Ben Judah is author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In And Out Of Love With Vladimir Putin.

The war in Ukraine is no longer only about Ukraine. The conflict has transformed Russia. This increasingly is what European leaders and diplomats believe: that Vladimir Putin and his security establishment have used the fog of war in Ukraine to shroud the final establishment of his brittle imperialist dictatorship in Moscow.

Among those who believe that this is happening, and that Europe will be facing down a more menacing Russia for a long time to come, is Radek Sikorski, who was Poland’s foreign minister from 2007 until September.


“I think psychologically the regime has been transformed by the annexation of Crimea,” Sikorski told Politico Magazine. “This was the moment that finally convinced all doubters and turned all heads. This was Napoleon after Austerlitz. This was Hitler after the fall of Paris. This was the moment that finally centralized everything into the hands of Vladimir Putin.”

Sikorski is formerly a glamorous figure in Brussels who played a leading role in shaping the European Union strategy toward both Russia and Ukraine. European leaders, intimidated by his charisma and outspoken views on Russia, chose not to appoint him as Europe’s high representative for foreign affairs earlier this year. Today Sikorski is the hawkish speaker of the Polish parliament, and he says that the West has been so distracted by the crisis in Ukraine it has missed the more important developments further east.

“What is happening now is the full embrace of neo-imperialism,” Sikorski says. “They have exploited every post-Soviet and neo-Soviet atavism and made it real because an alarming proportion of the population believes it. This is how they have refueled their regime.”

Sikorski is outspoken but not alone. Powerful officials inside Russia also see a darker cast to the regime, with the influence of the free-market economists and loyal oligarchs whom Putin once surrounded himself with significantly diminished. The liberals, relatively speaking, are out; the Russian president is reportedly now only working closely with security officials and the Defense Ministry. Some European diplomats even question whether Putin is still fully in charge, so beholden is he to the siloviki—the military and security establishment. “Every year the ruling circle shrinks smaller and smaller,” said one Kremlin source. “The only people that Putin is listening to are the military and the intelligence.”

Fear has returned to Moscow. Paranoia has gripped Russian officials and business elites. Those privy to sensitive information no longer carry smartphones. Instead they carry simple old cell phones and now remove the battery—to make sure the phone is dead – when they talk about Kremlin politics among themselves. This is because they assume the security services are now recording what is being said and this can disable the recording device. There is real fear that the next dramatic event in Russian politics could trigger a wave of sackings, arrests or even purges.

“This is the new ruling elite—the GRU military intelligence, which was the spearhead on the ground in Ukraine and the defense ministry,” says Sikorski, referring to Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency, which commands its own special forces. “The removal of old elites has not started yet, but that’s the next logical step. … They have unleashed patriotic euphoria. They made this happen by exploiting the psychological and sociological resentment of the all the new and the old intelligence and security services toward the hated class of billionaires with their yachts and their mansions in London. That’s why they are so committed and loyal.”

Carl Bildt, who was Sweden’s hawkish foreign minister until this month, also believes Putin’s revanchist team is using the nationalistic fury whipped up by the Ukraine war to consolidate its power. But Bildt suggests the new, hard-line Russian regime might also be brittle beneath the surface. “The mood from my Russian contacts is one of extreme pessimism and fear,” Bildt told Politico Magazine. “They have no idea where the future leads. They fear that Putin may rule forever or collapse very suddenly because the regime has such weak foundations. From what I am hearing, the military are overjoyed right now. This is because they are receiving what militaries want, which is prestige and vast new transfusions of money. But the oligarchs are frightened and the regional governors are angry. This is because they are the ones losing out on that big fat Moscow check.”

Putin has instilled fear of stepping out of line with talk from his propagandists about the “sixth column.” The regime has long smeared the opposition with textbook accusations of them being Russia’s “fifth column.” But the Orwellian new invention of a “sixth column” refers to those inside the regime opposing expansionism due to their ties to the West. Alexander Dugin, the Kremlin-controlled ideologue now promoted across official airwaves as the champion of this new conservatism, has even called these insiders the main existential enemies of Russia. “The oligarchs with property in London know they are the outdated remnants of a previous era,” said one Kremlin adviser.

