The best test of the effectiveness of US sanctions policy over Ukraine will be if it deters Russia from invading and encourages a negotiated solution.

Once the military has moved, sanctions are unlikely to prompt a change of Russian heart, any more than did the sanctions imposed after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.

In comments last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin flagged that he was weighing the risks. Presenting the conflict over Ukraine as a US strategy to ‘contain’ Russia, he declared: ‘[The US can] drag us into some kind of armed conflict and with the help of their allies in Europe impose against us the very tough sanctions that the US is talking about today.’

US officials have been crafting a set of sanctions to be applied against Russia calculated to inflict maximum political damage on Putin, while minimising, so far as is possible, any blowback for the US, European or world economies.

It is a tricky course to tread. The risk that sanctions will cause collateral damage to allies and the global financial system is balanced by the risk they will prove ineffective.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned Russia two weeks ago not to underestimate Washington’s capacity to act. ‘If Moscow chooses the path of further aggression, we will impose swift and massive costs.’

Some wondered if this was a coded message to the Russian Federation that the US would seek to exclude it from the SWIFT global financial settlement scheme. SWIFT—an acronym for Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication—is a Belgium-based cooperative of 11,000 financial institutions that provides secure messaging of global financial transactions.

The US and the European Union agreed to exclude Iranian banks from the system in 2012 as part of a campaign of sanctions that was ultimately successful in persuading Iran to negotiate a deal curtailing its nuclear ambitions.

When US President Donald Trump revoked the deal despite European objections, he ordered SWIFT to again exclude Iranian banks, threatening that the viability of SWIFT itself would be in jeopardy if it continued to deal with organisations that were the target of US sanctions. The cooperative reluctantly bowed to the US demand.

The threat of expelling Russian institutions from SWIFT was raised in the wake of its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and again in 2018 when it sought to block Ukraine access to the Sea of Azov, adjacent to the Black Sea. Russia’s prime minister during that period, Dmitry Medvedev, warned that exclusion from SWIFT ‘would in fact be a declaration of war’.

In the wake of those threats, both Russia and China have established their own national financial messaging services to ensure their institutions could still function, although blockage from SWIFT would still require special arrangements to be constructed for the entirety of their international transactions.

In practice, the US is unlikely to press for exclusion of Russian banks from SWIFT for the same reason it will not seek to shut down Russia’s energy exports: the damage to European allies would be too great. The EU relies on Russia for 40% its gas imports, and European customers need a continued ability to transact with Russian suppliers. There are also extensive business links between Russian and European countries.

The US is attempting to devise its sanctions package in tandem with the EU, although the latter requires the unanimous approval of all 27 members before implementing anything.

It is anticipated that the sanctions package will include some financial and energy components. The new Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea to Germany could be barred from starting up, although that would leave Germany and much of Europe with a continued dependence on the pipeline through Ukraine. Europe’s power industry is anxiously seeking to secure alternative supplies of LNG in case Ukrainian trans-shipments are blocked.

The financial measures could include sanctions on major Russian banks, although, again, there’s debate about whether that would cause too much difficulty for European businesses. Once a bank is placed on the US ‘Specially Designated Nationals’ list, banks and businesses around the world can’t deal with it without themselves becoming subject to US sanctions including a prohibition on dealing in US dollars.

Confining financial sanctions to second-tier banks or to particular divisions of major banks could be seen as a signal of weakness.

Secondary trade in Russian government bonds could be sanctioned. However, Russian government debt is only 20% of GDP and it has abundant reserves.

Oligarchs in Putin’s orbit are fair game, though even here there are some risks. In 2018, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on several Russian business leaders, including Oleg Deripaska, who owned the aluminium producer Rusal. The market immediately halted purchases of Russian aluminium, and the resulting shortage forces prices up 15%. Rusal was also a major supplier of the intermediate product, alumina, and the blockage of that trade caused difficulties for major aluminium smelters in the West. Ultimately, the US backed down.

Joe Biden’s administration has broadly continued the use of economic sanctions as an instrument of foreign policy coercion that was practised under both Donald Trump’s and Barack Obama’s administrations. In 2021, it imposed 765 new sanctions designations, compared with 777 in the final year of the Trump administration. Under the Obama administration, there were around 600 new sanctions designations each year.

