Magnificent News: Today's WorldView: Putin’s invasion of Ukraine could be backfiring

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By Anthony Faiola
with Sammy Westfall

Putin's invasion of Ukraine could be backfiring

Ukrainians stand in line to join the Territorial Defense Forces in Kharkiv, Ukraine on Feb. 26. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Even as he puts his nuclear forces on high alert and his troops close in on Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin has reason to worry: His war on Ukraine appears to be backfiring.

Unmasked as an unpredictable, even existential threat in the view of governments around the world, Putin has emerged as a dangerous symbol of tyranny, stoking the biggest European defense reassessment in decades. A reinvigorated NATO is emerging. Resurgent Western unity — wounded under former president Donald Trump — has enabled sanctions on Moscow that are some of the harshest ever imposed. With Germany suddenly off the fence in what is shaping up to be a historic realignment against Moscow, Putin faces new, as opposed to neutralized, security challenges in Russia's backyard.

Earlier this month, Chinese President Xi Jinping, who has called Putin his "best friend," welcomed him to Beijing. But reportedly taken aback by the speed, scope and force of Russia's assault on Ukraine, Beijing is proving a more reluctant ally than Putin might have hoped, with Xi urging Putin to settle the conflict at the negotiating table. Delegations from Russia and Ukraine will meet near the Belarus border for their first talks since Russia launched its invasion, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said.

Putin's supportive oligarchs live in a shrinking world — their foreign mansions, super yachts and billions under threat of seizure. "Russian-owned, Russian-registered or Russian-controlled aircraft" are banned from E.U. airspace. Amid stirring images of the Russian bombardment — and the rise of Zelensky as a global cause celebre — foreign leaders who'd cozied up to Putin before the invasion are suffering repercussions at home.

In the United States, several senior Republican lawmakers typically quick to back Trump have danced sidesteps after he praised Putin's "genius." Even some of Moscow's closest international allies, including Venezuela and Cuba, are offering nuanced responses, betraying unease with the modern precedent set by Russia's violation of Ukrainian sovereignty.

"Putin wants to establish a Russian empire," a newly steeled German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared Sunday in parliament. The question is, he continued, "whether we can summon the strength to set boundaries to warmongers like Putin."

Nowhere is the about-face on Russia more full than in Germany, where the rumbling of Putin's tanks and the toll of his missiles on Ukrainian cities is jolting awake a sleeping giant.

Since reunification, Germany has shrunk from geopolitical confrontation and sought a careful relationship with Moscow based on post-World War II penance and energy security through Russian gas.

On Saturday, the normally reluctant Germans agreed to target a number of Russian banks, cutting them off the vital SWIFT global network that allows international movement of funds. But as an outpouring of 100,000 demonstrators fanned out from Berlin's Brandenburg Gate to decry the Russian invasion on Sunday, Scholz went far further, unveiling a previously unthinkable surge in defense spending.

As part of a remarkable security rethink, German military spending will get a one-off spike of $110 billion, about twice last year's defense budget. Scholz also pledged Germany's annual military spending would immediately begin to exceed a 2 percent of gross domestic product target for NATO nations — a level Berlin was not projected to reach until 2024. It shows how the Russian threat seems to have crystallized for Germans more over the last four days than in the last two decades combined.

Over the weekend, Berlin also cut through its long-standing resistance to sending weapons to conflict zones, authorizing the dispatch of 1,000 shoulder-launched antitank rockets and 500 surface-to-air Stinger missiles to Ukraine. This from a country ridiculed only last month for a muted response involving a gift of helmets to Ukrainian forces.

"There has been an awakening, not just by the political class, but also by ordinary voters," Marcel Dirsus, a German political scientist and fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at the University of Kiel, told my colleagues.

In Beijing, where earlier this month Putin and Xi issued a 5,300-word joint statement outlining a Russian-Chinese effort to counter Washington's reach, "many Chinese officials seemed startled that Russian President Vladimir Putin would move so far so fast — and so forcefully," Melinda Liu wrote in Foreign Policy. "Beijing's rhetoric has become less overtly supportive of Putin," she noted. A senior Biden administration official pointed my colleagues to media reports this week stating that China had also restricted financing for Russian commodity purchases, suggesting limits to Beijing's support.

