Cliff’s Note:
David Shuster spent years as a correspondent at the networks, which means he has sat through the briefings, worked the sources, and learned exactly how careful you have to be with a story like this one. Read what he does below with the reporting about Putin’s private comments. He tells you where it came from, he tells you it has not been independently confirmed, and then he tells you why it matters anyway. That is what actual journalism looks like, and it has become weirdly hard to find.
Cable news will cover a cornered dictator with nuclear weapons for ninety seconds between a panel about polling and a commercial for a pillow. We are not doing that. David gets the room he needs, and nobody upstairs is telling him to soften it.
The rest of this piece—the escalation reporting, what the Kremlin now believes about NATO, the nuclear question, and what Xi Jinping has told Putin directly—is for paid subscribers. Paid subscribers are the entire reason Blue Amp exists. No network, no billionaire, no advertiser deciding what we are allowed to say.
If you want more of this, be one.
—Cliff
by David Shuster
There is something terrifying these days about Vladimir Putin’s predicament: after nearly five years of war with Ukraine, an estimated half a million Russian soldiers killed (plus another 1.1 million wounded) a crashed Russian economy, and widespread gasoline shortages, Russia’s dictator may now be fighting not for his nation’s security, but for his own skin.
According to a new report in The Economist, Putin has privately told people close to him that “they’ll hang me” if he fails to conquer the entire Ukraine Donbas region. The quotation has not been independently confirmed. And it could reflect the usual Kremlin intrigue. But if the quote captures even a fraction of Putin’s thinking, it underscores the malignancy of this catastrophe: Putin’s disastrous foreign policy adventure has become a test of his own personal survival. Relatedly, he has fewer and fewer reasons to compromise.
Russia’s President Putin has built a political system around the proposition that he is indispensable.
He has surrounded himself with flatterers, brutal enforcers, and yes-men. Putin has suppressed dissent, made falling from windows a regular thing, and promoted the image that he alone is the omnipotent czar who can restore Russia to greatness.
For almost five years, Putin has called his invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation,” as though a war involving mass casualties, destroyed cities and enormous armies could be made less terrible by giving it the bureaucratic name of a parking violation.
The euphemism has become one of the great jokes of the modern geo-political age—except that the joke has been paid for by Ukrainians and Russians with their lives.
I mentioned the Russian casualties above. Ukraine has suffered an estimated 150,000 military fatalities and another 500 thousand troops wounded. Ukraine has also had more than 20,000 civilians killed by Russia attacks and air strikes.
Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is reportedly considering an even more dangerous escalation. Bloomberg, citing sources close to the Kremlin, reports that Russia is weighing intensified ballistic-missile strikes against Kyiv, potentially including the city center, as well as attacks on infrastructure in other Ukrainian cities. According to the Bloomberg reporting, Moscow does not believe global sanctions on Russia or Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil refineries and logistics networks will persuade Putin to end the war.
This should worry the entire globe.
Because the terrifying feature of this moment is not just that Putin is contemplating inflicting more violence. Russia has been contemplating more violence for years. The danger is that Putin’s Kremlin seems to increasingly believe that escalation is the only alternative to failure.
According to Bloomberg’s sources, Putin and his inner circle increasingly regard Ukrainian attacks on Russia as attacks by NATO because alliance members provide Kyiv with weapons and intelligence. If that view hardens, the distinction between a war Russia is fighting against Ukraine and a war Russia believes it is fighting against the West becomes dangerously thin.
And once that distinction disappears, the room for error disappears as well.
Also, there does not appear to be any diplomatic exit ramp. Putin reportedly believes he has already made concessions to the U.S. and NATO that weakened Russia’s position. Those concessions apparently included promises not to try and kill/decapitate Ukraine’s leadership by bombing Ukraine’s government center. However, with Russian forces still occupying eastern Ukraine and fighting for more territory, Ukraine has no reason to accept a settlement that rewards aggression.
So, the result is a diplomatic deadlock accompanied by military escalation. That is how wars become traps.
The most disturbing reports concern nuclear weapons.
