Putin is keeping West guessing, that’s fine with him

Bloomberg

Vladimir Putin likes keeping Western leaders on their toes, guessing what his intentions are and what he might do next. The Russian president has been doing it for more than two decades and mostly getting away with it.
As thousands of Russian troops began withdrawing from the Ukrainian border, easing some of the worst tensions with the US and Europe since the Cold War, there’s quiet satisfaction in the Kremlin that the high-risk gambit paid off.
Amid rising alarm in Western capitals over the massive Russian build-up, US President Joe Biden picked up the phone to Putin and offered the first summit meeting between the two leaders. Forcing the new administration to recognise that it needs to engage with Moscow was seen in the Kremlin as a tactical win for Putin, according to three people close to the Russian leadership.
Biden’s White House had hoped to put Russia on the back-burner in order to focus on the more pressing priority of responding to China. Putin’s surprise military maneuver upended those calculations, according to a senior State Department official.
While German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron spearheaded appeals for Putin to back down, the 27-member European Union was weighing potential sanctions including targeting Russia’s military capabilities in response to any aggression in Ukraine, according to a diplomatic memorandum seen by Bloomberg.
For the US and its European allies, the weeks-long crisis after Russia moved an estimated 100,000 troops with tanks, ships and warplanes to the Ukrainian border was a sobering reminder of Putin’s ability to raise the stakes in relations. Years of sanctions since his 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in Ukraine’s east have done little to force him to change direction, even as they have squeezed Russia’s stuttering economy.
The swings in the drama set Russia’s ruble wobbling, first sliding amid fears of conflict then rebounding as tensions receded. “Russia’s only instrument to show that it is a great power is strength, tanks,” said Gerard Araud, France’s ambassador to the US from 2014 to 2019. “It’s a show of force for Biden to say ‘Don’t forget me, I am a world power.’”
The view from Moscow is very different, fuelled by a sense of grievance that the West is determined to weaken Russia and stoke a pro-democracy “colour” revolution to topple Putin. By this reading, the US and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies have repeatedly betrayed Russia, abandoning missile treaties and expanding ever closer to its borders, since Putin became the first foreign leader to offer help to Washington after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the US.
“The Kremlin feels in a fortress, under sustained pressure from the US and the West in general. With its aggressive actions, Russia is trying to deter the US, but Washington is just responding with stronger measures,” said Oksana Antonenko, a director at Control Risks in London.