Building on historic ties to authoritarian regimes and more recent vaccine diplomacy, Russia accelerated its courting of Latin America in recent weeks — seeing economic and military cooperation there as strategic warning to Washington. This month, leaders of South America's two largest nations, Brazil and Argentina, held lovefests with Putin in Moscow. Now, both of them — along with other global Putin cheerleaders — are facing awkward moments, with signs of at least some diplomatic backtracking.

"We are in solidarity with Russia," Brazil's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro declared in Moscow during a meeting with Putin just eight days before the invasion.

After Thursday's invasion, Bolsonaro's vice president, Hamilton Mourão, seemed to indirectly call out his boss. Saying the "Western world" was repeating the 1938 mistake of giving space to Adolf Hitler, the former Brazilian army general called for more than sanctions.

"The use of force is needed, a support for Ukraine," he said. "That's my view. If the Western world just lets Ukraine fall, Bulgaria will be next, then the Baltic States, and so on. Just as Hitler's Germany did in the 1930s."

Bolsonaro publicly rebuked his No. 2. But despite a certain tiptoeing around Russian aggression from Brazil's Foreign Ministry, the country still stood with the 11 members of the U.N. Security Council that voted in favor of a resolution to denounce the Russian invasion — a measure that Moscow vetoed.

On Feb. 3, Argentina's President Alberto Fernández, also meeting with Putin in Moscow, heralded a future with Russia as an antidote to U.S. power. But, as images of fleeing Ukrainian refugees and Russian missile strikes began rippling across social media Thursday, Fernandez called for Moscow to "end" action in Ukraine. His reluctance to say much more sparked an influential group of opposition politicians and intellectuals to demand he make "a clear and forceful condemnation" and show "the immediate alignment of our country with the West."

"I think this invasion, and all the images that are just so egregious, are going to cost these leaders, and that's why they've backtracked a little bit," Michael Shifter, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, told me. "Any kind of sympathy with Russia is not sustainable with the public opinions in Brazil or Argentina right now."

Putin also sought to boost long-standing strategic ties to communist Cuba and the left-wing authoritarian states of Venezuela and Nicaragua. Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro, after meeting with senior Russian officials two weeks ago, pledged new and powerful "military cooperation" with Moscow.

Maduro has blamed NATO for Putin's woes and criticized Western sanctions. But a government statement Thursday ventured close to suggesting cooler heads were needed on both sides, calling for a "peaceful resolution" to the conflict and "a return" to diplomacy to "avoid escalation."

Even communist Cuba seemed to hide a nugget of criticism inside a lengthy statement blaming Washington and NATO for Putin's "use of force." Havana's Foreign Ministry still described the Russian action as "the nonobservance of legal principles and international norms."

"You're not going to see Venezuela or Nicaragua break with Russia over this, but I think they are sensitive to the violation of principles they hold dear, of national sovereignty and non interference," Shifter said. "They have the U.S. in mind. The theory that this gives the United States free rein to do what it wants in its own backyard in Latin America."

Talking Points

• Belarus is preparing to send soldiers into Ukraine in support of the Russian invasion in a deployment that could begin as soon as Monday, a U.S. administration official said Sunday evening. If Belarus joins the Russian invasion, it would significantly complicate proposed talks between Russia and Ukraine, which the two sides had planned to hold at the Ukrainian border with Belarus. More than 350 civilians have been killed, including 14 children, Ukrainian officials said Sunday.

• Putin stated that he had put his nuclear deterrence forces into alert, attributing the move to "aggressive statements" from the West. The European Union, meanwhile, announced it will shut down airspace to Russian planes and finance weapons purchases to Ukraine. Several nations, including the United States, vowed to block the Kremlin's access to its sizable foreign currency reserves in the West and to cut off some Russian banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system.

