As Vladimir Putin tells it, the most important moment in his geopolitical education came via a phone call. It was December of 1989. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, and popular protests were sweeping away most of the Soviet-backed governments in Eastern Europe.
Putin, then a Soviet spy in the East German backwater of Dresden, was holed up in the city’s KGB villa as a group of protesters approached, demanding entry. While his fellow agents frantically crammed boxes of top-secret documents into the fire of a basement furnace, Putin picked up the phone and called the local Soviet Army base to ask for reinforcements.
“Moscow is silent,” came the reply. The Kremlin wouldn’t authorize a deployment of troops. The answer stunned and enraged Putin, he later told a biographer. “A paralysis of power,” he recalled, had allowed the Soviet empire to crumble.
Putin has spent much of his political career trying to overcome the humiliation of the Soviet collapse. But over the past year, as ally after ally has gotten ousted or bombed – in some cases by the US – Putin has been curiously silent himself.
A little over a year ago, jihadist militias swept through Syria and overthrew Kremlin-backed Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad.
Several months later, the US and Israel bombed the nuclear program of Iran, another key Russian ally and a major supplier of drones for Putin’s assault on Ukraine.
Then, earlier this month, US special forces nabbed Putin’s “great friend” Nicolás Maduro in his pajamas and flew the Venezuelan strongman to a New York City jail – destroying half a dozen of the country’s Russian-made air defenses for good measure.
Aside from condemning these episodes as violations of international law – a body of rules Putin himself has happily shredded in Ukraine – the Kremlin sent no military aid to its allies.
Why?
For one thing, Russia has its hands full with Ukraine. Putin’s full scale invasion of Ukraine is about to enter its fifth year, and although his army continues to slowly grind through Eastern Ukraine, the conflict – Moscow’s deadliest and most costly since World War II – is a significant drain on Russia’s manpower, attention, and resources.
That, in turn, means Putin is more constrained and has to pick his battles wisely. Unlike the Soviet bloc – an empire that Moscow had maintained for more than four decades – today’s Russian alliances with countries like Iran, Syria, or Venezuela are looser and more opportunistic.
So while Putin is willing to suffer immense pressure in order to preserve control over Ukraine, which he sees as a core interest, there’s less reason to stick his neck out for other, more distant partners, especially if it would put him in direct conflict with the US or other important partners like Israel and the Arab states.
Washington, after all, isn’t just a superior military power, it’s also the key player in Ukraine negotiations where Putin is still hoping to get the Trump administration to endorse his maximalist demands for Ukraine’s territory and demilitarization.
But the final answer may be the most interesting: Putin sees an opportunity in all of this.
With his strike on Venezuela, Donald Trump signalled a new set of expectations and unspoken rules for the world order. High-handed lectures about international law, democracy, and shared values are out. Raw power and spheres of influence are in. This is a more brutally honest – or honestly brutal – system governed, as Trump’s own adviser Stephen Miller recently put it, by the “iron law” of power.
That’s a world Putin can probably live with for now. After all, he has long bristled at the West’s double-standard hectoring about democracy and sovereignty. He has long argued that Ukraine is in Moscow’s sphere of influence the way that Trump now considers Venezuela (and Panama and Canada and Greenland, for that matter) to be in Washington’s.
If the world’s only superpower is going to willingly meet him where he’s at on these issues, why try to stop it? For Vladimir Putin these days, a certain kind of silence is golden.