Within the establishment there have been sudden sackings of intelligence officials and generals believed to be disloyal. Meanwhile, beyond the Kremlin walls, the security services have moved to finish the job on the Russian opposition. Through repression and infiltration, there is no meaningful opposition activism left. The main opposition leaders have all been forced to flee the country, isolated or placed under house arrest. The protest movement is dead. “We believe most of the people who took to the streets of Moscow back in 2011 have emigrated,” one Russian official familiar with the matter says. “And we believe the rest will soon follow.”

There is growing fear among professionals in Moscow that the regime is contemplating requiring exit visas, a restrictive practice that vanished for most part with the Soviet Union. This appears for the most part to be a rumor spread by the Kremlin to encourage the remaining liberal activists to flee. However, there is a reality here as well: More than four million officials tied to the military and security services are now effectively banned from leaving the country. “They are closing the border slowly,” explains one Russian government adviser.

Even for the billionaires,there is a new fear in the air: No longer can they rely on the certainty of retaining their assets as long as they don’t oppose Putin. The arrest in September of the Russian billionaire Yevgeny Yevtushenkov, who is known for his independence, sent a clear message. “This is no longer a crisis,” says one banker for Kremlin insiders. “What we have now is a new normal. There had been a complete re-evaluation of what Russia can now achieve. We are no longer going to grow like an emerging market. We are going to be living in a country a lot more like Iran than China. They are putting nationalism above the economy.”

Russian oligarchs have been trying to convey their fears to the British government, warning advisers of Prime Minister David Cameron that further sanctions may cause Putin to lash out aggressively against the gentler parts of the Russian elite. Russian diplomats have also tried to convince their European counterparts that within the Kremlin, liberal and conservative factions are clashing and they must do nothing to strengthen the hardliners. But Bildt and others believe that such a clash, if it existed, is already over. “I don’t believe that Putin is being spun in a faction war,” says Bildt, “You must never forget that Putin belongs to the conservative faction. He is essentially a KGB security guy.”

The Putin regime has also done much in recent months to stifle the Russian media. The Kremlin brought national television under its control almost immediately after coming to power. But news sources without a mass audience were long relatively free of Kremlin meddling. The Internet was unfettered and most quality newspapers were only lightly censored. This has now changed dramatically. Russian state television is little more than agitation and propaganda. The hysterical national propagandist Dmitry Kiselyov, who heads the national news agency Rossiya Segodnya, now delivers a weekly broadcast of the government line to the population.

Draconian laws have been passed enabling the regime to arrest anyone for anything said online. The regime has invested in extensive surveillance technologies, including ones that allow it to rewrite foreign websites when seen on Russian computers. Russia is now forcing all servers covering Russian data to be relocated to its territory and then permit the intelligence services full access to them. Many Muscovites expect full censorship of the Internet soon, and they fear Facebook, Skype and Twitter will soon be banned. Meanwhile, major Russian newspapers such as Kommersant have seen their editorial freedom vanish, while others such as Vedomosti or Novaya Gazeta now believe they are under threat of closure due to a new law heavily dramatically curtailing what foreigners may own in the Russian media.

“There had been a serious step up in the propaganda front,” says Bildt. “This metaphor must not be stretched too far but what has happened reminds me of the propaganda TV established by Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in the 1990s. Serbian propaganda TV would use traumatic historical memories again and again. … Now Russian propaganda TV does the same.”

Many in Brussels believe Putin invaded Ukraine because he feared globalization; the Internet and the rise of the middle class were eroding the foundations of his regime. “Putin found reform too difficult,” says Sikorski. “Putin has taken the shortcut to popularity. He realized that moving towards reform involved cutting through and damaging the interests of too many relevant people who his power depends on. He saw this as much too risky. But in reality his greatest fear is being [the last Soviet leader, Mikhail] Gorbachev. He sees Gorbachev as a fool because he was taken in by the West and then thrown under the bus. And there is some truth in that.”

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Russia’s internal reordering has also, not surprisingly, reoriented the Kremlin’s view of the world in dramatic ways. There is no hiding the new Cold War-like atmosphere. Nikolai Patrushev, chairman of the Russian Security Council, which oversees Russia’s security forces, made this clear when he said in October the United States is now “pursuing the same objectives they had in the 1980s towards the Soviet Union.”