The focus has shifted away from Iran under Biden, with Belarus receiving the most country-specific sanctions last year (100), followed by Burma (76), China (70) and Russia (54). Unlike Trump, Biden has coordinated several sanction actions with allies.

Australia participated in a joint sanctioning of Russian business leaders and companies associated with the construction of a bridge linking Russia with the Crimean peninsula. The EU, Canada and the UK imposed similar sanctions.

While the process of imposing economic sanctions is firmly institutionalised in the US and increasingly so in other Western nations, there’s little empirical research into their effectiveness.

Over the past four years, the toughest economic sanctions ever implemented short of outright sieges have failed to produce the least change in the policies of the governments of North Korea, Iran or Venezuela, while Cuba has now resisted US economic coercion for six decades.

On the other hand, it’s possible that the sanctions imposed on Russia following its annexation of Crimea and of the Donbas region of Ukraine deterred a more extensive invasion. If a negotiated solution to the Ukraine impasse is reached, the US threat of sanctions may share the credit.

Russian President Vladimir Putin regularly showcases his skills in judo and other martial arts. Success in these sports often depends on what the Japanese call kuzushi—unbalancing one’s opponent by employing techniques designed to disrupt their physical and mental equilibrium.

Putin has sought to throw the United States and its NATO allies off balance by mobilising more than 100,000 Russian troops on Ukraine’s border. Having made no secret of his view that Russia and Ukraine are organically tied, Putin may well see re-establishing such a relationship as a way to cement his legacy by removing the perceived ignominy suffered by Russia in the decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Putin may have believed that threatening Ukraine could destabilise the country and provide an opportunity to replace the current, pro-Western government with one much more deferential to the Kremlin. Even more likely, Putin judged that his troop mobilisation would intimidate the US and its relatively new president, Joe Biden, into accepting Ukraine’s return to Russia’s sphere of influence.

After all, the US had just carried out a chaotic and near-unconditional withdrawal from Afghanistan. Putin had largely gotten away with annexing Crimea in 2014. And Chinese President Xi Jinping had paid little if any price for rolling back democracy in Hong Kong. From afar, therefore, the US appeared weak, divided and inward-looking.

Add to that Putin’s lack of respect for America’s European allies. Germany, having unwisely decided to phase out nuclear power, had allowed itself to become more dependent on Russian gas and, as was often true of West Germany during the Cold War, is uncomfortable confronting the Kremlin. Moreover, Putin began his military build-up as winter was approaching, when low temperatures and high fuel prices would give the Kremlin added leverage. The French were focused on their upcoming presidential election, while the United Kingdom was preoccupied with Covid-19, Brexit and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s behaviour.

In addition, Putin took steps to reduce Russia’s own vulnerabilities, especially to economic sanctions. The country’s foreign exchange reserves reached a record US$630 billion in December 2021, while high oil prices have generated significant government revenue. And China, already providing diplomatic backing, could offer financial help if the Kremlin were to need it.

But while Putin manufactured the Ukraine crisis believing he held a clear advantage vis-à-vis the West, he committed an error that can prove dangerous even for a skilled martial-arts practitioner: he underestimated his opponent.

While Biden and NATO have said they won’t intervene directly on behalf of Ukraine, that’s not the same as accepting Russian dominance. In fact, the US has organised a comprehensive response. It has sent arms to Ukraine to increase the costs to Russia of any invasion and occupation. There are plans to fortify NATO member countries closest to Russia. Substantial economic sanctions are being prepared. And rerouting gas to Europe would partly offset the possible loss of Russian supplies.

All of which is to say that Putin’s initial thrust failed to score a decisive blow. Those who say that he has the West where he wants it have things backwards. Putin has placed himself in an unenviable position: he must either escalate or find a face-saving way to back down.

