As Russia’s economy crumbles, the war in Ukraine drags on and Moscow’s ties with the West get more and more confrontational, it’s worth asking: Does Vladimir Putin have a plan?

To many of his detractors abroad and loyal supporters at home, the Russian president is decisively executing a strategy to strengthen Russia at the expense of the West. In 2012, when she famously accused Putin of trying to “re-Sovietize” the region around Russia, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argued, “We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.”

Indeed, Putin for years has advocated for a “multipolar” world order in which the current dominance of the U.S. is replaced by a more equitable balance of power. And many of Russia’s dramatic moves over the past year – the annexation of Crimea and support for rebels in eastern Ukraine, an enthusiastic embrace of China and increasingly anti-Western rhetoric from Putin – could be interpreted as moving toward a multipolar world.

But Putin’s opponents, particularly those within Russia, see him as less of a cunning mastermind and more of an out-of-touch autocrat who has started a fight with the West that Russia can’t win. Several of his ad hoc and apparently counterproductive moves have created the impression that he is out of touch and living “in another world,” to use German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s phrasing.



Take the countersanctions, which Russia imposed this summer on imports of food from countries that had put in place restrictions on Russia. This could be seen as part of a larger strategy to decrease Russia’s dependence on imports. But the hasty fashion in which they were announced suggested improvisation on the fly, and they have hurt Russian consumers.

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Similarly, a blockbuster deal on gas exports to China, signed by Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the spring, will reduce Russia’s economic dependence on the West. But the opaque nature of the new contracts, signed after a decade of negotiations, suggests to some that Putin agreed to an unfavorable price purely for the sake of making it look as if Russia didn’t need Europe. Opposition politician Boris Nemtsov argued that Putin’s eager embrace of Beijing’s terms risked turning Russia into a “raw materials colony” of China.

Even in Ukraine, where the conventional wisdom has it that Russia’s involvement is an aggressive first move toward further expansionism in Europe, Russia instead appears to be only reluctantly engaged. It has kept its military involvement limited and tried to maintain secrecy, and while some have posited that this is a sophisticated brand of “hybrid warfare,” others argue that it is simply making a virtue of necessity.

Putin believes that Ukraine, having been taken over by hostile forces that don’t represent the will of the people, is a unique national security risk to Russia, argues Roger McDermott, an analyst of the Russian military at the Danish Institute for International Studies. But the limited use of force is a sign of weakness, not cunning, McDermott says.

Anti-government protesters clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine, in February. A month later, Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula voted to join the Russian Federation, and Russia officially annexed the region. Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images

“It’s about maintaining control over conflict escalation, and sending in too many forces would carry risk of things getting out of control,” he says. Both in Ukraine and more generally, “it is unlikely that there is a ‘grand strategy’ as such.”

Some analysts disagree and contend that Putin does, in fact, have a long-term strategy. In a recent piece titled “Global Aikido: Russia’s Asymmetrical Response to the Ukraine Crisis,” Fyodor Lukyanov, editor-in-chief of the journal Russia in Global Affairs, argues that Putin may be relying on his training in judo in an attempt use the strength of the U.S. against it.



In this argument, Western actions against Russia can backfire to Russia’s long-term advantage. Western dominance of the economic order, Lukyanov points out, is premised on the West’s role as an honest broker and one that lets the laws of the free market reign. But politically motivated financial sanctions against such a powerful country could expose that premise as flawed, accelerating efforts by non-Western countries (led by China) to come up with alternatives.

In addition, Russia could be well-suited to unite its right-wing counterrevolution against the liberal West with a left-wing antiglobalist movement, offering an ideological alternative to the West. “The world as a whole is growing increasingly tired of the lack of alternatives to the U.S.-centric order,” Lukyanov writes. “If a real confrontation begins, Russia will seek to use objective weaknesses of the world leader. If Moscow sides with advocates of a revision of the current international system, which it has never supported before, this may significantly change the global balance of power.”

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But as Lukyanov himself acknowledges, that requires a lot of deft maneuvering by the Kremlin, which Putin has thus far not exhibited. “Russia’s actions are as a rule reactive and defensive in nature, even if they look offensive and aggressive,” he writes.

Other analysts are even more skeptical. “If anyone was ‘aikido-ed,’ it was Russia in Ukraine,” says Mikhail Troitskiy, an associate professor of international relations at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations. “It took a risk, or was provoked to take a risk, that predictably led Russia into an impasse. I don’t see how Russia can respond asymmetrically without provoking a new round of sanctions that would ruin the Russian economy.”