• North Korea fired a suspected ballistic missile off its east coast, militaries of South Korea and Japan said, its first since a spate of launches in January and its eighth test of the year.

• Canada's self-styled "Freedom Convoy" couldn't have come at a worse time. Canadian officials have pressed their U.S. counterparts for exemptions to the Biden administration's Buy American pledges. Now, there are worries that the blockades at several U.S.-Canada border crossings will boost the economic nationalism that has weighed on bilateral ties.

Live Q&A on the Russia-Ukraine crisis

Thank you to all our readers who joined our live chat Friday on the Russian invasion. We heard from Post reporters Isabelle Khurshudyan and Whitney Leaming, who are both in Ukraine, as well as Steve Hendrix and Robyn Dixon. Here are some of the highlights:

How are you feeling right now in Ukraine? Can you describe the tone of it over there? Stay safe.

Isabelle Khurshudyan: First of all, thank you. My Washington Post colleagues and I are staying safe, taking precautions while trying to comprehensively cover this story. The millions of Ukrainians who did not sign up for this are in a much worse position.

People here are really shocked. Despite the United States and other Western countries attempts to warn that this was coming, a lot of Ukrainians didn't really believe it would until those first strikes on Thursday morning. Those who prepared emergency bags with cash, nonperishable food and other essentials were in the minority.

Especially where I am in Kharkiv, a city with more familial ties to Russia because it's just 25 miles from the border, people also expressed feeling betrayed. The Kremlin has repeatedly referred to Ukraine as a "brotherly nation." But we witnessed hundreds of people huddling together in fear of airstrikes in the underground metro. They don't have a lot of brotherly love for the country that forced them to shelter there.

Some speak of Putin's desire for a new post-Cold War global order. What would/could that look like in an ideal world for him?

Steve Hendrix: I won't try to guess what it's in Putin's mind, but he seems to clearly be pining for a return to full superpower status for Russia, with Moscow at the center of a zone of influence well beyond Russian borders.

We have seen Russia maneuvering to increase its gravitational pull over the years in the Middle East and Asia as well as reclaiming the Crimean peninsula and, effectively, Belarus. It was fascinating to see in the weeks leading up to the invasion what seemed to be his efforts to create a pretext for invasion.

We were all watching carefully for some kind of false flag operation, the purported massacre of citizens in Russian-controlled parts of Ukraine or something of what he has called an ongoing "genocide" in the Donbas.

But in the end, as the Biden White House continually used U.S. intelligence to call out his plans, Putin invaded Ukraine with no pretext at all.

He made a shocking speech in which he explained himself pretty specifically: Ukraine isn't the sovereign country that our eyes and history books say that it is; it's an upstart part of Russia that he intends to reclaim in an attempt to restore some of Moscow's Cold War power.

Why are there no other country's troops support Ukraine on the ground?

Steve Hendrix: The biggest reason NATO countries are not rushing to man the barricades in Ukraine, is that Ukraine is not a member of NATO.

The alliance's guarantees of mutual defense are reserved for countries who are full-fledged partners, and Ukraine is not, despite Putin's assertion that Kyiv is basically a puppet client-state of the West. That makes participation in this fledgling war an elective affair, and a very frightening one for any capital.

In the case of the United States, no president will easily commit U.S. troops to what looks like a potentially bloody and protracted land war in Europe. There would not be significant support in Congress, for example, especially with the Republican party becoming increasingly isolationist. A president from any party has to answer the question of why he is sending American troops to die for another country's neighborhood war.

The response of most governments is going to be what we've seen: a regime of amplifying sanctions, so far largely unified, that seek to punish Russia by isolating it from global financial systems. Part of Putin's calculation certainly includes an awareness that few governments want their own body bags in this conflict.

What's Putin's end game and do you think he is unbalanced?

Robyn Dixon: A lot of people also asked why this is happening and I think this helps answer why he decided to invade.