The US has wisely provided Putin with a diplomatic off-ramp. This could entail a new structure to help underpin European security, as well as arms-control arrangements that would limit the scale and location of a range of systems. A revitalised and revised Minsk process would seek a political settlement in eastern Ukraine that would allow for considerable autonomy for the region’s inhabitants (many of whom are ethnic Russians) and the replacement of Russian soldiers by international peacekeepers. The US has also signalled that Ukraine will not enter NATO anytime soon, and then some.

Whether such an outcome will be enough for Putin is uncertain. He’s not going to hear what he wants—that Ukraine will never be able to join NATO, or that NATO forces will pull back to where they were more than two decades ago, before the alliance expanded into Central and Eastern Europe. But Putin will probably have a few weeks to ponder his next steps. He will soon travel to Beijing for the opening of the Winter Olympics—and Xi has likely made it clear that he would not appreciate a war in Ukraine overshadowing the opportunity to showcase China ahead of the Chinese Communist Party congress later this year, when he will seek a third term.

Putin does have another option. He could increase Russia’s military presence in the western hemisphere, claiming to be doing to the US what it and NATO had done to Russia. But that would be risky, and would do nothing to deal with his concerns in Europe.

It’s impossible to predict what Putin will do, and it may be that he has yet to decide. He may well opt for a so-called ‘minor incursion’, or limited intervention, possibly to increase Russia’s military presence in eastern Ukraine.

Such a course of action would give Putin something to show for his aggressive diplomacy without incurring major penalties, as NATO’s 30 members would be unlikely to reach a consensus on how to respond. It would also be consistent with the martial arts approach of looking for tactical openings to unbalance one’s opponent.

But such a scenario highlights the limits of the martial arts, which are more about tactics than strategy. This largely manufactured crisis in Ukraine risks leaving Russia worse off: controlling slightly more territory, but facing new sanctions, a stronger NATO and a neighbour whose people have developed a more separate, anti-Russian identity.

When he returns to his dacha, therefore, Putin might be well advised to take up another game closely associated with Russia: chess, where the best players think several moves ahead and respect their opponents.

Comments implying that President Vladimir Putin’s ultimatums and threats against the US, other NATO states and Ukraine are counterproductive have appeared in Russia’s hitherto unimpeachably loyal media. Even muffled dissent in an increasingly authoritarian state suggests that disquiet in the Russian professional security elite may be more widespread than visible. This won’t inhibit Putin in his campaign to achieve a compliant leadership in Kyiv or a failed Ukrainian state, or to annex the part of eastern Ukraine he controls and force the US and NATO to accept a new European security order on his terms.

History isn’t an infallible guide but it’s the only one we have. The historical background to the sharpening Ukraine crisis is comparable in its complexity to the history of the Balkans. This may explain why some journalists have rushed to judgement with predictions of, and reasons for, another Russian invasion of Ukraine, falling back on the remedy of editors confronted by issues too arcane for most punters: simplify and exaggerate.

Russia specialist John Besemeres wrote in his 2016 book, A difficult neighbourhood, ‘The geopolitical tug-of-war over Ukraine has been at the heart of the broader contest between Russia and the West since Putin returned the Russian presidency [in 2012].’

A key to understanding the conflict is Putin’s view that Ukraine is not a country; to him, the Ukrainians and the Russians are one people (most of Ukraine’s 44 million citizens disagree vehemently). Another is that Putin, an authoritarian leader in a country with an authoritarian tradition (which he doubtless believes has served it well), has a compelling reason to do whatever he can to prevent democracy from taking firm root in a neighbour he claims can become a country ‘only in partnership with Russia’. (Let’s recall that post-Soviet Russia has had two leaders in three decades, while Ukraine has had six, all elected in messy but credible ballots. And Putin has fashioned constitutional justification to remain Russia’s ruler for life.)

Last July, Putin set out his views in an article published in Russian, Ukrainian and English. The gist of it is captured by historian Timothy Snyder:

The basic idea is that a thousand years ago there was a country called Rus, the most important city in Rus was Kyiv, and now a thousand years later Kyiv is the capital of Ukraine, and therefore Ukraine cannot be a real country, and everyone involved and their descendants must be Russians or a brotherly nation to Russians.

Snyder goes on to observe: ‘Historically speaking, the idea that a dictator in another country decides who is a nation and who is not is known as imperialism.’

