The Black Box of Moscow

Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin is dead, but the West’s desperation to interpret the larger meaning of his final weeks lives on. Western policymakers and pundits are still sifting through the details of Prigozhin’s odyssey from mercenary to mutineer to apparent murder victim, looking for the clues that would crack the mystery of the Kremlin’s behavior during the Ukraine war and help guide the West’s responses.

Many analysts see evidence that the Russian regime is brittle and that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s hold on power is tenuous. According to this analysis, Prigozhin’s beef with the Defense Ministry signals a deeper rot within the Russian military. The fact that the mutiny ended only when Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko intervened signifies Putin’s inability to manage conflicts within his own regime. And the fact that Prigozhin met with Putin a few days after he marched on Moscow suggests that Putin is no longer invincible.

Other analysts point to the fact that the head of the Russian Aerospace Forces, Sergei Surovikin, was apparently sacked in August, after Prigozhin praised him; numerous lower-ranked officers faced a similar fate. And thus they conclude the opposite: that the whole mutiny was a false flag, designed by Putin to smoke out disloyal officers. With this mission accomplished, the story goes, Prigozhin was either killed to cover Putin’s tracks or perhaps was not killed at all.

But this hunt for meaning obscures the real lesson Westerners should take from Prigozhin’s arc: that they understand very little about Russian politics today. Despite a glut of intelligence and information, the truth is that the Western analytical establishment—both within and outside governments—was at a loss to illuminate Prigozhin’s motives to march on Moscow; the Kremlin’s immediate, forgiving response; and the ensuing weeks’ twists and turns.

If the lack of analytical clarity on the Prigozhin affair were an outlier, it might be acceptable. Unfortunately, it is symptomatic of a much bigger problem. Western decisionmakers have had reasonable visibility into the inner workings of the Kremlin: Washington gathered and shared high-quality intelligence about Russian intentions in the run-up to the February 2022 Ukraine invasion, and U.S. intelligence broke the story of Putin’s post-putsch parley with Prigozhin.

But the availability of such information is not systematically leading to reliable analysis, which in turn undermines wartime policymaking. Facing a drawn-out war in Ukraine, many Western officials and their advisers cling to the notion that the swiftest route to peace runs through Moscow. They are very unlikely, however, to engineer a change of heart in the Kremlin—or a change of leadership—by reading the same tea leaves that have failed them over and over. They would do much better to instead focus more urgently on helping Ukraine.

NUCLEAR CALVINBALL

The model of Russian politics that most Western analysts worked with before the war assumed that severing Russian elites from their assets in the West would weaken political coordination in Russia. Since the first decade of this century, shelves of academic research have been generated that study Russian kleptocracy, the idea that Russia is ruled by a clique of people primarily interested in illicitly extracting wealth from the state and the economy. This research implies that Putin’s overriding goal is to keep the kleptocrats rich and the population silent. And that idea, in turn, suggested that Russian elites would react explosively to sanctions that crimped their bank accounts.

While this understanding of kleptocracy was a reasonable description of Russia in the recent past, it has broken down since February 2022. Severing Russian elites from their assets has not seemed to weaken Putin. The same models assumed that ordinary Russian citizens would speak up after seeing pictures of atrocities and body bags coming home from Ukraine. They have not.

And thus millions of Western dollars spent to ensure that Russians become aware of the war’s depredations have had little effect. Similarly, early in the war, protests in ethnic-minority regions motivated Western donors to shell out for campaigns encouraging self-determination and “decolonization” as a way of stoking internal divisions. But these ethnic-minority protests have since fizzled out.

Instead of prompting humility, this confusion has fed Western analysts’ and policymakers’ determination to ferret out the motives behind Russian behavior. Russia watchers have sought to predict whether the Kremlin will ramp up or draw down its military recruitment drives; this scrutiny has, in the end, yielded few useful predictions. Bouts of high-level rhetoric from Moscow about the possibility—and even the desirability—of using nuclear weapons have mainly reinforced analysts’ prior beliefs, either that the West should fear Russian escalation or that the Kremlin dangles the prospect of escalation as a red herring.

These failures highlight the difference between information and understanding. Precisely why Western analysts are failing to understand the causes behind the phenomena they observe in Russia is the subject of academic debate, but it likely has to do with the overwhelming focus, in recent years, on studying the country by way of statistical modeling rather than in-depth field research. Until researchers can get back into the field and build a new approach, their analyses will remain poor.

