If there’s one thing you can guarantee about a warmongering tyrant, it’s that he needs a war, says Fleet Street Fox. Thanks to Donald Trump, the Russian despot can pick a new target
When Donald Trump puckered up to kiss Vladimir Putin’s bald behind and promise to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine, he wasn’t talking about peace. He was talking about money. That it was costing too much to fight Russia, and from the simplistic point of view of a chaotic real estate mogul, war simply isn’t good for business. But he couldn’t be more wrong.
Trump set the stage for peace talks in which he could claim credit and the Nobel prize he’s always wanted, Ukraine would have to give away everything, the EU would have to police it, and the US could walk away whistling. Except all he’s really done is give Putin the chance to wage war on more fronts. Because Russia cannot afford to do anything else.
When Putin launched a tsarist land grab in 2022, three quarters of a million people and 1,200 businesses left Russia. They were the clever ones, the globalists, the inventors, the entrepreneurs. Those who stayed were the sick, the lame, the poor, and the ones well-positioned to exploit a wartime economy. Able-bodied men were conscripted for the front, and as a result its own government predicts that by 2030 Russia will be short of 2.3million workers.
This has sent wages up, and inflation with it. State spending on the war effort has replaced what was lost in sanctions, with Russia splurging more on arms than the combined defence budget of all European nations combined. He has invested heavily in replacing the imports lost to sanctions from other sources, creating new infrastructure with China, and pre-orders for military hardware. It is this spending which has held up the Russian economy.
If the war were to end, he would be heading for a bust. A lack of workers, higher wages, and rising prices lead ultimately to devaluation. Foreign companies would renew trade, with Russian ones unable to compete. And he’d be taking delivery of freshly-minted military hardware for the next five years, minimum.
Putin would find himself back in the dying days of the Soviet Union, with a stagnant economy over-reliant on a militarised state, and a people growing cross at what they don’t have.. That’s why peace in Ukraine could be disastrous for Putin, if there is nothing to replace it. But he’s one step ahead of dum-dums like Trump.
Where Russia meets Europe, there is an aberration you may never have heard of. It is called Kaliningrad, a Soviet-era leftover about one tenth the size of Wales. It is a city port on the Baltic Sea and after the Second World War was cleansed of everyone but Russians. It is an outpost of a past that no longer exists: a bit like the Isle of Wight. The connection is psychological, because when the Iron Curtain fell Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, to the north, all declared independence. They joined the EU and NATO, and now form a 412-mile wall of modernity between Kaliningrad and the motherland which Putin has been carefully undermining for years.
He has rattled the dustbins with border disputes. He has complained that Russian citizens and goods cannot get in and out as they used to, and has threatened retaliation. And his Baltic fleet has been blamed for interfering with undersea cables. Just last week Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all cut off the Soviet-era power grid they had been relying on, and switched to EU sources. That left Kaliningrad an energy island, forced to be self-reliant. If Lithuania, its last source of outside gas, ever cut off supplies the consequences could be dire.
It is all a long way from war, but it is precisely the sort of sabre-rattling which Putin used to justify his raids on Crimea, Chechnya, and Ukraine. He is determined to take back every country which declared independence. Ukraine was the fattest apple, but was difficult to digest. Now Trump is offering him, effectively, a ceasefire and a chance to save face, he can tackle the rest. The problem is that the rest of his list are protected, in theory, by NATO.
It’s an organisation with multiple members and nuclear weapons, sworn to protect all-for-one and one-for-all, but the unofficial senior partner is the US and Trump hates it. He hates what it costs, he hates it protects countries other than America, and he keeps threatening to walk away. And he has just given Putin the breathing space to restock, rearm, and move against a defensive alliance whose don would rather do a deal then head to the mattresses.
The chances of Trump standing up for Estonia are close to zero. The chances of Putin needing, rather urgently, to invade Estonia, are probably 3 in 5. And if the tanks, drones, submarines and soldiers decide to open up a military corridor to Kaliningrad to ‘protect’ Russian citizens from non-existent threats, it would be up to the loosey-goosey, touchy-feely Europe to stand up to them. That’s why offering Putin peace is a terrible, simplistic, myopic idea of exactly the sort you’d expect from a particularly dim estate agent only interested in his next bonus and not how you, or he, are going to live in the same street afterwards, because he lives up on the hill and doesn’t give two f***s about you. Give Putin a couple of years of peace, and there’ll be a decade more war on our doorsteps.
Putin might die – he’s not well. Or his staggering economy could be outstripped by the high-tech drive of China and the West. Another pandemic could flip the board. But unless and until Putin’s own curtain falls, there will be no change to Russia’s thirst for war. Because without one, it will expire.