On 18 November, Putin called for long-term guarantees to ensure Russia’s security. On 1 December he was more specific, calling for a ‘concrete agreement’ and ‘legal guarantees’ to ‘rule out any further eastward expansion of NATO and the deployment of weapons systems posing a threat to us in close proximity to Russia’s territory’.

At the same time, Russia massed 100,000 troops along the border with Ukraine—part of which it already controls via its proxy forces in Ukraine, in addition to those stationed in the parts of Ukraine that it already occupies. Snyder observed that, ‘Rather than invading without warning, Russia has ostentatiously prepared for an invasion, and then warned the West that whatever happens is all their fault.’

Russian political-military commentator Vladimir Frolov wrote in December: ‘For the last month, Russia has been waging a strategic assault to stop NATO’s expansion to the east once and for all. Moscow is striving to complete what it began in 2014 in Crimea: to alter in its favor the terms on which the Cold War ended.’

On 15 December, Russia’s foreign ministry published a set of demands addressed to the US only, described by another Russian commentator as an ‘ultimatum unprecedented in the 30-year history of post-Soviet Russia’. The gist is that the US and NATO should undertake to admit no new members from Eastern Europe (read: Ukraine and Georgia) and dismantle all military infrastructure put in place in NATO member states that have joined the alliance since May 1997.

Snyder says Putin made demands he knew would be rejected. ‘Moscow tabled two draft treaties and asked that they be signed as they stand; in them, Americans are asked to accept provisions that the Kremlin must surely know are unacceptable and to sign away the sovereignty of other countries, especially Ukraine.’

A few months before his death in 2015, Yevgeny Primakov—a legendary espionage officer, former head of the Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, former prime minister and, other than Putin himself, perhaps the most lauded and celebrated figure in the pro-Kremlin establishment—gave a public speech in Moscow, suspecting it would be his last. His audience in the hall of the Moscow Exchange was a who’s who of the post-Soviet political and plutocratic elite. He rocked them.

In his 2015 biography, Leonid Mlechin recorded Primakov as having said:

‘Within two years, the Russian leadership must diversify the economy, give economic autonomy to Russia’s regions and open its doors to cooperation with the US and NATO … The threat of a “coloured revolution” in Russia is nil, while the only genuine threat to the country is the excessive concentration of power at the centre … If the Minsk agreements on Ukraine are not implemented to Russia’s satisfaction, should Russia deploy its regular forces in support of the insurgents in eastern Ukraine? Categorically, no.’

This call for a reversal of Putin’s approach to the US and NATO came a few months after Putin met Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former Danish prime minister and then secretary-general of NATO. Responding to Rasmussen’s overture for improving Russia–NATO relations, Putin had said that he didn’t want to improve relations with NATO; he wanted to see it abolished.

Primakov’s direct challenge, coming from one of their own, must have irked Putin and the intelligence and military officers who help him rule. When Primakov died a few months later, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church presided at his funeral while Putin delivered a fulsome eulogy. Primakov was installed in a pantheon of the greatest Russians in history—but his advice was ignored; indeed, Putin did the opposite, on all fronts.

Prominent political analyst and former military intelligence officer Dmitri Trenin has observed that every attempt in Russian history to introduce political reforms has ended up with power in the hands of one man. As Putin has concentrated more and more power in his office of president, Russia has steadily become more authoritarian. This trend was highlighted by the Russian Supreme Court’s recent banning of Memorial International, an organisation dedicated to preserving the memory of the millions of victims of political terror in the Soviet era.

Yet, a grim record of murders and incarceration of investigative journalists notwithstanding, Russia is not totalitarian. A liberal, pluralist radio station, an embattled but independent television station and an independent newspaper survive (the newspaper’s editor recently shared a Nobel prize). Clearly, they are useful to Putin. That at least was the explanation offered by the radio station’s editor, in my presence.

