Is Putin paranoid over Ukraine?

The Telegraph has an interesting column by a correspondent who knows Russia and Vladimir Putin fairly well.  He thinks Putin's actions in Ukraine are driven by paranoia.

As Sunday’s referendum, in which the people of Crimea will decide whether to join Russia, approaches, the images on Russian television are astonishing. They are more propagandistic and venomous than anything I can remember even from Soviet times. Breathless presenters whip up hysteria with bloodcurdling stories of atrocities being committed by the “neo-Nazi junta” now governing Ukraine. Overheated “victims” beg Putin to help, kindly Russians offer to give refuge to the terrified people fleeing Ukraine, and menacing music accompanies montages of swastikas, fascist thugs armed with clubs, and black-and-white images of Hitler’s troops and burning villages.

It is all apparently aimed at preparing the public to accept that there may be war, and that Russia will be fighting in a just cause. Yet I have a horrible feeling that President Putin believes all this stuff. He receives his information mainly from his trusted secret services – men like himself, schooled in the dark arts of KGB disinformation. I worked as a media consultant to the Kremlin from 2006 to 2009, close enough to gain a sense of Putin’s growing paranoia.

I believe this has three causes, the most important of which, perhaps, is his own terror of being dislodged by popular revolution. Putin believes the Ukrainian uprising was fomented entirely by the West. He puts two and two together and gets five ... Putin has been convinced ever since the Orange Revolution in 2004, followed by the Moscow protests of late 2011, that there is, in one of his advisers’ words, a “Destroy Russia” project. And he is next on the list.

The second factor is Russia’s strategic security. And here I believe the West made a major mistake in believing it could build its own security at the expense of Russia’s. It has created a situation in which Moscow feels not just marginalised but threatened ... Crucially, in 2008, Nato promised Ukraine that it “will” be allowed to join. Even then Putin made clear that this would be the last straw. Perhaps Nato should have considered his psychology more deeply. You don’t ensure your safety from a growling bear by provoking it.

I believe Putin sees Ukraine’s decisive turn to the West now as inexorably leading to the Nato membership it was promised. This would further isolate Russia, bring a hostile alliance right up to its borders, and place its only warm-water naval base in enemy hands. Hence the scramble to get Crimea out of Ukraine as soon as possible – using every lie and pretext in Putin’s well-thumbed dezinformatsiya handbook to justify Russia’s annexation.

Which brings me to the third factor in Putin’s thinking – his unashamed presumption that Russia has the right and duty to protect Russians wherever they may be. He once described the collapse of the USSR as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the last century. He didn’t mean he regretted the end of communism, but he did regret the collapse of a huge multinational state, and the fact that 25 million Russians ended up outside their own country’s borders. His vow to “protect Russians” in Ukraine is the corollary of that. God forbid if he decides Russians in Latvia and Estonia also require “help”.

. . .

So what can the West do? Not much. Insisting that Putin talk to Ukrainian leaders he regards as putschists is pointless. He won’t. Sanctions will not stop Putin either. It is also too late now to give him the assurances he has sought about Russia’s own security. He is convinced the West is out to get him, and has dug in for the long haul.

In Munich in 2007, Putin made a no-holds-barred speech which was essentially a cry of frustration at being ignored. We ignored it. And now he doesn’t give a damn what we think.

There's more at the link.  Food for thought, if he's right.

Peter