Putin counts his men

 Vladimir Putin’s envoy, Kirill Dmitriev, was in Washington yesterday. According to the Russian news agency Tass, Dmitriev discussed economic cooperation with the Treasury and Energy departments. A few days earlier, he had been in New York to meet Donald Trump’s envoys, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, with whom the Russian has maintained a relationship for months, characterised by dinners and lavish hospitality – all translated into the language of business, which Dmitriev speaks fluently: he is the head of the Sovereign Wealth Fund, studied in the United States, and knows how to deal with Trumpism. Solutions are being sought to end the war, and the Americans are reported to have said that cooperation with Moscow remains a possibility, but nothing is feasible unless the war against Ukraine ends first. For Putin, continuing to talk to Washington means giving the impression that negotiations are taking place, when in reality, on the ground, the Kremlin admits only one solution: Kyiv’s surrender. While Dmitriev was touring the United States, Russia sent a letter to NATO protesting against the Alliance’s ‘adventurist and irresponsible’ stance, including the exercises held in August to simulate the isolation of the Kaliningrad exclave. 

Moscow has spoken of threats that ‘significantly increase the risk of an armed conflict’. NATO has responded that the Alliance is defensive and poses no threat to Russia. Moscow, however, builds the ideological framework for its wars on the premise of a perpetual threat. The Kremlin leader has signed a decree to increase the strength of the Russian Armed Forces by 15,500 personnel, bringing the number of active-duty military personnel to 1.55 million. At present, Moscow is not informing the Russian people of the outcome of Operation Vivaldi, through which Ukraine is recapturing parts of the Donetsk Oblast; nor is it reporting on the surrender of military personnel who, though high-ranking, are unprepared and taken by surprise, and agree to hand over their weapons to Kyiv. It makes no mention of how Putin’s ambitions to swiftly conquer the whole of Donetsk are more wishful thinking than calculations based on the realities of the battlefield. It does, however, explain the rationale behind the need to increase troop numbers; indeed, in an article published in Komsomolskaya Pravda and in various appearances on Russian television talk shows, generals and military experts are endeavouring to explain Putin’s decree. In Komsomolskaya Pravda, Colonel Viktor Barents writes that the Kremlin is not conscripting for the war – or at least not solely for that purpose – but is primarily expanding its ‘standard parameters’ in response to the ‘growing threats from NATO and Europe’. Moscow needs more men to deploy in Donetsk, not to guard its borders; yet the years of stalemate cannot be explained indefinitely by an endless war against Kyiv. It is more convenient to ensure that the perception of threat within Russian society is amplified a hundredfold.

For 2027, Moscow plans to increase its defence budget by 27 per cent. With every move, Russia demonstrates that the path to negotiation is extremely narrow, but the only way forward that Putin sees involves combat and new weapons to be launched against cities far removed from the battlefield, whilst on the front line the Ukrainians are finding ways to use technology to repel the hordes of men sent by Putin to fight.