First, I don't think he is unbalanced, even though isolated and surrounded by people who were unwilling to advise him that invading was a bad idea. But he has gone after what he wants in a way that he believes maximizes his chance of success, and he is not afraid of brinkmanship and confrontation. The main thing for him, it seems, is not to appear weak or frail.

I think he has multiple goals, as follows: He wants to stay in power until 2036, so he does not want a jostling pro-Western democracy next door that Russians could look at and be inspired by. He sees Ukraine joining NATO as a red line, fearing that missiles or defense systems could be stationed there. He wants to remake European security architecture, pushing Washington and NATO to do something they have categorically ruled out, which is ending NATO's open door policy. He hopes to use the massive tension generated by his invasion of Ukraine to force NATO to accept this demand.

But he seems to have achieved the opposite result, with NATO building up its forces in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states.

The impasse remains. Depending on how his Ukraine operation plays out, we may see him escalate again, at some point in the future.

Read the rest here: What does Putin want from Ukraine? Our reporters answered your questions.

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Wartime President

This screen grab taken from a video made available on the Facebook account of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, shows himself speaking to a camera on Feb. 25. (Facebook/@Volodymyr Zelensky/AFP via Getty Images)

KYIV, Ukraine – Yuri Shuklin has never fired a gun, not a real one at least. His war experience, he said, comes from playing video games such as "Call to Action." "Maybe it's funny, but in some movies and video games, they have nice [battlefield] tactics," he said.

By Saturday, he had signed up to fight the Russian forces pressing on this capital.

In Ukraine, there's precedent for Shuklin's screen-to-reality sense of confidence: President Volodymyr Zelensky was an actor and comedian, whose only political experience before getting elected was playing the role of Ukraine's president in a satirical TV series. Now, those savvy communication skills, his ability to sway audiences via social media, a healthy dose of grit and defiance — and not least of all, his readiness to die if necessary — have transformed him into an unlikely champion for Ukrainians and the world.

Shuklin, who once never cared about politics, is among Zelensky's devotees.

"This man did not jump away to some other country like previous presidents," said the tall and lean 31-year-old mechanic. "He can show us the way."

Until three days ago, when the Russians invaded, Zelensky's political tenure was mixed, even considered by many on the decline. He was criticized for not pushing forward essential anti-corruption and judicial reforms. Ukrainians felt he was weak in his relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin and too quick to seek compromise with Moscow. Zelensky, 44, at times downplayed the threat of Russia crossing into Ukraine, denouncing U.S. and European governments as alarmist.

As a wartime president, however, Zelensky has risen remarkably to the challenge. His messaging has been consistent and sharply directed at Moscow. In videos posted on social media he has appealed directly to Russian citizens, gracefully urging them to protest Putin's onslaught on Ukrainian democracy.

In another video, wearing a green military-style pullover, he called for Ukrainians to take up arms. "We are alone in defending our state. Who else wants to fight with us? Honestly, I don't see anyone," he said.

He has portrayed himself as the primary target of Moscow, describing himself as "target number one" and declaring that Putin wants to "destroy Ukraine by destroying the head of state."

"I've always thought he is a person who has a profound sense of right and wrong," said a senior adviser to Zelensky, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. "He will never acquiesce when he thinks something is wrong."

Zelensky has also astutely used imagery to his advantage. Instead of hiding in a shelter, he has shown himself walking in Kyiv or visiting with soldiers, wearing a bulletproof jacket. Virtually every day, a new video emerges on social media showing his defiance of Russia.

"For all the talk of Russian information warfare, Zelensky had proven to be a master communicator," Colin Clarke, director of research at The Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consultancy, said in a tweet. "His messages have conveyed strength, empathy & fortitude. A case study in effective communication during war and a profile of courage on a level I can't recall." — Sudarsan Raghavan and Siobhán O'Grady

1,000 Words

Some 368,000 Ukrainians have fled to European neighbors since Thursday, the U.N. said. So far, European leaders and communities say they are ready to welcome Ukrainian refugees, including countries such as Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, which have previously hardened their borders and policies in the face of other waves of refugees. (Wojtek Radwanski/AFP via Getty Images)