Ukraine’s supporters cheered the audacious Operation Spiderweb attack on Russia’s strategic bomber fleet at the weekend. They argue that it was “Russia’s Pearl Harbour” and “gives Zelenskiy some cards” as he goes into his meeting with US President Donald Trump. It also undermines Russia’s nuclear delivery capacity and may result in a US commitment to continue to support Ukraine in its struggle with Russia.

It's an appealing argument. The problem is that the opposite might be true. This operation could backfire and make it even harder to bring the war to an end at a time when the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU)’s situation on the battlefield is slowly deteriorating. It could make Putin even more determined to crush Ukraine and turn it into a “friendly” country than ever, so argues Tatiana Stanovaya, the founder and CEO of R.Politik and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, a veteran Russia-watcher.

The operation has also likely killed off what little interest Putin had in agreeing  to the 30-day ceasefire proposal made by Trump administration in March.

By the way, high quality satellite images came out yesterday that suggest only 20 planes were damaged of which only 11 were destroyed – not the 41 that the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) claim – but that doesn’t really detract from the success of the operation. Reportedly, Irkutsk is in chaos now as the police now have to inspect all the trucks on the road in Siberia (the main way of moving goods about) that has slowed the local economy down to a crawl.

Which side of the fence you fall on depends on what you think Putin’s motives are and to what extent he can be put under pressure. Personally, I agree with Stanovaya. As we argued in a “Has Putin gone mad” op ed at the start of the war, he is obsessed with Ukraine and sees the issue as existential for Russia to the point where it has warped his perception of reality (famous psychologist RD Laing’s definition of insanity). So, the short answer to the question is: “yes.”

This makes dealing with Putin very difficult, as the “if only we can ramp up sanctions and military support for Ukraine, it will win” argument doesn’t work. The more you push him into a corner, the more convinced he is that he is right that Ukraine is an existential problem and the less likely he is to back down. Indeed, from this perspective, the more likely it is that he will increase his maximalist demands.

This line of logic is based on the Western ideas of how running countries are supposed to work. Under the Washington Consensus worldview in the West, leaders are supposed to be interested in maximising personal happiness and prosperity and at the end of the day won’t do anything to jeopardise that. This is the root of Nato’s stated goal from former Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s statements at the very start of the war that Nato’s top priority was to “avoid WWIII” and that helping Ukraine comes a pretty distant second. That is the foundation of Biden’s “escalation management” policies that led to the “some, but not enough” supplies to Ukraine that ensure it can’t win the war.

That is not how Putin (or Chinese President Xi Jinping) see the world. The idea that Putin can be bullied into compromise by military or even economic pressure is fundamentally flawed. Russians do suffering like no one else. The worse the West makes things for Russia, the more intransient Putin will become. And so far the sanctions have not worked. Indeed, they have largely backfired, thanks to the boomerang effect. It is Europe that is going into recession, not Russia.

As we have argued, Putin and Xi adhere to the Moscow consensus where the societal individual has to sacrifice some of their freedoms for the good of the state. And it’s not just Putin pushing this; most Russians buy into it as a cultural legacy of the Soviet Union. As we just reported, Putin’s popularity and trust ratings remain at 80% -- close to all-time highs, even if the Russian population increasingly would like to see the war end.

Put it this way: it’s the most Soviet thing about Putin. He is prepared to sacrifice all the prosperity he built up over the last two decades and the remarkable remake of the Russia that was flourishing, for the sake of its security. The Soviets did the same thing: they were happy to channel all the money into a Cold War arms race and expected the population to lump the exploding TVs and ten-year waiting list for a Lada.

Putin’s version of this is to use the capitalist system so that he can make both bombs and working TVs, hence the power that CBR governor Elvia Nabiullina and Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov are given. But it’s basically the Soviet Union 2.0 where the operating system has been upgraded from the buggy socialism version to a much more efficient capitalist architecture. Putin made this explicit in his little commented on “guns and butter” speech last year.

And it's working pretty well. It’s a hybrid system that we first described in 2007 in a piece about “ZAO Kremlin” that has been a very long time in the making. China follows the same blueprint. I have been following Xi’s official X channel and he keeps harping on about how China doesn’t have oligarchs, how big companies are there to enrich the country, and how top businessmen need to stay out of politics. And China is being as aggressive as Russia is in its own backyard, except it hasn’t gone beyond shooting anything other than water cannons at Filipinos – so far.

I don’t want to come across as a Putin-apologist (I know I do) but I believe there that most western politicians fundamentally fail to understand how Russia works. There is a long-standing arrogance based on the confidence of the West’s overwhelming prosperity and Nato’s theoretical military might. But that leads to constant miscalculations. Russia made that mistake in Afghanistan and has learnt its lesson. The US, ironically, made exactly the same mistake in Afghanistan. Taking on Russia is not a straightforward task. Napoleon made that mistake too, and Hitler made exactly the same mistake. The West is a lot less powerful than it thinks it is.

The same is true of Senator Lindsey Graham’s 500% tariff idea. It’s more of “if ramp up sanctions…” thinking. But that’s not going to work as academics are already pointing out as it is incredibly simple minded: it assumes trade is a binary deal – that the US trades with China or India in isolation and so can be sanctioned to cut Russia off. Trade is a global network affair, which is doubly true for oil.

So what is the solution? Stepping back and the root of the problem is Putin’s fixation on the need to protect Russia’s security. Actually, this is now also Zelenskiy’s obsession, hence his constant demands for Nato membership. Why not go to the heart of the problem and deal with both of these. Europe is now also worried about security after Trump has snapped shut the US security umbrella.

bne IntelliNews has long called for a new pan-European security deal which is actually what everyone wants and by-passes the Nato problem completely. It would be very hard to do but the Russian side have already proposed exactly this in 2008 so it would be easy to start the talks. And it would solve everyone’s problems and finally bring the Cold War era to an end.

Then we could finally shift all our efforts to fixing the climate, which at this point is going to kill billions of people within two generations unless we act right now.