But among the Russian securocrats, Primakov’s was a lone voice of dissent on Putin’s policies—almost. In 2018, military journalist Aleksandr Khramchikhin published a rebuttal of the claim that NATO represents a threat to Russia, which the Kremlin employs as a fundamental justification for its policies:

Military deployments from other NATO countries to Poland and especially to the Baltic states have a purely political rather than military rationale, one that official NATO representatives recognize … All of the talk in Russia about the threat of a NATO attack is nothing more than a propaganda ploy … Quantitatively and qualitatively, NATO forces are unprepared to wage war against the modern armed forces of the Russian Federation.

Three years later, in October 2021, following the chaotic US and allied withdrawal from Afghanistan, the same commentator wrote even more trenchantly, signing off with an ironical flourish:

Even to suggest that such a pathetically impotent entity [as NATO] is preparing to attack Russia is ignominious. By endlessly foisting on [Russian] society this notion of a threat from NATO we disorient and discredit ourselves. Yes, in recent years NATO has been preparing for a war with us—but for a defensive war… Alas, to rely on Moscow to respond effectively [to geopolitical trends] is ever more problematic; instead, we shall continue to repulse the aggression of Lithuania, Belgium, Slovenia and Portugal.

This article was published in the Russian-language Military-Industrial Courier, an influential site read widely by defence and security personnel. It’s noteworthy for its loathing of ‘liberal’ economic views, such as those expressed by Primakov, and for publishing provocative, lurid pieces against the US, the UK and NATO generally.

Khramchikhin has long been a maverick among Russian military commentators. From the early 2000s his was virtually a sole Cassandra-like voice warning of the possible long-term costs of closer ties with China.

Since Putin delivered his 1 December ultimatum demanding in effect a Yalta Agreement 2.0 and the dismantling of NATO, threatening ‘military-technical measures’ if the demands weren’t met, more voices have questioned the wisdom of his brinkmanship.

Frolov characterised the concentration of forces on Ukraine’s border as a ‘lever’ designed to ‘force Ukraine to hammer out its relationship with Russia on Russia’s terms’. He described Putin’s demands as unrealistic, criticised the decision to proclaim them publicly (‘when such sensitive issues are best discussed in private’), and noted the failure to offer any concessions in exchange for the limitations Russia was demanding.

On 17 January, one Yevgeny Fyodorov (apparently a pseudonym), writing in the widely read and hitherto unimpeachably pro-Kremlin military journal Voennoe Obozrenie, challenged Putin’s policy in remarkable terms:

Virtually only one conclusion can be drawn from this whole episode: no one in the Russian Foreign Ministry actually hoped for a diplomatic solution. The conditions put to NATO were formulated to be unacceptable, and moreover without any concessions [by the Russian side]. One can only hope that those in the Kremlin know what they’re doing.

Even Australian readers, unschooled in the refined Russian technique of encoded language, can decipher ‘those in the Kremlin’: Putin may not be all-powerful, but he is the apex of the vertical of power in Russia. It seems unlikely that the last sentence in particular would have been published had the writer and their editor not assumed a reasonable degree of support for their concerns in the upper echelons.

These notes of dissent have appeared when Putin is being described ironically by some on social media as ‘the bunker president’—a reference to the common knowledge that since the onset of Covid-19 the concentric circles of security surrounding him have proliferated and hardened. The implication is that he is not only inaccessible, but out of touch with reality.

Also on 17 January, Andrey Kortunov, an ‘approved’ commentator on global politics yet often a reflective voice of moderation, criticised what he called ‘Moscow’s diplomatic Blitzkrieg’ as misconceived, unrealistic and as weakening rather than strengthening Russia’s security.

What is more important for Russia: causing the maximum pain to an obdurate and hypocritical West, avenging the defeat [in the Cold War] and unilateral concessions of the 1990s; or endeavouring to strengthen Russia’s own security? If the answer is the second of these, then Russia has no option but to review its policy of ‘all or nothing’.

Kortunov also rejected the constant drumbeat by Russia and its supporters in other countries, including Australia, that NATO ‘expansion’ occurred because former Soviet–Russian possessions and Warsaw Pact client states were enticed into or pressured to join NATO:

In fact, the opposite applies: former Soviet republics have been desperately storming the gates of the Euro-Atlantic security structures, and the West, fully aware that accepting these new member states would weaken NATO not strengthen it, had to respond to this pressure. So, Moscow should focus instead on finding alternative mechanisms to underpin the security of its ‘common neighbours’, thereby reducing the allure of NATO membership and their striving to gain it come what may.

