs and spooks everywhere, we are bugging in ways you have no comprehension of, good as your people are! We know what Putin is thinking and saying—Listen to what President Biden knows.

By this line of thinking, Russian analysts say, American officials are falling for an exaggerated image of Mr. Putin as an evil genius. 

Americans do not consider Putin either evil or a genius. Just Russian.

“He is very successful at using the negative image that has been created of him as a demon,” said Dmitri Trenin, the head of the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank, describing Mr. Putin as capitalizing on fears that he was prepared to unleash a horrific war. “The plan was to create a threat, to create the sense that a war could happen.”

But the experts have been wrong before. In 2014, Mr. Putin seized Crimea, even as few Moscow analysts were predicting a military intervention.