WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin’s calculated move Wednesday to test a new ICBM and declare it a warning to those in the West who are “trying to threaten our country” prompted growing concern within the Biden administration : Russia is now so isolated from the rest of the world that Mr. Putin sees little downside in provocative action.
Even before the missile launch, American officials and foreign leaders were mulling whether their success in cutting Russia off from much of the world economy and making it a diplomatic pariah might further fuel Putin’s willingness to assert his country’s strength. The first launch of the nuclear-capable Sarmat missile was just the latest example of how, despite early setbacks on the ground in Ukraine, it has tried to remind the world of its capabilities – in space, in cyberspace and along the coast of Europe.
“He’s in his own war logic now,” Austria’s Chancellor Karl Nehammer said last week after meeting Mr Putin in Russia. He described the Russian president as more determined than ever to counter what he saw as a growing threat from the West and to recapture Russia’s sphere of influence in Eastern Europe.
William J. Burns, the CIA director, said last week that “Putin demonstrates every day that declining power can be at least as destructive as rising power,” adding that his “risk-taking has grown as his grip on Russia tightened.” became”.
Privately, American officials have been more direct about the potential of an isolated Russian leader to lash out in more destabilizing ways. “We’ve been so successful in disconnecting Putin from the global system that he has even more incentive to disrupt it beyond Ukraine,” a senior intelligence official said in a recent interview, insisting on anonymity to discuss intelligence assessments. “And as he gets more and more desperate, he might try things that don’t seem rational.”
According to a senior American official who requested anonymity to discuss intelligence findings, according to assessments sent to the White House, Mr Putin believes he is winning.
He certainly behaves like that.
It is hardly surprising that Mr Putin has not backed down in the face of economic sanctions and measures to cut his country off from the technology needed for new weapons and now some consumer goods. He has often shrugged off Western sanctions, arguing that he can easily circumvent them.
“We can already say with confidence that this policy towards Russia has failed,” Putin said on Monday. “The strategy of an economic blitzkrieg has failed.”
He was immediately contradicted by his own head of the central bank, Elvira Nabiullina. “Right now, this problem may not be felt that much because there are still reserves in the economy,” she said. “But we see sanctions tightening almost daily,” she continued, adding that “the period for which the economy can live on reserves is finite.”
But this reality has apparently not yet arrived. If anything, Mr. Putin has become more belligerent, directing fresh fire at Mariupol as Russian forces attempt to secure the entire Donbass region in the coming weeks. He has insisted to visitors like Mr Nehammer that he remains determined to achieve his goals.
While the death toll in Russia has run high and Mr Putin’s ambitions in Ukraine have dwindled, American intelligence analysis concludes that the Russian president believes Western efforts to punish him and curb Russia’s power with the time will subside. With the help of China, India and other nations in Asia, he seems to think he can avoid true isolation, as he did after the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Now, American officials are bracing themselves for an increasingly protracted, grueling confrontation, and they have encountered repeated reminders from Mr Putin that the world should challenge a nuclear-weapon power and tread carefully.
updated
April 20, 2022 at 7:30 p.m. ET
On Wednesday, after Putin warned the Pentagon that a missile test was imminent — a requirement of the New START treaty, which has four years to go — Mr Putin stated that the launch “should give those in the heat some food for thought with frenzied.” aggressive rhetoric trying to threaten our country.”
In fact, if deployed, the missile would only slightly increase Russia’s capabilities. But the launch was all about timing and symbolism: It came amid recent public warnings, including from Mr. Burns, that there was a small but growing chance that Mr. Putin could lead to chemical weapons attacks or even a nuclear demonstration detonation could grab.
Whenever Mr. Putin turns his attention to the United States or its allies, the assumption has always been that Russia would use its cyber arsenal to retaliate for the impact of the sanctions on the Russian economy. But eight weeks into the conflict, there have been no significant cyberattacks beyond the usual background noise of daily Russian cyberactivity on American networks, including ransomware attacks.
US officials have been warning financial firms, utilities and others to prepare for six months, and evidence is mounting that the US Cyber Command and its equivalents in the UK and elsewhere have taken modest preemptive action against the Russian intelligence agencies, which are most active in the cyberspace.
“If the Russians attack the West, NATO or the United States, it is a difficult decision that will have dire consequences on both sides,” Chris Inglis, the United States’ first national cyber director, said at a council meeting on Wednesday organized event Foreign Relations.
Mr Inglis said US government agencies and companies had received ample “strategic warnings” and were in a far better position to repel or recover from such attacks than they would have been a year ago.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
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Saving civilian lives in Marioupol. Russia and Ukraine have reached a tentative agreement to evacuate some women and children from the city, though similar deals have failed in the past. Ukrainian forces entrenched themselves in a large steel factory that appeared to be the city’s last defense and refused to surrender.
Sending military aid to Ukraine. Ukraine’s allies are scrambling to supply more advanced weaponry for the battle in the east, where their defenses are expected to rely on weapons such as long-range missiles, howitzers and armed drones. President Biden said the United States would send more artillery.
But despite all these threats, the American position has been to keep increasing the pressure on Mr. Putin – from sanctions to diplomatic isolation to providing the Ukrainian military with more powerful weapons. “Ukraine has already won the battle for Kyiv,” a government official said. He added that the government “will continue to provide Ukraine with a tremendous amount of weapons, training and information” so that it “can keep winning.”
It’s far from clear that the Ukrainians will keep winning after the fight shifted from the urban streets of Kiev to more familiar, flatter terrain in Donbass.
It’s also not clear what exactly would make the government back down from the ever-increasing pressure on Russia.
The government’s public position is that none of the sanctions are permanent and that they have been carefully crafted so that they can be used at any time as leverage for a diplomatic solution to the war. Presumably, this would require Russia to withdraw all of its forces from Ukraine and cease hostilities in what Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken calls an “irreversible” path.
At the moment this is not on the horizon. The attacks, a government official recently noted, are more barbaric than ever and seem poised to escalate. But the effects of the sanctions are also likely to become more severe.
Mr Burns, a former US ambassador to Moscow, said at the Georgia Institute of Technology last week that Mr Putin is “an apostle of payback” who believes the West “seized on the moment of Russia’s historic weakness in the 1990s”. He added that Putin’s small circle of advisers would hesitate “to question his judgment or his stubborn, almost mystical, belief that it was his destiny to restore Russia’s sphere of influence.”
That means getting the West to withdraw from Russia’s borders. And it means stopping NATO’s expansion, which could soon extend to Finland and Sweden, where a senior US defense official was visiting this week to discuss possible joining the Western alliance.
At the start of the Ukraine war, Mr Putin publicly ordered his nuclear forces to be placed on high alert as a show of Russia’s power, although Mr Burns said there was no evidence the forces were actually placed on high alert.
Wednesday’s test of the Sarmat missile, which has been in development for years, sent another mixed signal. While Mr Putin described it as “capable of overcoming all modern means of missile defense,” armaments experts say that’s an exaggeration. But the exaggeration fits a pattern.
Cold War historians point out that little of this is new. George F. Kennan, the inventor of the “containment strategy” — efforts to contain Soviet power — has always warned that containment has its limits. “His concern,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian who has written extensively about the era, was that “if they become a pariah nation, you won’t have much influence over them.”
In the coming months, this could also become President Biden’s concern.