Russian President Vladimir V. Putin wants to prosecute his war in Ukraine the same way he won freedom on Thursday for a major Russian arms dealer: causing too much pain for politicians Western governments so that they must finally reach an agreement.
The Kremlin has been pushing for more than a decade for Viktor Bout, convicted in 2011 of conspiracy to kill Americans, to be released from prison in the United States. But it was only this year, with the arrest of American basketball star Brittney Griner at Moscow airport, that Putin found the leverage to get his way.
On Thursday, pro-Kremlin voices celebrated Bout’s release in a prisoner exchange with Griner as a victory, a sign that despite wanting to punish Russia for the war In Ukraine, the United States will still come to the final decision. table when major US interests are at play. Russia negotiated from “strength, comrades,” Maria Butina – a pro-Putin member of the National Assembly who I myself served time in an American prison — post on the Telegram messaging app.
Putin’s emerging strategy in Ukraine, after repeated defeats by his troops, now increasingly repeats the strategy that eventually brought Bout back to Moscow. He is bombarding Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, effectively holding its people hostage as he seeks to shatter the spirit of the country.
Tactics are threatening the European Union with a new wave of refugees Like Mr. Putin using familiar economic levers: strangulation stop exporting gas. And Mr. Putin is betting that the West, even after showing much more solidarity in support of Ukraine than Mr. Putin seemed to expect, will eventually tire of the war and its adverse economic effects. its economics.
There is no guarantee that the strategy will work. Although President Biden has made concessions to Mr. Bout, he has no intention of giving in to US support for Ukraine. America’s European allies, while facing some domestic political and economic pressure to push for a compromise with Russia, remain supportive.
In the face of this unity of the West, Putin has repeatedly signaled this week that he is ready to continue fighting, despite embarrassing territorial retreats, Russian casualties, and US casualties. fabricate. at more than 100,000 and the ever-expanding Western sanctions. On Wednesday, he warning that the war “could be a long process.” And at the medal ceremony for soldiers in the Kremlin on Thursday, Putin falsely asserted that the Ukrainian government was carrying out “genocide,” implying that Russian attacks into Ukraine’s energy infrastructure will continue.
“If we take the slightest action in response, there will be noise, noise and noise throughout the universe,” he said, champagne flute in hand, during the speech. Broadcast on state television. “This will not prevent us from completing our combat duties.”
Putin himself did not comment on Thursday’s prisoner exchange. But in the wake of the Ukraine war, there is a clear conspiracy in the crowing in Moscow: To his supporters, Mr. Putin remains a dealmaker, and he is willing to negotiate on Ukraine as long as the West does not interfere with his goals. pull the country into its orbit and seize some of its territory.
“He is sending a signal that he is willing to haggle,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, a political analyst who studies Putin. “But he is letting the West know that ‘Ukraine is ours’.”
When asked when the war might end, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, hinted on Thursday that Russia is still waiting for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to accept some sort of deal: “Zelensky know when this might end. It could end tomorrow, if there is a will.”
But when one of Putin’s top spies, Sergei Naryshkin, met the head of the CIA, William Burns, in Turkey last month, Burns did not discuss a solution to the Ukraine war, officials said. US officials said. Instead, Mr. Burns warning of dire consequences for Moscow used nuclear weapons in Ukraine, and discussed the fate of Americans imprisoned in Russia, including Griner.
“The Russian style of negotiation is, they punch you in the face and then they ask you if you want to negotiate,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a former State Department official who is now research director at the think tank. of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “The Americans responded to that by saying, ‘You know, you just punched us in the face, obviously you don’t want to negotiate.'”
However, talks on several issues continued even as Russia’s missile attacks escalated, talks supported by Putin despite occasional criticism from critics. most hawkish supporter of his war.
Pro-war bloggers in Russia rage in September when Putin agreed to an earlier high-profile exchange: the commanders of the Azov Battalion, a nationalist fighting force in the Ukrainian army made famous for protecting a besieged steel mill, to a friend Putin’s, Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk. Some critics have criticized Putin’s agreement to allow Ukraine’s grain exports through the Black Sea to represent excessive concessions.
And then there was the talk around Mr. Bout and Mrs. Griner. On the surface, the exchange doesn’t seem like a good fit, given the huge disparity in the severity of their offenses: one of the world’s most prolific arms dealers and a basketball star who US detained for traveling with a vape box containing hash oil.
But Mr. Biden has shown he is willing to invest significant political capital to secure Griner’s freedom, while the Kremlin has long sought to free Mr. Bout.
“We know that efforts to help Bout have been going on for many years,” said Andrei Kortunov, director general of the Russian Council of International Affairs, a think tank close to the Russian government. “He has also become an iconic figure” for the Kremlin, he added.
Mr. Bout became infamous among US intelligence officials, earning the nickname “The Trader of Death” for evading capture for years. He was eventually caught in a covert operation in Bangkok in 2008, with US prosecutors saying he agreed to sell anti-aircraft weapons to informants posing as arms buyers to Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
Some analysts believe Mr. Bout has links to Russian intelligence agencies. Such connections have not been publicly confirmed, but they may explain why Mr. Putin – a former KGB officer – made such predictions to help Bout’s release.
Mark Galeotti, lecturer on Russia and transnational crime at University College London, said: “If he’s just an arms dealer and freight magnate, it’s hard to see why it’s being accepted. The Russian state makes such a priority. summer.
That means the US decision to free Mr Bout – possibly the most famous Russian in US custody – represents a significant compromise. It is magnified by the fact that the US accepted the exchange even though Russia also refused to free Paul Whelan, a former Marine in the Biden administration. Also considered a political hostage.
Some analysts believe the decision to free Mr Bout is risky because it could encourage Mr. Putin to take new hostages – and shows that the strategy of inflicting pain, and then winning concessions, is being continue to bear fruit.
Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist specializing in the security services, said he was worried about the precedent set by Washington by agreeing to trade an arms dealer for a basketball player who committed a misdemeanor.
“Back in the Cold War era, there was always expert versus expert, spy against spy,” he said. While the United States has had to contend with domestic public demands to release the hostages, the Russians can “completely ignore it,” he said.
Now, Moscow “can marry a famous person in America – an athlete, an athlete,” he said. Public outcry in the United States “would make that stance much more favorable to negotiations of this kind.”