To have so authoritative a Russian commentator as Kortunov, the director-general of the Russian International Affairs Council, explain bluntly the reality of NATO’s ‘expansion’ is a timely corrective.  For many Russian securocrats, however, these views would be enough to qualify Kortunov as an ‘agent of foreign influence’.

A key question is whether these mutterings in the ranks reflect a wider concern in the elite—and if so, might that lead to organised opposition to Putin’s policies? The evidence is too thin to draw such a conclusion. Putin’s priorities would remain as before: to protect the interests of the securocrats who support him and their networks of clients and constituencies, repelling any emerging challenges to his power. His instinctive response to such challenges has been aggressive: ‘The streets of Leningrad taught me one thing: if a fight’s inevitable, strike first.’

He has now shown plainly his disdain for his US and European adversaries. Given the disarray in the US and the UK, the departure of Angela Merkel as German chancellor, and the repeatedly demonstrated unwillingness of the main European states to stand up to him, Putin has probably concluded that ultimately they’ll agree to a settlement on his terms. Meanwhile, he’ll presumably do all he can to help Donald Trump to return to the White House in 2024. Trump has said he would withdraw the United States from NATO in a second term.

One outcome of the confected crisis that might explain why Putin advanced unrealistic demands may well be that he plans to formalise, in Russian terms, Moscow’s control of what it calls the Luhansk and Donetsk ‘people’s republics’ (a title recalling eerily the terminology of Soviet imperialism), the two eastern Ukrainian districts that it has controlled since 2014. That is, Russia will ‘recognise’ them as ‘independent states’, as a faction in the Duma (the Russian parliament—a ‘cabaret of feudal obsequiousness’, as one commentator put it) has been urging. This would mean in effect reincorporating them into Russia. Moscow has already issued between half a million and a million passports to the region’s inhabitants, often under duress, creating a pretext for it to ‘protect’ them.

This would mean Putin had used military force three times to change the borders of Europe: once in Georgia, twice in Ukraine. One recalls that the Russian word for a great power is derzhava, a cognate of the verb ‘to seize and hold’.

Editors’ note and correction (3 February 2021, 9 pm AEDT): Thanks to Strategist reader John Crowfoot for noting that the work of Memorial International extends beyond the Stalin era to victims of political violence throughout the Soviet period; the text of this post has been amended to reflect that point. He also notes that the Russian Supreme Court’s December ruling has not yet taken effect and that Memorial is challenging the decision.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has clearly decided that now is the opportune time to secure his long-held objective to bring Ukraine back within Moscow’s orbit—by whatever means it takes.

In part this is because the Kremlin has given up on President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in Kyiv, and concluded that the diplomatic process under the Minsk accords is going nowhere. Moscow fears that its long-term influence in Ukraine is ebbing.

Russia also sees the US and its major European NATO allies as weak, distracted and vulnerable, providing it with a window of opportunity to redress its historical grievances and achieve longstanding ambitions to redraw the post–Cold War settlement in ways that meet Moscow’s interests.

Why is Ukraine so important to Russia? Partly, it reflects perceptions of shared national identity (laced with imperial nostalgia).

But Ukraine is also important to Russia for geostrategic reasons.

The break-up of the USSR and demise of the Soviet empire in central and eastern Europe, and the consequent eastward expansion of NATO and the EU, removed the strategic depth Russia has always strived to maintain on its western approaches, from where security threats have historically emanated.

Putin sees an opportunity now to rectify this, forestalling Ukraine’s westward drift, while at the same time curtailing and undermining NATO expansion and reasserting Moscow’s sphere of influence around its periphery.

It’s a matter not just of national security, but also of regime insecurity.

The Kremlin has intervened unsuccessfully on repeated occasions over the past 20 years to thwart what it portrays as Western-inspired ‘colour revolutions’ in Ukraine. Moscow doesn’t want sovereign, democratic states flourishing on its doorstep, offering an unhelpful model for Russians.

