Inside the Kremlin: De-coding Vladimir Putin

Photo credit: Jorge Láscar from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Inside the Kremlin: De-coding Vladimir Putin

Defence and Security Forum Dinner on 29 September 2026, London

Speaker: Sir Laurie Bristow KCMG

Response: James Nixey

Presiding: Lady Olga Maitland

Report by Emily Claessen

The West’s difficulty with the Kremlin has never been one of interpretation. It has been a reluctance to believe what Moscow says and to act on it.

Now in its fifth year, Russia’s war on Ukraine shows no sign of ending. Putin is fighting for an idea of Russia rather than a strip of the Donbas, which makes him almost impossible to buy off and very hard to wait out. Europe, meanwhile, is already the target of a campaign it still hesitates to call war.

Grievance and intent

Putin has been candid about what he wants; the West has rarely chosen to listen. His grievances are sincere, but his promises are not.

Telling the two apart has grown harder. The Kremlin is more closed than at any point since the Soviet era, Western analysts can no longer travel to Russia, and many Russian experts now work in exile. Analysis has reverted to Cold War methods of piecing together fragments.

What emerges is a leader driven by resentment. His demand that any settlement address the “root causes” of the war leads back to Dresden in 1989, where, as a KGB officer, he watched East Germany collapse and called Moscow for orders that never came. That sense of abandonment underpins four grievances.

The first is empire. Putin regards Russia as an imperial great power and Ukraine as part of it; his 2021 essay cast Ukraine not as a nation but as an “anti-Russia” project engineered by the West. The second is the transatlantic security order. He wants NATO rolled back to its 1997 borders and the 2008 Bucharest promise to Ukraine and Georgia buried. The motive is a sphere of influence, and the old Soviet ambition of prising America away from Europe’s defence. The third is rivalry with the United States, most famously expressed in his 2007 Munich speech attacking American “unilateralism”. The fourth is contempt for liberalism. In 2019 he told the Financial Times that the liberal idea had outlived its purpose, and he is betting that the West is too divided and tired to resist.

No deal to be done

Those “root causes” can be satisfied only by measures that would destroy the security of Ukraine and of Europe. The war is unlikely to end until Russia changes, and Russia is unlikely to change while Putin lives.

Neither side is near outright victory. Russia has taken well over a million casualties, and Ukraine’s deep strikes on refineries and factories have shifted the balance, though not decisively. Moscow’s winter strategy is to break Ukrainian will by destroying the grid. Putin may declare victory if he secures all of the Donbas, whether by force or because Washington presses Kyiv to concede it.

The Trump administration’s diplomacy rests on personal chemistry and treats Putin as a businessman with a price. That misreads a former KGB officer nursing a long list of grievances, who has read Trump far better than Trump has read him. His method is predictable: play for time, pocket every concession, give nothing back. He does not take the Europeans seriously. For him, a ceasefire is simply a pause to regroup. The West must therefore first make delay costly through sustained pressure, then lock any agreement in place with firm penalties, precise wording and reversible sanctions relief. Trading land for peace will not work in a war about more than territory, and a weak deal would merely set up Russia’s next offensive.

The war comes home

Putin has presented the war as remote from the comfortable urban middle class, which is why he has avoided full mobilisation. Petrol shortages, internet blackouts, deepening repression and drone strikes on Russian soil are bringing the conflict home. With losses at times running to tens of thousands a month, mobilisation looks increasingly likely, probably by stealth rather than declaration. September’s Duma elections, probably the most fraudulent in modern Russian history, offered no means of voting against the “special military operation”: anti-war parties were kept off the ballot entirely.

After Putin

A coup is unlikely while Putin remains healthy. The greater danger to the regime lies in succession, since authoritarian systems have no rules or institutions for managing one. Putin’s successor will almost certainly not be a democrat, and the first leader after him may not be the one still standing a year or two later.

There is a precedent for hope. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the men around him concluded that none of them was safe unless repression eased. The West should begin thinking now about how to shape the choices of Putin’s successors, and resist the temptation to rush back to business as usual with the first strongman who offers a handshake.

Breaking NATO without fighting it

A direct attack on a NATO member remains unlikely, as Putin has no interest in a full-scale clash that triggers Article 5. He need not defeat the alliance, only make Article 5 look meaningless. That means eroding allies’ trust in one another, above all in Washington, and draining European public support for Ukraine. Some argue that Moscow seeks NATO’s destruction outright.

Either way, the instrument is cognitive warfare. In America the narrative is that Ukraine “has no cards” or shares the blame; in Europe, that appeasing Putin will make him less dangerous. Behind the drone incursions, sabotage and cyber intrusions lies an old KGB and Stasi technique known as reflexive control: provoking an opponent into acting against its own interests by overreacting, panicking or freezing. Firing a multimillion-pound interceptor at a drone worth a few thousand is precisely that trap.

Call it what it is

Language matters. “Hybrid” attacks are simply attacks, and the adjective, consciously or not, invites a softer response. Describing Russian intelligence as having “gone a bit feral” makes deliberate aggression sound routine.

Each incident is judged too small to answer, yet the cumulative toll is anything but. The polonium and Novichok attacks on British soil show that none of this is new. What has changed is scale and aggression, with a single cyberattack now capable of costing a major manufacturer, its suppliers and the taxpayer billions. Britain need not go to war unless attacked militarily, but it must recognise what is being done and respond on its own terms. The response to the 2018 Skripal poisoning is the model: London expelled Russian intelligence officers and persuaded allies to follow, imposing an operational and reputational cost far beyond what Putin expected. Retaliation means making life less rewarding for the Kremlin, not bombing Moscow.

Allies and enablers

Putin’s “multipolar world” amounts in practice to a world run by Washington, Beijing and Moscow, with little regard for middle and small states. The CRINK grouping of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea is no formal alliance, but its support matters: without China and North Korea, Russia would be far weaker and possibly out of the war. North Korean troops count in a war of attrition, and they do not come free. Missile technology, and quite possibly nuclear know-how, flows back the other way. Driving a wedge between Beijing and Moscow is unlikely to succeed, though their interests diverge: China has prospered under the post-Cold War order, whereas Russia believes it lost out and wants to drag everyone down to its level.

What the West should do

The prescription is familiar: deter Russia and outlast it. The harder question is whether democracies can sustain public and political support over many years.

Some steps are widely agreed, notably arming Ukraine consistently, maximising sanctions and strengthening Europe’s own defences. Others are achievable but neglected. Russia’s shadow fleet of ageing, poorly insured tankers can be stopped. Frozen Russian state assets, held mostly in Belgium but also in Britain, should be put to work for Ukraine; if Russia does not pay, Western taxpayers will. Sanctions on leading oligarchs have softened and should be revived, and Western brands still trading in Russia should be pressed to leave.

Communication matters above all. Leaders must explain what is being done and why without frightening the public into paralysis. They must also stop deterring themselves, and ask not what it will take to deter Putin in 2035 but what it takes today. The answer is alliance cohesion and capability, with the Americans if possible and partly without them if necessary. High-end forces cannot be built in six months, but political will can be found far faster.

Poker, not chess

Putin is no grand strategist thinking ten moves ahead. He is a poker player, and beating him requires the nerve to call his bluff. Yet the gravest threat to European security may lie closer to home. Asked what most endangers the West, officials often answer “us”, meaning its divisions and its reluctance to name the problem.

Putin may rule for another decade, and his departure will bring turmoil rather than relief. The West should prepare for both, deterring him now and deciding today what it will wish it had done on the day he is gone.