Putin seeks revenge on a world order he once wanted to join

In Ukraine, Putin is attempting to strike a decisive blow against the U.S. and Europe to reshape that global order to Russia’s advantage. Putin’s gamble — backed by military force and grudges — is that he can bend the world to his will. China, with its own territorial ambitions, is watching carefully how much Russia is able to push the boundaries.

“He is sitting right there on his throne, keeping an eye on the entire plot and trying to figure out how he can manipulate and take advantage of every set of international circumstances to push forward,” said Fiona Hill, a former top White House advisor on Russia. “Putin can look like he’s losing colossally, but he’s actually winning — and he’ll think he’s winning.”

Encouraged by Trump, Republican opposition in the U.S. to continuing to arm Ukraine is growing. Billionaire Elon Musk also urged Americans to lobby Congress to oppose funding for Ukraine on Monday, saying there’s “no way in hell” Putin can lose the war.

Putin, meanwhile, is reshaping Russian society in his image at an unprecedented pace. He’s stoked patriotic fervor with a mix of nostalgia for Russia’s imperial and Soviet past in parallel with the harshest repression for decades. He casts himself as the defender of Russian sovereignty and traditional Orthodox Christian values against the “liberal” West.

While his invasion of Ukraine triggered Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II, the scale of the rupture between Russia and the West in the past two years still seems hard for many to conceive.

Months after Putin was last re-elected, in 2018, Russia hosted hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors for football’s FIFA World Cup. Emmanuel Macron sat with Putin at the Moscow final to see France lift the trophy.

A senior adviser to Putin at that time said the Russian leader genuinely wanted to build closer ties with the West. He would meet not only with foreign leaders, but ministers and sometimes even just ambassadors to explain his views, including on the most controversial subjects such as his war in Chechnya. Whatever Putin said, though, the Russian military didn’t believe there’d be an alliance with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

“We in the Defense Ministry never received any orders that would signal the seriousness of such intentions,” said Evgeny Buzhinsky, a former general who served in its international relations department from 2002-2009.

Resentment slowly took over. Putin often grew angry after meetings with U.S. representatives. Disillusionment with the West gradually soured into a sense of betrayal on issues such as U.S. plans for a new missile-defense system in Europe.

It finally erupted into anger in a notorious speech to the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Before an audience of Western leaders, Putin railed against NATO and called its expansion “a serious provocation.”