Introduction
Russia’s President Vladimir Putin has been in a geopolitical standoff with the United States for so long that it’s hard to remember how it started: twenty years ago, events shaped his core narrative about the harm Russia has suffered at the hands of a malevolent U.S. national security establishment. In September 2004, a group of Chechen terrorists seized a school in Beslan, a town in the Caucasus region of North Ossetia. Hundreds died in the attack, including some 186 children, following a botched rescue attempt for which Putin and his security forces have been widely blamed. But he blamed external actors for capitalizing on Russia’s perceived weakness.
Last August, just shy of the twentieth anniversary of the tragedy, Putin traveled to Beslan to meet with some of the mothers who lost children that day. The visit was something of a surprise. For two decades, Putin had routinely ignored the anniversary of Beslan—he rarely calls attention to failures—and had never before met with the mothers on their home turf. In fact, the Kremlin website bears no record of what, if anything, the women said at the meeting. Instead, they were treated to a Putin soliloquy about how the same shadowy international forces that were responsible for killing their children were also at work in Ukraine. Just two weeks before his visit to Beslan, Ukraine’s armed forces had pulled off what Putin called a “neo-Nazi” incursion into Russia’s Kursk region.
In other words, Putin was using these mothers as props to score geopolitical points. It’s a response to trauma he adopted in earnest twenty years ago.
It Began with Beslan
Putin’s speech to the nation the day after the siege of Beslan ended, September 4, 2004, was arguably the most consequential of his career. Typically, Western observers give that distinction to his fiery speech in Munich in early 2007 in which he threw down a gauntlet to the United States over NATO enlargement. But Beslan, in every way, laid the groundwork for Munich and did the most to shape, or at least reveal, the Putin we know and the governing philosophy we associate with him today.
During his televised remarks, Putin looked better than he had during a hostage crisis at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater two years earlier; he seemed more in control, less haggard. He spoke with gravity and purpose. After the obligatory expressions of grief and condolences, his speech turned geopolitical, a rhetorical maneuver that many listeners at the time were not yet accustomed to.
The reason terrorists had targeted Russia, Putin summarized, was that the country had fallen into a period of weakness after the breakup of the Soviet Union. “We were weak, and the weak get beaten,” he explained. It was a uniquely succinct expression of what was to become a core principle for Putin: never admit weakness. (He later went on to use the “weakness” argument as a creative pretext to appoint regional governors—a milestone in giving himself more power.)
From there, he continued, “Some want to tear off a juicy piece from us. Others help them. They help, presuming that Russia, as one of the largest nuclear powers in the world, still poses a threat to someone. Therefore, this threat must be eliminated. And terrorism of course is just an instrument for achieving these goals.”
Those tearing off a “juicy piece” from Russia in Putin’s parable clearly were the terrorists, led by warlord Shamil Basayev, who sought Chechnya’s independence from Russia. Basayev was exporting his brand of insurgency to other North Caucasus republics. The “others” in Putin’s Beslan speech, who were so obsessed with Russia’s nuclear weapons that they assisted the terrorists, were the Americans.
In retrospect, Putin’s reasoning and cryptic language are obvious. He and his spokespeople have trotted out similar logic many times since then. As recently as March 2024, after terrorists associated with Islamic State-Khorasan attacked Moscow’s Crocus City Hall concert venue and killed scores, Russian authorities claimed that the United States and its supposed Ukrainian clients were behind it. But twenty years ago, the insinuation was so unfamiliar and disconnected from reality—Putin, after all, was implying the George W. Bush White House had helped terrorists murder children—that most people in Washington probably didn’t make the connection or gave Putin the benefit of the doubt that he must have meant something else.
As we now know, he didn’t mean something else. The lesson Putin took away from Beslan was that terrorists don’t act on their own. They are more like playthings in the hands of geopolitical puppet masters.