This line is not lost on Brussels, where officials believe the European Union will continue to do business with Russia, but it will no longer commit to building anything with Moscow. This means that any project to build either a visa-free or a free-trade regime with Russia is now dead for the foreseeable future. This is why Putin’s new-style regime is pushing hard to cozy up with China, in particular with new huge energy deals. According to an adviser to Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov, Moscow intends to slowly move the finance of state companies and political players away from London, Zurich and Frankfurt toward Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore. “We think we can match what we lose from the West with what China offers,” said the adviser.

European leaders find this fantastical. According to one Cameron adviser, the inner circle of the British government sees Russia’s eastern pivot as delusional. They believe that it will take decades to rebuild an entire oil and gas infrastructure oriented toward Europe and that Chinese banks are in no position to replace Western loans. “The Chinese cannot and will not give them this money,” said the adviser.

And indeed, there has been little by way of new Chinese loans toward Russian companies unable to leverage in the West. As of early September the leading Chinese state banks – the Bank of China, the Chinese Construction Bank and the International and Commercial Bank of China had lending portfolios of only $170 million in Russia. This is nothing compared to $134 billion in foreign debts Russian banks and corporations must repay to mostly American and European banks before the end of 2015.

“What we are hearing from the Chinese is an extremely cynical view of Russia,” says Bildt, “and what the Chinese can do with them. They arrive in Beijing and there is great fanfare but there is very little reality to many of these handshakes. They say we have indeed signed some contracts but this will take a very long time and we don’t even believe much of it will really happen.”

Now that the shock of war in Ukraine has faded, many in Brussels are trying to work out how far back the operation in Crimea was planned. This is why Russian diplomats are working hard to convince European leaders that the war in Ukraine was simply an unfortunate set of events starting with the spontaneous protests in Kyiv earlier this year, which led to the ouster of then-Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych, a fickle ally of the Russian President.

The buildup to war actually began as early as 2008, according to Sikorski. He says Russian intentions were becoming transparent by the time of the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest. “This is where [Putin] gave his extraordinary speech saying Ukraine was an artificial country and the greater part of these lands historically belonged to Russia.” At the summit the Kremlin warned it would respond militarily to moves by Ukraine or Georgia to join the NATO alliance: months later Russian forces seized on a provocation from Tbilisi and invaded Georgia.

Ukrainian intelligence points to Russian operatives beginning to move into Crimea from 2012 and possibly even 2010. There have also been reports of Kremlin operatives openly discussing a project to annex the territory beginning in the summer of 2013. Sikorski says Russian intentions toward Crimea first began to alarm him in 2011 and 2012, when Putin began visiting the festivals of Russian nationalist biker gangs in the peninsula. However it was not until the summer of 2013 that alarm bells began to ring inside the Polish Foreign Ministry.

“We learned Russia ran calculations on what provinces would be profitable to grab,” says Sikorski, who claims that Poland became aware the Kremlin had calculated it would be profitable to annex Zaporozhye, Dnepropetrovsk and Odessa regions, while the assessing that the Donbass area currently controlled by Putin’s rebels would not, on its own, not be profitable to incorporate into Russia.

“By that time they were already doing calculations about how to seize Crimea as a way of blackmailing Viktor Yanukovych,” says Sikorski, “I know from my conversations and meeting with Yanukovych that he wanted to get the [European Union-Ukraine] Association Agreement. But in November 2013 something happened, something snapped. Based on our conversations, my sense is that it was something Putin told him in Sochi. I think that Putin had kompromat [blackmail material] on Yanukovych: we now know there was a weekly, biweekly truck taking out the cash [stolen from the Ukrainian budget] in a cash transfer. And I think he told him: ‘Don’t sign the Association Agreement; otherwise we’ll seize Crimea.’ That’s why he cracked.”

Since then, Russia has attempted to involve Poland in the invasion of Ukraine, just as if it were a post-modern re-run of the historic partitions of Poland. “He wanted us to become participants in this partition of Ukraine,” says Sikorski. “Putin wants Poland to commit troops to Ukraine. These were the signals they sent us. … We have known how they think for years. We have known this is what they think for years. This was one of the first things that Putin said to my prime minister, Donald Tusk, [soon to be President of the European Council] when he visited Moscow. He went on to say Ukraine is an artificial country and that Lwow is a Polish city and why don’t we just sort it out together. Luckily Tusk didn’t answer. He knew he was being recorded.”

