A few days before Christmas, Vladimir Putin flew to Minsk for talks with Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko. There was widespread speculation that the meeting would deliver a dramatic announcement, perhaps about the direct participation of the Belarusian armed forces in Russia’s war against Ukraine. But it ended with little more than the same kind of vaguely worded commitment to closer economic, political, and military ties that the two countries have announced many times over the last 25 years. Belarus is often described as Russia’s closest ally, and Lukashenko is heavily dependent on Russian support for his political survival. However, despite Russia’s urgent need for help, Lukashenko has so far resisted sending troops to Ukraine, no doubt because of the risk of domestic unrest and the threat to his grip on power.
The previous month, on another rare trip abroad, Putin was snubbed by the president of Armenia (another historically close state), who also publicly attacked the ineffectiveness of the Russia-dominated Collective Security Treaty Organisation. The meeting was widely seen as a reflection of Moscow’s shrinking influence in the region critical to its (self-defined) great power identity.
Two days after Putin’s seemingly pointless trip to Belarus, Zelensky flew to Washington to meet Biden and address Congress. Both events acted as powerful evidence of continuing US support for Ukraine, underscored by the White House’s announcement of another huge military aid package. For the first time, this included the Patriot missile defence system, intended to help protect against Russia’s devastating attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure. Zelensky’s speech to Congress gave him a global platform for his message that Ukraine’s fight is part of a wider defence against aggression and authoritarianism, and that US assistance “is not charity, it’s investment in global security”. Two days later, Congress passed a $45bn aid package for Ukraine.
These trips show how dramatically just over 10 months of war have altered both presidents’ reputations and their countries’ standing. Zelensky is perhaps the most admired leader in the world. Ukraine has, like its president, become an icon of resistance to aggression. It is now an EU candidate country and is receiving the western assistance and diplomatic attention its leadership have been seeking since the “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014. The reputation of its armed forces has similarly been transformed.
Putin began the war with ambitions to remove Zelensky, absorb Ukraine in a colonial project to consolidate the “Russian world” and force what he thought was a declining and cowardly west into resetting the strategic map of Europe back to the mid-1990s. In each respect it has been an abject failure. And by launching an unprovoked war of aggression, without the diplomatic strength or military capabilities to win it, the Kremlin has exposed the limits of its ability to influence even those states in its orbit, and tipped the scales of the Russia-China relationship dramatically in Beijing’s favour. It has trashed its hugely important energy relationship with Europe, done immense damage to its economy, and cost the lives of tens of thousands of its men. Putin’s international standing has never looked lower, or his domestic position more uncertain.
The war has also destroyed the credibility of the Russian armed forces, which Putin had spent billions of dollars reforming and modernising in recent years. When it was launched in February 2022, the military phase of the invasion was intended to last for a few days, crushing a corrupt and ineffective Ukrainian army. Instead, the Kremlin now finds itself in the winter of a new year, with little sign that it has the manpower, the equipment, or the strategy to reverse the Ukrainian counteroffensive of the autumn. The scale of these problems, and the extraordinary success of Kyiv’s resistance, mean that military defeat seems much more likely than victory. Even those regions under Russian control since 2014 now look vulnerable, with Putin reduced to making vague nuclear threats to try to halt the western aid to Ukraine that would help to liberate them.
Putin’s decision to attack Ukraine last February looks like one of the greatest self-inflicted military and political failures in recent history. It is hard to imagine a more comprehensive disaster for him and for Russia. Most worryingly for him, it is equally difficult to see how it can be reversed, or how his presidency can recover. Whatever 2023 brings, it seems unlikely to offer Putin an escape from the trap he has created for himself and for Russia.
