I love the way that board games become trendy again. I grew up with a tradition of a Sunday afternoon board game with my parents and sister, which usually ended in a tantrum from me whenever I did not win. The day I caught my mum cheating stands among the lasting traumas of my life. All good aides to growing up!
We didn’t possess Risk at home and in any case it needs more than four players to work well, but I remember a game of Risk from some point in my thirties. One player, a very quiet lady, followed a strategy that differed markedly from everybody else. We were all frenetically gambling and fighting and conquering and suffering, while all she did was quietly build her resources. Then she chose her moment and wiped us all out within two moves. I was very impressed and took away more valuable life lessons.
I should have known better, because one game from my childhood was called “L’Attaque”. It was a great game, but should more correctly have been called “La Defense”, because the winning strategy was always to let your opponent do all the attacking.
I recalled many of these lessons, including the one about authority figures cheating, when reading about Russia’s military build up in Ukraine. There was a wonderful long article about the tangled history of Russia and Ukraine in the Christmas double issue of The Economist, followed up this week with a strong essay concerning the current situation. As always with The Economist, the first thing to do is strip away the MI5 propaganda: fortunately in this case that was relatively easy and the remaining content was still powerful.
Most of the article was spent trying to discern Putin’s motives. While more thoughtful than most such pieces, I was still left with the strong impression that the author was from the west, was schooled in the west, and thought like people in the west. When I worked in competitor intelligence our watchword was to walk in the shoes of the competitor. It is astonishing how poor we are at this in our complacent western bubble. Who, for instance, might think that taking out an ISIS leader would do anything but anger a new generation and act as a midwife for more ISIS’s? I was at least heartened by the self-awareness shown by quoting a recent remark of Alexei Navalny: :”Time and again the West falls into Putin’s elementary traps…it just takes my breath away”. What an indictment that is of eighty years of western intelligence!
So what traps is Putin setting? If we put ourselves in his shoes and think like Risk players we can find some answers.
First, Putin is a tactician more than a strategist. He probably does not know his endgame himself yet, he is simply building resources to give himself options. Hopefully he won’t be like that girl I played Risk with who devoured the rest of us.
Next, the long article makes clear that Russia has a unique view of its own history and role in the world. The bear is proud, defensive, fearful, vengeful, feels entitled and takes an expansive view of its own boundaries and role. Everything has to be seen in these contexts.
What this means with respect to Ukraine is manifold. Putin does not really accept that Ukraine is a different country, certainly not the parts of it (and there are many, and not just abutting Russia) where Russian is spoken and where there is Russian history. The frightening few weeks when the USSR broke up and an alcoholic Yeltsin and a few acolytes tried to reset the world order left a bitter mark, and we should remember that the west has reneged on many promises made at that time. Russia will see a western orientated Ukraine with military prowess as an unacceptable mortal threat. It is just as easy geographically to invade Moscow from Kyiv as it is to invade Kyiv from Moscow.
Most important, this is personal. A lot of politics is personal. 2016 is instructive. Putin did not interfere in the US election primarily because he thought he could outmanoeuvre Trump (though that was a big bonus), it was because he hated Hillary Clinton and bore a massive grudge against her. There are probably several people in Ukraine that we have never heard of that meet the same criteria.
Next, Putin is very comfortable with messiness. Most of us have a preference for clean solutions to problems. Indeed being uncomfortable with ambiguity is a limiting factor in many lives. Putin can tolerate a mess for a long time if it suits him. It is Risk all over again. Moldova has been a divided mess for 25 years. That is a lovely asset for Putin sitting ready for him to use when it suits. Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Georgia and now the Donbas follow the same pattern, as does Belorussia and now even Kazakhstan in their different ways. Russians love chess. Don’t look for endgames. They emerge, sometimes very slowly.
The Economist guessed that the main objectives of the troop build up might have been to shore things up at home via a manufactured crisis and to snub his nose at the west. Fair enough, and both have been achieved. But I don’t think it is as clean as that. Putin is ex KGB and will have a chessboard full of characters that he is trying to manipulate here, most of them in Russia or Ukraine. He doesn’t understand about communicating to an entire populace – the KGB just locked people up – but he knows how to structure a chessboard of powerful individuals. Many of the true targets here will be some oligarchs we have never heard of.
I wish we could analyse this more intelligently in the west. That probably starts by keeping anybody military out of the way. But if people believe what they say, they are so dumb that Navalny is proven correct on a daily basis. Take the gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. Somehow we are supposed to believe that this gives Russia extra leverage. That is nonsense. Europe has a shortage of reliable gas suppliers and supply routes. The new pipeline can only improve things. It does not have to be used. Europe can buy from elsewhere. The ones who lose by the new pipeline are the ones controlling the choke points, because adding a new supply line reduces their leverage. In practice, that means Ukraine, and it is the Hunter Biden’s and other overpaid parasitic consultants who are the ones peddling this nonsense. The sad part is how we continually fall for it.
My guess is that Putin will back down, unless he is provoked by something very personal. He is playing a long and messy game of Risk. Building up forces is cheap. Actually fighting is not, and usually ends badly. Putin is already lobbing jobs at the west saying it was us who created the crisis by stoking fear. There is truth to this (and also that there are a lot of troops surrounding Ukraine). Let him say it, and wait for him to withdraw and claim victory.
I find a clear parallel here with the west and China, most notably regarding Taiwan. Xi is not Putin: he is smarter, and actually cares for his people as well as his clos confidantes. He has a stronger hand, but is equally patient. I predict that Taiwan will be like Hong Kong. Within ten years China will have practical control, and they won’t fire a bullet to achieve it. The west won’t see it coming, at least won’t see how it is coming. A more detailed prediction is that TSMC, the world’s largest and most successful semiconductor producer, will play a key role in Xi’s strategy.
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