Enter Ukraine
The traumas of 2004, however, weren’t yet over for Putin. Less than three months after Beslan he suffered another setback when his preferred candidate for president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, saw his fraud-tainted election overturned by the country’s supreme court, under pressure from mass street protests. The pro-Europe candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, went on to win a new election. It was Ukraine’s first post-Soviet popular revolt, the so-called Orange Revolution, and it was a personal slap in the face for Putin, who had twice congratulated Yanukovych on his phantom victory.
Although the pro-West demonstrators who helped overturn Putin’s choice for president of Ukraine couldn’t have been more different from Basayev’s terrorists, Putin must have decided both were equally devoid of agency. Just three days after Yanukovych’s election had been nullified, during Putin’s first-ever trip to Türkiye, his sense of grievance and humiliation boiled over in public.
In a preview of the anticolonial rhetoric he has relied on to appeal to audiences in the Global South since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he blamed Ukraine’s revolution on the imagined actions of a “kindly but strict man in a pith helmet” who taught second-class “natives” how they should live. If those ungrateful natives should protest their treatment, he said, they are subjected to bombing, “as in Belgrade.”
The ordinary Ukrainians who had braved Kyiv’s December cold and overturned Yanukovych’s election, in Putin’s view, could not have acted out of principle, much less on their own. Like the Beslan terrorists, they were mere tools in the hands of masters in the West, deployed to beat down the unruly “natives” who had supported Yanukovych.
Before the crises in late 2004, “people power” may not have sat well with Putin, but he showed little inclination to contest it. In Serbia in 2000 and in Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003, pro-Western popular movements forced the ouster of figures that Moscow backed. Russia did not seriously try to prevent either change. In the Rose Revolution, and in a separate leadership standoff in Georgia’s Ajaria region in early 2004, Putin even sent his foreign minister to peacefully extricate the besieged leaders.
The Beslan attack and the prospect of losing Ukraine to the West were a watershed. They convinced Putin that “people power” was being weaponized against him.
Russia’s Lost Opportunity?
Individuals’ subservience to the state, or to the ruler standing in for the state, is a long-standing cornerstone of Russian governance. Czar Peter I and Josef Stalin are lionized in Russia precisely for expanding the power and territory of the state to the exclusion of everything else. Individuals were sacrificed wholesale to advance the leader’s purposes, and—because there were no checks on his whims or paranoias—often for no purpose at all.
Stalin today emerges as Russia’s most admired historical ruler in online polls in large part because, despite a purge of the military command that nearly lost the war against Nazi Germany before it began, his apologists insist he mobilized the country for victory. He gets a pass for the millions he killed through mass terror, forced collectivization, and famine because he industrialized and urbanized a vast, backward country for great-power competition in historically near-record time.
This ruler-centric view of Russia has been challenged by generations of dissidents and human rights advocates, of course, and even by a few Russian leaders themselves. The last to have done so was Dmitry Medvedev, who as president from 2008 to 2012 took aim at Stalin-style rule, proclaiming that no ambitions or achievements of the state could be valued more highly than the lives of individuals.
In late 2011, less than three months after Medvedev renounced a second term as president so that Putin could reassume power, large protests broke out in Russia. The protests were triggered by electoral fraud, which many of the middle-class beneficiaries of the regime saw as an affront to their dignity. The protests undoubtedly were also fueled by the sense that Russia had lost a chance to follow a new, less ruler-dependent path. Putin of course could not believe the protesters had simply had enough of him, his manipulativeness, and corruption. He blamed the protests on then U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
Medvedev’s humanist rhetoric was not the only reason Putin took the presidency back from him, but it certainly contributed. The demonstrations peaked, then diminished in size and were harshly suppressed the day before Putin’s inauguration in May 2012. Perhaps to show that he has learned his lesson about promoting values that Putin opposes, Medvedev has since pivoted in the opposite direction to an almost cartoonish chauvinist and militarist public persona.
Of Citizens and Strategic Buffers
Putin understands geopolitics as the product of strong men who sit around a table and decide the fates of nations; in other words, a few truly sovereign strong men dictate the fates of the smaller, not-fully-sovereign nations. The leaders and citizens of countries like Ukraine, in his view, fall into line or else. Putin’s view of people—whether they’re democracy protesters, representatives of civil society, or real terrorists—as tools in the hands of rival great powers has been his most critical and enduring blind spot for the past twenty years. It also has real-world consequences.
