He would completely lose face.īassetti: Putin still has cards in his hand, especially regarding some of the economic sanctions. But I've just been speaking to one Moscow businessman who's pretty well connected, and he says that's not possible.

And you would have to hope that that would be a very, very strong deterrent against Putin ever considering going any further than what he has. I think if the U.S., as is being suggested, goes ahead and sanctions Russia's Central Bank, that's going to wipe out a huge chunk of Russia's hard currency reserves, and is potentially devastating. But for quite how long it can continue to do so is another question. But Russia's Central Bank has clearly made some quite strong interventions in the market to prop up the ruble and to keep things stable for now. We’re already seeing signs of a run on the banks. So the sanctions against Sberbank, against VTB, barring them from conducting any dollar transactions, they're pretty tough. Because at the moment, I think we're only seeing the beginning of the impact of the sanctions that were launched earlier this week. and the rest of the Western allies will now escalate their response. We have to see how long can President Zelensky withstand the Russian forces. I mean, the stronger resistance that Ukraine can put up, the stronger the resistance from the West, will hopefully mean that this is the end, that it is his waterloo, and it will lead to his toppling. Victoria Bassetti: Do you think Ukraine is the end of his kind of, let's call it, descent into madness?īelton: I guess we've got to hope so. I mean, so many Russians are completely devastated by what's happened. But it certainly seems he didn't expect such resistance, and he didn't expect, I think, such a strong response from the Western world, because Russia's economy is now going to be devastated and it's getting cut off from all the cultural ties. Maybe he thought Zelensky was going to do the same. I mean, it really seems that he thought maybe the Ukrainians would just back down. … And it seems has changed over the last two years. He believes it should be part of the Russian empire.īut we've seen him always before, no matter what he's done … we've always seen him act, perhaps wrongly and terribly, but always with a degree of cool rationality. … He doesn't believe that Ukraine should exist. Even then he was blaming the Bolshevik revolutionaries, as he did in his speech on Monday, for creating an artificial republic. We also know that, even from 1992, when he gave his first-ever interview as the deputy mayor of Saint Petersburg, that even then he was suggesting that Ukraine wasn't a real country. We always knew that he placed a very special emphasis on kind of restoring Russia's greatness and restoring its imperial past. And, as you say, he has become consumed by history and his place as the restorer of the Russian lands. But we can only presume it's the last two years of the pandemic, where he has been increasingly isolated. everyone's trying to scrabble around and guess at, including quite high-placed officials in Moscow who really don't understand what's changed. Why do you think it happened?īelton: I wish I knew the answer to it, and it's the answer that. And people talk about him being increasingly isolated. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)ĭaniel Klaidman: So the fact that the people around him are so surprised suggests that Putin has changed in some fundamental way. You could see the fear in their eyes and that, really, they didn't want to be there. And you could see that on their faces when he held that Security Council meeting on Monday. And I guess the question is really: To what degree is he now just acting all by himself? Because I actually can't imagine for an instance that his decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine was supported by a majority of his own top officials. Is any of this having any impact or effect on the Kremlin?Ĭatherine Belton: I'm afraid it's not, clearly not, having too much impact on Putin's own calculus. Just on Friday, the United States announced that they were going to sanction Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov directly. The United States and its Western allies are trying to deter Putin with imposing ever harsher sanctions. You have dug into Vladimir Putin's past, and also his cronies and the oligarchs. Michael Isikoff: So, extraordinary time, and extraordinary events going on. This content is not available due to your privacy preferences.

Russian sleep expert