NO CLEAR DETERRENCE

Nonetheless, much of the West’s Ukraine policy—including calculations on military aid to Kyiv, sanctions policy, and the definition of a Ukrainian victory itself—remains predicated on the assumptions about decisions that will or will not be made in Moscow. Take the piecemeal way in which the United States has doled out military support to Ukraine. The Biden administration has, over time, delivered most of what Kyiv has asked for, but at a pace slower than Ukrainian leaders requested—a delay that may well have contributed to Ukraine’s slow progress in its summer 2023 counteroffensive.

Motivating this slow pace was a concern about escalation and a theory that any Russian decision to use a nuclear device would most likely result from panic. That theory is grounded in decades of research and analysis on Russian nuclear doctrine. But it is not clear that this research applies now, if it ever did. The chorus of foreign policy thinkers in Moscow who call for the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine do not seem to be guided by any of the ideas that Western analysts believe guide Russian foreign and security policy. In fact, their arguments seem to draw from another purported Russian doctrine, namely the idea of “escalating to de-escalate”—using a nuclear or other similarly catastrophic attack to shock an opponent into submission.

A similar confusion besets sanctions policy. To be sure, a major motive for sanctioning Russia is to diminish its ability to prosecute war by depriving it of revenue and technology, increasing the cost of raising capital, and decreasing liquidity. Although imperfect, Western sanctions on Russia’s technology and financial sectors have broadly achieved these objectives.

The West has taken a Moscow-centric approach to handling the Ukraine war.

But Western sanctions are also designed to impose costs on specific individuals linked to the regime or to the war. The United States and the European Union have, by now, sanctioned more than 2,000 Russian individuals and entities, cutting them off from their villas and bank accounts in the West, barring them from travel, and so on. These sanctions are designed to drive a wedge between Putin and Russia’s ruling elite and induce the kleptocrats to challenge the Kremlin. But Russia’s billionaires are now approximately $100 billion poorer than they were before the war, and they have yet to mount any visible challenge to Putin.

Ultimately, the West has taken a Moscow-centric approach to handling the Ukraine war. Washington, in particular, has put the strategic defeat of Russia ahead of achieving a complete Ukrainian victory. Both the U.S. government and the Washington think-tank world now spend considerably more time debating the finer points of Kremlinology than they do examining strategies for a Ukrainian victory, leading to a warped perception of both where the war stands and what could end it. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN in July, “In terms of what Russia sought to achieve, what Putin sought to achieve, they’ve already failed, they’ve already lost.”

But Russia keeps fighting. The trouble for Washington, and more important, for Ukraine, is that the Russia that might have been strategically defeated by the West’s moves is not the same Russia with which Ukraine is at war. Blinken and others assume that Russian leaders care about the national interest and might be held accountable for harming that national interest. The fact that Russia keeps fighting despite its losses suggests that a different logic is at work.

Unfortunately, Westerners’ inability to travel to Russia and conduct new research means that they are unlikely to arrive at a better understanding of the cost-benefit analysis guiding Kremlin decision-making. And so the sobering truth is that Western countries’ attempts to achieve their policy aims by modulating—or even responding to—events in Russia and the decisions of the Russian leadership are doomed to be ineffective at best.

A WISER GAME

The good news, however, is that Washington and its allies still maintain considerable leverage. First and foremost, they can strengthen Ukraine’s ability to make progress on the battlefield. The West may be unable to affect Russia’s military decision-making with any degree of reliability. But it has shown that it can improve Ukraine’s ability to hold and retake territory.

Similarly, the United States and its allies have not been able to deter Russia from bombarding Ukrainian civilians, but they can bolster Ukraine’s air defenses to prevent Russian missiles and drones from hitting their targets. None of these actions can force Russia to stop fighting, but they can help Ukrainians stay alive.

In the absence of any ability to gauge how Moscow will behave, the G-7 security guarantees promised after the July NATO summit in Vilnius should be focused tightly on increasing military impacts in Ukraine. Western countries should privilege developing and enforcing sanctions that squarely target the war effort over attempting to induce political change in Russia. In practice, that means closing the loopholes that have kept cash and technology flowing to Russia. And as the West saps Russia’s resilience, it should focus on increasing Ukraine’s resilience by fast-tracking the country’s progress toward European integration and spurring investment in the infrastructure and technology Ukraine will need to get its economy back on its feet.

More than a year and a half into this war, Western analysts and policymakers have accumulated tremendous amounts of robust data on the impacts of adding new weapons systems to the battlefield and defending Ukrainian airspace. They have solid evidence that policies to support Ukraine’s economy and weaken Russia’s financial capacity to prosecute war are effective, and they know what adjustments could make them even more effective.

Alas, those same analysts—this author included—remain flummoxed by events within Russia itself. Over time, this problem will be addressed, and the gap between awareness and analysis will narrow. Until it does, however, Western policy should focus on the things Westerners understand rather than the things they do not.