In late 2013, for example, with Viktor Yanukovych finally serving as the elected president of Ukraine, Putin thought that all he needed was to twist Yanukovych’s arm into backing out of an association agreement with the European Union in exchange for a $15 billion loan. Putin could not grasp that the Euromaidan protests that then erupted in Kyiv were, just as in 2004, an expression of grassroots anger at having been deceived for the benefit of Putin and his insistence on keeping Ukraine under Russia’s thumb.
When protesters drove Yanukovych out of Kyiv in February 2014, Putin could interpret it only as the result of Western perfidy. He has since suggested repeatedly that it should have been the duty of the foreign ministers of France, Germany, and Poland, who had signed an agreement allowing Yanukovych to stay in office until the end of 2014, to somehow send the protesters home. At times, he has held then U.S. president Barack Obama responsible for not intervening to stop the protests. No U.S. representative signed the agreement with Yanukovych, but from Putin’s point of view European states such as France, Germany, and Poland are not fully sovereign and do Washington’s bidding. He calls them “satellites.”
Putin’s inability to grasp the agency of individuals set the stage for everything that’s happened since, including Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea, the failed Europe-brokered Minsk agreements for settling the Ukraine conflict, and the full-scale invasion of February 2022. Arguably, Putin’s entire theory of victory in Ukraine was built on the fatally flawed assumption that its people were so devoid of agency, will, or self-respect that when Russian troops showed up, Ukrainians would immediately trade out their supposed Western masters for preferred Russian masters.
In that context, Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk in August was a miscalculation because it was predicated on the assumption that Putin would care so deeply, or be so deeply embarrassed, about surrendering territory and the Russians who lived there to the Ukrainians that he would change course. Instead, Putin neither diverted forces from his grinding offensive in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas, nor was he willing to bargain away occupied Ukrainian territory for Russian territory. Putin probably was privately furious about Ukraine’s brazenness; indeed, some of that anger emerged in his meeting with the mothers from Beslan. Still, Ukraine became the first foreign state since Nazi Germany to forcibly occupy Russian land, and the Russian leader’s public response was essentially a shrug. Why?
In fact, most of Putin’s predecessors would not have been surprised by his reaction. They would have understood that the people, and to some extent the territory they live on, serve a larger purpose. Russia has acquired as much territory as it has to provide a strategic buffer against invaders. Putin likely remembers that Stalin lost vastly more strategic buffer before Soviet forces turned the tide against German invaders and pushed all the way to Berlin. To Putin, temporarily surrendering a few hundred square kilometers of nonstrategic land in southern Kursk is nothing compared to the greater mission he’s pursuing. The territory isn’t juicy enough.
Plus, Putin was likely confident he would get the territory back. He takes the long view. The man who vowed twenty years ago to leave Russia’s weaknesses in the past has since become the first Russian or Soviet leader since Stalin to have enlarged the state’s claimed boundaries. In that context, Russia’s setback in Kursk was not enough to shake Putin’s confidence in his own strength.
The vengeful but more confident Putin that was forged by the traumas of twenty years ago is unlikely to be moved by the usual coercive tools of Western statecraft. Economic sanctions will not rattle the nerves of someone who is ready to use military force against a peaceful neighbor. Long-range drone strikes on military facilities or on Russian refineries won’t be enough to change the calculus of someone who is ready to take Western citizens hostage or lethally target those he considers his opponents. Even seizing Russian territory isn’t enough. Someone who doesn’t value the lives of even his own citizens will always be ready to play dirtier than his opponents.
If and when the Ukrainian Armed Forces leave or are pushed out of Kursk, with or without the assistance of North Korean troops, Putin may meet with or reward the commanders and other state officials who will get the credit. He probably will invoke the history of Kursk and the epic battle that took place there in 1943. He may even meet with some of the citizens. But if he does hold that meeting, it won’t be because Putin feels any regret for the time they spent under “occupation.” It will be to use them as foils in his overheated geopolitical narrative.