On August 29th, meeting with staff and students at a university in Moscow, Vladimir Putin observed that orcas feed on polar bears.
“That’s the food chain,” Russia’s president stated. “Children should be taught about this, so that they understand what kind of world we live in and why we are conducting the special military operation”—his term for Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Sources close to the Kremlin say that, after several weeks of consideration over the summer, he seems to have chosen to escalate. He went ahead three months later. Mr Putin may express his aims using the language of geopolitics, but in fact he is guided by the criminal logic of his regime: never show weakness. Russia’s system has a high tolerance for violence, but is unforgiving of failure. But Ukraine already expects such attacks as part of Russia’s all-out offensive to break its will this winter. He does not need to announce a new wave of mobilisation: he never suspended his initial mobilisation order. Extra men will probably be recruited using coercion by regional governments to keep any political discontent localised. The authorities are already testing the new recruitment system in Penza, a region 750km south-east of Moscow.
That, the source said, was the president’s interpretation of the visit to Moscow in November 2021 by Bill Burns, Joe Biden’s CIA director, to warn him against invading Ukraine. As for the ground war, Russian sources say Mr Putin is committed to throwing an additional 300,000-400,000 men into the meat grinder.
Indeed, a longtime associate of Mr Putin says he is likely to have seen Mr Ratcliffe’s visit as a sign of American weakness. He probably believes that ending the war without achieving even his minimum goal, taking all of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, would put him physically at risk. (“They will hang me,” he told some of his cronies at one point during the war, according to an insider.) Within Ukraine, escalation largely means scaling up things Russia is already doing. On August 30th Russia’s ministry of defence said it was preparing a massive strike on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure.
