How to read your lies, mom?
“How to read...”
Take it sentence by sentence. Stop & consider meaning. Then, paragraph by paragraph & consider wontext of sentences together.
“Agent of chaos: How to read Putin’s lies, U-turns and retreats”
“There are always reasons to doubt Russia is playing it straight.
For years, Russian President Vladimir Putin has bundled U-turns and lies together, making it hard to distinguish between evasion and fiction, and weaponizing the toxic mix to blackmail, divide and bewilder his foes.
In recent days, Russia has pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal, then gone back into it, and issued bloodcurdling threats of nuclear attack before reversing course to endorse the language of non-proliferation. This week, Putin ordered his forces to retreat from Kherson only weeks after declaring that the city would-be part of Russia “forever.”
How should the world interpret Putin’s wildly contradictory statements, actions and signals? And when it comes to the use of nuclear weapons, does Russia’s most recent rejection provide any reassurance at all?
“For Russia, inconsistency is an integral part of its foreign policy strategy, particularly under Putin,” noted Fiona Hill, a former official at the U.S. National Security Council. Hill was commenting back in 2013, a year before Russia illegally annexed Crimea after disavowing what it called the “little green men” occupying and blockading Simferopol International Airport and military bases on the Ukrainian peninsula.
In January and February, less than two weeks before intense rocket fire rained down on Kharkiv, and Kyiv’s airports were blasted by pre-dawn waves of cruise missiles, the Kremlin and its top officials waved away any suggestions that Putin intended to invade and conquer Ukraine.
The troop buildup along Ukraine’s eastern and northern borders were part of normal military exercises, they said. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova labeled as “absurd” accusations that Russia nurtured any aggressive plans. “We learn from U.S. newspapers that we will attack Ukraine,” Zakharova mocked. Her boss, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, insisted “there won’t be a war,” assuring all and sundry Russia didn’t want one.
Was this a brazen lie aimed to deceive and maintain an element of surprise or a genuine policy reversal? It’s hard to tell — and that may be the intention. Or it may just be the West’s failure to understand how Russian policy is made, say some seasoned Putin-watchers. They argue Western governments struggle to comprehend the abrupt U-turns and too often can’t differentiate between such policy reversals and purposeful deception.
“I think he makes some of this up as he goes along, some is out of desperation, but he also looks for openings in the West,” said David Kramer, who was an assistant secretary of state in the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. The result is — whatever the motivations for the changes in direction — everyone wonders what Putin going to do.
Maybe Winston Churchill’s definition of Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” has never been truer since Britain’s wartime leader struggled to parse Joe Stalin.
Western policymakers, who must shape strategies, don’t have the luxury of just throwing up their hands and lumping together all the inconsistencies, lies and about-turns as part of a deliberate Kremlin policy. They might miss something important and revealing if they did.
“Overall, Putin thinks where there is chaos, there is opportunity, so confusion and deception is all part of his ‘spy training,’” said Orysia Lutsevych, research fellow at Britain’s Chatham House.
Even so, there are different reasons for shifts and inconsistencies, she warned. “In some cases, Putin is testing the limits of the possible, as with the grain deal, and if the opposing side shows force and determination, he does a U-turn.”
But she thinks Putin’s about-turn ordering a partial mobilization of reservists in September after insisting there wouldn’t be one “was a domestic deception operation; they were secretly mobilizing for a long time, and he made it public at the moment it was expedient.”
The White House, apparently, does not want to take too many chances. According to recent reports, U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan held talks with senior Kremlin aides with the aim of reducing the risk that the Ukraine war could escalate into a nuclear conflict.
According to Emily Ferris, an analyst at the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense and security think tank, Putin’s thinly-veiled nuclear threats over the past few weeks were a way “of escalating to test the waters and see what the response would be.”
He has recently dialed back the threats, claiming that he “had never talked about using nuclear weapons,” and that a nuclear strike on Ukraine would make neither political nor military sense.
Ferris and other Putin watchers think the backtracking this time was a result of pressure from Beijing. “Given the concerns from China, Putin likely noted the limits of that rhetoric and has now moved on from it and they’ve now said quite clearly they want to avoid any kind of nuclear conflict, so it did reveal some of the influence China has to help deescalate here,” she said.
Ferris said the decision to invade Ukraine was probably made at the last minute, which would be “quite in keeping with Putin’s tendency to put off big decisions.”
And when it comes to operational matters there’s an underlying “general incompetence and inefficiency among security establishment in Russia which shouldn’t be understated,” she said. “Putin sometimes is kept out of the loop of the details,” forcing him to intervene subsequently, she added.
Andrei Illarionov, a former senior policy adviser to Putin and now an opponent, thinks there is less logic than meets the eye when it comes to sudden policy changes. He said: “It looks like he has become quite nervous because if he’s not losing the war, he is definitely not winning either.”