Similar thinking has guided Moscow’s propping up of the embattled authoritarian regime in Belarus over the past two years, as it ruthlessly suppressed the widespread popular unrest sparked by the disputed presidential election of August 2020. Long economically dependent on Russia, Belarus’s embattled president, Alexander Lukashenko, is now totally dependent for his political survival on Moscow’s patronage.

So too recently in Kazakhstan, where Putin was quick to provide assistance to the authorities to restore order after popular unrest apparently morphed into intra-elite clashes—leaving President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s government increasingly dependent on Russian support for its survival.

The broader context for all of this is Putin’s overriding objective over the past two decades: to restore and strengthen centralised authority within Russia, suppressing dissent while reasserting Russia’s standing and influence globally as a great power, especially in its near abroad, and rebuilding a strong Russian military to support this ambition.

So far, Putin has played his hand on Ukraine adeptly. The threat of invasion, reinforced by the Kremlin’s bellicose rhetoric and massive military build-up on the Ukrainian border, has forced the West to take notice—obliging the US and NATO to engage with Russia on Putin’s terms as Moscow continues to frame the agenda. The Kremlin knows, too, that it can exploit its leverage as Europe’s dominant energy supplier.

But is this just coercive diplomacy, promoting tensions and uncertainty in order to undermine Zelensky and warn NATO off of deeper military engagement with Ukraine?

Or is it diplomacy designed to fail, a propaganda ploy by Moscow to provide a pretext for intervention in Ukraine?

There are big risks for Putin in unleashing military force against Ukraine—whatever form that might take. It could backfire badly for Russia. Zelensky’s government may fall, but any client regime installed by Moscow would require long-term and substantial Russian support.

Russian military action would lead to Ukraine’s irrevocable estrangement; forge greater unity of purpose within NATO, providing the alliance with a new raison d’être; and lead to a greater, not lesser, NATO military presence in its eastern member states—not to mention the damaging effect on Russia of expanded Western sanctions.

Beyond Europe, the consequences of Russian intervention in Ukraine would ripple widely, causing major global economic and supply-chain disruptions.

It would inevitably lead to a significant spike in global oil and gas prices of uncertain duration, creating additional unwelcome inflationary pressures for importing countries such as Australia and New Zealand.

Since Ukraine is a major grain exporter, the resulting disruption to supplies would likely lead to shortages, increased prices and hardship in developing state markets, notably in the Middle East.

And all of this could have implications for Russia’s increasingly aligned yet still transactional relationship with China.

Beijing would welcome any Russian action that embarrasses the US and gives a nudge to the unravelling of the US-dominated international rules-based order. But China would not welcome the increased costs for its already overheated economy caused by disruptions in global energy and food supplies arising from a Ukraine conflict.

Putin’s brinkmanship on Ukraine carries huge stakes not just for Europe but for the world.

There is a saying in Vladimir Putin’s Russia that is profoundly insightful: ‘The less you know, the better you sleep.’ This observation could apply at various times in Russian history, particularly during the period of the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1991. However, this remark has again assumed real form. Respected human rights organisation Memorial, which recalls the victims of Soviet tyranny, especially Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, was banned by the Russian Supreme Court at Christmas.

Shortly before this repressive decision was taken in Moscow, the Chinese University of Hong Kong ordered the removal of an emphatic sculpture, Pillar of Shame, from the campus. This evocative work of art, some 6.4 metres tall and composed of two tonnes of faux copper, commemorates the victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.

Thousands of Chinese protesters are estimated to have died during the massacre at the hands of the People’s Liberation Army on the orders of the Chinese Communist Party. The victims of Soviet Stalinism numbered in the millions and Memorial was endeavouring to trace the fate of some 11 million people. The symbolism of these two decisions ought not to be lost on anyone committed to the most modest human rights agenda. These steps were designed to obliterate acutely painful episodes in the history of both Russia and China. Why? Because the legitimacy of the dictators rests on narratives that are in dramatic contrast to the historic record.

