Waiting for Russia to invade Ukraine feels a bit like Waiting for Godot. In this edgy reworking of Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece, Russia’s leader, Vladimir Putin, is cast, appropriately, as the restless Vladimir while the US president, Joe Biden, is the bowler-hatted Estragon, frequently dozing off.
The play’s central conceit is that the mysterious Godot, expected at any moment, never actually arrives. After Russia agreed last week to keep talking, Ukraine’s citizens have reason to hope the crisis will turn out to be a comparably vacuous non-event – a peculiarly Putin-esque contribution to the theatre of the absurd.
The border standoff, which commenced in earnest in November, has lasted so long that the tea leaf-reading Biden reckons Russia “has to do something”. This penetrating Mystic Meg analysis is not necessarily correct. No one, perhaps not even Putin, knows whether “something” will happen today, next month, or never.
Continuing the existentialist theme, even the definition of “invasion” is endlessly debated. Biden anticipates a D-day-scale Russian operation. But many analysts expect any attack to be fast, covert and asymmetrical, using special forces, sabotage and cyberwarfare, as in the Donbas in 2014.
While this slightly surreal waiting game continues, it’s possible, and instructive to assess what damage has already been done – and which individuals and countries are winning or losing so far in Ukraine’s phoney war.
For example, Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s brand-new foreign minister and co-leader of the Greens, has had a good war to date. Ignoring chauvinist sneers about her inexperience and gender, she faced down Sergei Lavrov, her grisly Russian counterpart, when they met recently in Moscow.
In contrast, her boss, Germany’s chancellor Olaf Scholz, is having a miserable time of it. His prevarication over what anti-Russia sanctions Berlin may support, and his blocking of arms supplies to Ukraine, has raised wider questions about his competence – and about German leadership in Europe.
Having long resisted American pressure to scrap the newly completed Nord Stream 2 gas Baltic pipeline from Russia, Scholz last week appeared to cave. It’s been an unlucky beginning for Angela Merkel’s less popular successor.
France’s Emmanuel Macron, facing a spring presidential election, is struggling to reconcile his vision of European “strategic autonomy” with the reality of continuing dependence on Nato, amid offstage jeering from Britain’s Boris Johnson.
“We will never give up dialogue with Moscow,” Macron declares. But his bridge-building is repeatedly undermined by Putin’s recidivism, symbolised by the 2020 poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny. Undeterred, Macron continues to pursue “de-escalation” and a “European solution”.
Yet how real is that? Putin insists on dealing with the US, not the EU, which he disdains and has deliberately bypassed. The so-called “Normandy format” talks finally resumed in Paris last week. But Brussels, sliding towards irrelevance, is the big loser so far in the undeclared war for Ukraine.
The opposite may be said, surprisingly, of Nato. Obituaries were written for the 30-member alliance after last year’s Afghanistan humiliation. Macron famously declared it “brain dead”.
Yet now, thanks to master-strategist Putin, Nato is experiencing a mini-renaissance. “Frontline” east European states have scurried under its protective umbrella, appealing successfully for more troops and weapons. There is revived talk of membership for Finland and Sweden. Even more improbably, Putin’s Beckett-like inscrutability has changed Washington’s calculations, as analyst Paul Taylor noted.
“Putin’s grandstanding has dragged the US back deeper into European security, just when two successive American presidents had tried to pivot Washington’s strategic focus toward China,” Taylor wrote. This is a big plus for Moscow’s ally, President Xi Jinping, who feels the same way about Taiwan as Putin does about Ukraine.
Other authoritarian regimes are also enjoying the drama. The heat is off Iran’s mullahs. And who among western leaders is focusing on mayhem in Myanmar, Yemen or Tigray – or on resurgent Islamic State terror in Syria and the Sahel?
Ukraine’s unlikely president, Volodymyr Zelensky, formerly an itinerant thespian and comic, eschews a bowler hat – but is playing well to foreign audiences in the role of valiant underdog. Concerns about official corruption in Kyiv, democratic deficits, and Donbas intransigence have been brushed aside by the likes of Liz Truss, the UK foreign secretary. In her simplistic analysis, it’s about freedom versus tyranny.
Truss, a jet-setting Margaret Thatcher imitator, is not having a good war. Like her predecessor Dominic Raab during the Afghan withdrawal, she went walkabout as the Ukraine crisis peaked, blundering around in Australia when she and the baying, terminally distracted Johnson should have been leading the charge to keep the peace in Europe.
What of the principal architect of this protracted imbroglio? The US-based Russia expert, Fiona Hill, says Putin is winning without firing a shot. “He has the US right where he wants it,” Hill wrote. A “master of coercive inducement”, he was advancing his overall aim to evict America from Europe to belatedly avenge the Soviet Union’s defeat.
Maybe. It’s true Putin has succeeded in forcing the US to focus on Russia’s security concerns, including future missile deployments and Nato exercises. He will keep up the military and diplomatic pressure for now, to see what concessions and freebies he can get.
But Washington will not agree to freeze Ukraine out of Nato or remake Europe’s post-cold war security structures, and Putin surely knows it. Meanwhile, his aggressive tactics have rallied the fractious western democracies and stiffened opposition to his regime.
While a watching world is waiting for Putin, Biden is threatening to sanction him personally, as urged in this space last week. Like a thief in the night looking to see what he can grab, Russia’s leader makes a pariah of himself and his country on the global stage.
War or no war, real or imaginary, that look likes defeat.