President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia took the stage in Sochi, Russia, last autumn, two days after Donald J. Trump won the US presidential election, and spoke of the dawn of a new world order.
“In a sense,” Putin said, “the moment of truth is coming.”
It may have already arrived.
After three years of grinding warfare and isolation by the West, a world of new possibilities has opened up for Putin with a change of power in Washington.
Gone are the statements from the East Room of the White House about the US standing up to bullies, supporting democracy over autocracy and ensuring freedom will prevail. Gone, too, is Washington’s united front against Russia with its European allies, many of whom have begun to wonder if the new American administration will protect them against a revanchist Moscow, or even keep troops in Europe at all.
Trump, having voiced desires to take Greenland, has pursued a rapid rapprochement with the Kremlin, while sidelining shocked European allies and publicly assailing President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
It is a rapid shift of fortunes for Putin. He dug in on the battlefield — despite mounting pressures and costs — to wait out western resolve in a far longer and more onerous conflict than Moscow had expected. Now, the Russian leader may believe his moment has come to shift the balance of power in favour of the Kremlin, not only in Ukraine.
“I think he sees real opportunity, both to win the war in Ukraine, effectively, but also to sideline the US not just from Ukraine but from Europe,” said Max Bergmann, a Russia analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington who worked at the state department during the Obama administration.
The Russian leader’s “grandiose objective”, Bergmann said, is the destruction of Nato, the 32-country military alliance led by the US, which was established after World War II to protect western Europe from the Soviet Union. “I think that is right now all on the table,” Bergmann said.
The opening represents one of the biggest opportunities for Putin in his quarter-century in power in Russia.
Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine three years ago, Putin issued demands to the US and its European allies that went far beyond Ukraine, proposing the resurrection of Cold War-style spheres of influence in a Europe divided between Moscow and Washington.
He asked the US and its western European allies not to deploy any military forces or weaponry in the Central and Eastern European countries that once answered to Moscow. Many of those nations, such as Estonia, Poland and Romania, have been Nato members for decades.
“In Putin’s view, it’s the most powerful countries that should get to determine the rules of the road,” said Angela Stent, emerita professor of government at Georgetown University. “Smaller countries, whether they like it or not, have to listen to them.”
New York Times News Service