George Orwell understood this with crystal clarity in 1984: ‘Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ He envisioned a totalitarian society in a dystopian future, and integral to a suffocating ideological framework was the reconstruction of history. Winston Smith, the central character, was charged with purging the news and the state’s histories on a regular basis and substituting a more interesting but fabricated copy. Most people assumed Orwell was referring to the Soviet Union, but he understood that democracies could fall prey to this kind of intellectual dishonesty. BB was Big Brother, but cynics also suggested it could refer to Brendan Bracken, wartime minister for information in the British government.

The classic history of the Great Leap Forward in China was written by Yang Jisheng, titled Tombstone: the great Chinese famine, 1958–1962, which documents in meticulous detail the result of Mao Zedong’s endeavour to skip the different economic stages, as detailed by Marx and Engels, in the creation of communism. The human fiasco that emerged caused at least 40 million deaths. As Yang set about writing the book, those Chinese researchers and archivists who made material available to the author understood precisely what he was doing but said nothing. Officially, it was a history of Chinese agriculture. The blind eye in a dictatorship, accompanied by a nod, can achieve much.

Memorial was denounced falsely in the Russian Supreme Court as being a ‘foreign agent’, and in the current paranoid state of Russian judicial quicksand, the fact that it did not identify itself as a supposed foreign agent brought about its downfall. But the overwhelming reality is that the Kremlin feared independent analysis of everything from rigged elections to the war in Chechnya. Putin’s regime appears superficially secure. But colour revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine threw out regimes allied with Moscow and replaced the stagnant corrupt elites with Western-oriented governments.

Witness the Russian problems with its client regimes in Belarus and Kazakhstan and we understand better Putin’s obsession with bullying an independent and sovereign Ukraine, which clearly wants membership of the EU and NATO.

The only means by which the current Russian empire can be held together is the deployment of police and military. The routine response to challenges ranges from the jailing of Alexei Navalny to the crushing of any form of street protest.

The Chinese wolf warriors face some similar dilemmas, most of which are imported by Beijing without any form of Western encouragement. ‘One country, two systems’ is now replaced by the dictatorship of the party, as we have seen in the snuffing out of basic liberties in Hong Kong. The agreement with Britain, as outlined in the handover of 1997, guaranteed freedoms of expression and organisation. These are now dead letters.

Taiwan is a functioning democratic entity that offends Beijing by its mere existence, which sets an example of Chinese aspirations being met freely and openly.

If West Berlin was the democratic canary in the coalmine of the first Cold War, then Taipei has assumed that role in the second.

Ironically, the result of such repressive policies being imposed by the dictators is that the West must lift its game further in respecting its own histories, and this falls most heavily upon the US. Historical truth must be defended at all costs and not left in the hands of those who would distort and deny it. This is why President Joe Biden’s address confronting the storming of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 is more important than we might at first allow. Biden was the first president obliged to defend the citadel of American democracy since Abraham Lincoln in 1864 stood atop the parapet on Fort Stevens and saw the battle flags of the Confederate forces of General Jubal Early advance upon Washington DC. Biden did so directly. Hopefully, the ‘big lie’ about a stolen presidential election was dealt some collateral damage also.

American scripture is often to be found in the great speeches of US presidents. In the 20th century, we can point to Franklin D. Roosevelt (creating ‘the arsenal of democracy’), Dwight D. Eisenhower (warning of the military–industrial complex), John F. Kennedy (‘Ich bin ein Berliner’) and Ronald Reagan (‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’), the last two from a divided Berlin, now unified in peace. Biden’s recent speech doesn’t rival the Gettysburg Address. But it will be appended honourably to Woodrow Wilson’s clarion call of 1917 to buttress democracy.

The nature of the Russian and Chinese regimes should not prevent diplomatic dialogue being focused on achieving resolutions on outstanding issues wherever possible. This week in Geneva, a welcome if strained dialogue took place between the US and Russia to be followed by discussions at NATO level and later with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, of which Ukraine is a member.

It is more difficult to talk openly and honestly with Beijing while it is in the grip of wolf-warrior diplomats, but we should not abandon the determination to do so. We would all sleep better by understanding more clearly the world as it is, however unpalatable.