PUTIN'S GOALS

World Affairs has had two excellent articles analyzing Putin's policies and goals.

Melik Kaylan has written "Kremlin Values:  Putin's Strategic Conservatism."

I first got wind of this new pan-Putinist ideology in Tbilisi, Georgia, while covering the national elections in the fall of 2012. Having reported from there during the Russian invasion of 2008 and after, I knew the population to be virulently anti-Moscow and largely pro-West. So I was astounded when the country elected an oligarch, Bidzina Ivanishvili, who had made his money in Moscow, who refused to criticize Putin, and who ran against a government headed by the volubly pro-American Mikheil Saakashvili. In the space of a few years, President Saakashvili had stamped out Georgia’s legendary corruption, driven out the mafias, notched up eight percent annual growth rates despite global banking failures and a Russian invasion, and had delivered efficiency, transparency, and foreign investment. Yet the other side won. I saw a most skillful, well-financed, pre-prepared opposition campaign with Moscow-based funds, one that deftly cooked up a prison abuse scandal with scary videos to smear the government. It convinced me that the KGB was rebooted, modernized, formidable, and once more able to redirect the destiny of its near abroad satellites as it had for years, even in democratic contests. Above all, I got a foretaste of the ideas Putin has expounded more openly and systematically since 2008.

Jeffrey Gedmin has written "Beyond Crimea:  What Vladimir Putin Really Wants."

Kasparov’s comment is reminiscent of the remark made by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, who once said the “Russians are like a burglar going down a hotel corridor, trying all the doors. When they find one unlocked, they go in.” It’s not just Ukraine and Georgia where Putin has been at work. For more than a dozen years now, he has burglarized Eastern Europe and territories of the former Soviet Union. Putin’s weapons of choice have not been tanks and MiG fighters; he has mastered the dark side of soft power.  [emphasis mine]