The Kremlin gambled it was playing with Poland’s own repressed imperial fantasies: Moscow is well aware that among the country’s bestselling novels is a historical fantasy of a Poland that teamed up with Nazi Germany to conquer the Soviet Union. Nor had it gone amiss in Moscow that Sikorski himself has praised the novel, on more than one occasion. This is why the Kremlin sent out feelers to Warsaw with a message from the speaker of the clownish Russian speaker of parliament, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, offering Poland five provinces of Western Ukraine. The belief in Warsaw was this message was a deniable feeler from the Kremlin’s innermost circles. “We made it very, very clear to them—we wanted nothing to do with this,” says Sikorski.

Nobody knows where Putin will stop. But there is fear in Poland and the Baltic states that sooner or later he will try and conquer the rest of what he claims of what he calls “Novorossiya,” or New Russia: a huge territory stretching from Donetsk all the way to the borders of Moldova. “What I fear,” says Sikorski, “is that the Russians simply cannot accept the existence of Ukraine as a nation. They cannot admit that a separate nation exists. And if they want to go head to head against Ukrainian nationalism, well, then be my guest. Then Russia will learn that Ukraine is really a nation and face a situation of 20 years of partisan war. The Russians could grab the entire territory of Novorossiya easily, but they will have a rump Ukraine arming her, supplying her with weapons, seen by the whole world as the real Ukraine, with a sizable amount of the population supporting the real Ukraine. They could win the battle. But to hold down this enormous territory would require a force of 200,000 to 300,000 troops and a 10-year commitment. And they could never sustain it without permanent, national mobilization.”

Europe’s leaders think this is why the Kremlin will now freeze the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. But they are not certain. Many speculate Putin will try to carve out a land bridge to Crimea, others that he will cut off Ukrainian gas this winter. Whatever happens, it’s clear Europe’s foreign policy machine has been exposed as clueless. The EU and its member states have more than 57,000 diplomats around the world, but they failed to predict either the war in Ukraine or the Arab Spring. Bildt laments: “Most of the staff in the EU embassies can’t even speak the local language.”

The hawkish Bildt and Sikorski see Russia as a real threat to other European states, but most European leaders disagree. As one European foreign minister from a small eastern country explained the discord: “There are two kinds of threat assessments in the EU right now. There are those of us who see the only real threat to our statehood coming from Germany if the euro and the EU collapse, and then everything else, ISIS, Ukraine and all that, as being threats that only seem real on TV; and then there are those of us like the Poles, and the Baltic states, who really do believe that Russia imminently menaces their statehood.”

Still, Bildt and Sikorski are taken very seriously in Brussels: they have the ear of Europe’s leaders on all matters concerning Russia. Both see more Kremlin-instigated war in Europe through the decades ahead. “I have talked to NATO generals,” says Sikorski. “And they see what I see: that he is capable of pushing us to the limit. Of pushing us to the limits before we crack. I believe that Putin has us completely sussed. He thinks he’s facing a bunch of degenerate weaklings. And he thinks we wouldn’t go to war to defend the Baltics. You know, maybe he’s right.”

In the end, however, the threat from Russia could stem as much from its instability as its ambitions. Putin appears too entrenched to be toppled without bloodshed or a coup. European diplomats note soberly they believe sanctions cannot crack the regime: If they succeed, they will only make it more reticent to intervene abroad, at the cost of becoming much more repressive at home. This means the real risk is that Putin will attempt to repeat his success in Crimea every time his popularity begins to flag—and there might be an even greater risk of this now that the price of oil is falling, and with it Russia’s prosperity.

“Should it go decisively below $80 a barrel and stay there for two years he’s in trouble,” warns Sikorski. “But what’s bad for him is not necessarily good for us. He’s a gambler. And he’s got a lowered sense of danger. He’ll take these huge gambles because the real danger for Putin is his own life. He can’t let go. He can’t leave the Kremlin. Once you’ve spilt blood, once you’ve had apartment bombings, once you’ve sent death squads abroad, once you’ve had Georgia, Ukraine, all these mothers, and all the bodies of soldiers being disposed of from secret wars… You can’t just let go.”