Winston Churchill’s famous remark that Russia was a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma needs revisiting. After Putin’s brutal assault on Ukraine, there seems nothing enigmatic about his intentions.
Nearly three years ago as his columns of tanks made for Kyiv, the Russian President wanted the subjugation of Ukraine and its absorption into a newly expansionist Russia.
Today, with the conflict bogged down in horrendous trench warfare in the east, repeated Russian missile strikes on Ukraine’s civilians and infrastructure, and Donald Trump about to return to the White House, the world is waiting to see if Putin’s war can be brought to an end – and on what terms.
Yet Churchill’s words, uttered at the outset of the Second World War, and after the ruinous failure of appeasement of Nazi Germany, still have resonance for our times. Putin’s blitzkrieg against innocent Ukraine runs the risk of blinding us to his wider and even more sinister ambitions.
Not that he has made any secret of them with his public statements. It is just that the West hasn’t listened or declined to take him seriously.
This is a man who has called the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 as the “greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century” and who has demanded that the West rolls back military protection not only from the former territories of the Soviet Union but from all the countries of the former Warsaw Pact as well.
Putin’s nightmarish dream – in which Ukraine is no more than a recent construct of the Bolsheviks and Lenin in the early 1920s – is the reconstitution of Imperial Russia, the one of the Czars, not the only slightly more modest but grimmer project of the Communists.
So, pulling harder at the threads of the riddle, the master plan becomes clearer and more alarming.
Ukraine may be under constant bombardment, but smaller but equally pivotal countries such as Georgia and Armenia are already coming under pressure from a hungry bear. Meanwhile, Belarus and Azerbaijan are already drawn into Moscow’s orbit.
Take Georgia. In the last few days protesters in the Moscow-backed breakaway region of Abkhazia have stormed the parliament in a bid to stop a controversial investment deal with Moscow.
In the capital Tbilisi, an opposition politician hurled black paint over the head of Georgia’s electoral commission in a separate protest against alleged fraud in the elections won last month by the ruling pro-Russian Georgian Dream party.
Armenia once again finds itself caught in a perilous situation. This time it is Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman ambitions and Putin’s cruel grandiosity that are reshaping the region via their proxy, the oil-rich, autocratic Azerbaijan.
The latter’s military aggression in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in the fall of 2020, supported by both Russia and Turkey, reignited a dormant territorial conflict, resulting in Armenia’s capitulation on November 9, 2020. The continued Azeri aggression, which included a blockade and starvation of civilians, led to the expulsion of 120,000 Armenians from their historic lands in September 2023.
Armenia has been a plaything of Russian and Turkish imperialism before – most notably after World War I when these two countries forcibly partitioned the land. Now, it appears the same actors have had had inside help, which Armenia’s Prime Minister, Nikol Pashinyan, has admitted.
His passivity and indecisive response during the war exposed a critical failure in leadership on his part and likely made him part of a premeditated plot. The resulting failure to deter aggression gave Azerbaijan and its partners, Russia and Turkey, a window to act decisively, resulting in territorial losses for Armenia that crippled that nation’s defences beyond repair.
By allowing Armenia to fall prey to Russian and Turkish ambitions without strong international intervention, while simultaneously neglecting Georgia’s pro-EU aims, Western powers risk repeating the grave errors of past appeasement.
The strategic corridor encompassing Armenia and Georgia is a critical juncture between Europe and Asia, and its stability or instability has ramifications beyond local borders.
An effective Russian takeover of this corridor would embolden authoritarian regimes, as seen historically when ambitious powers are met with insufficient resistance. Western inaction on Armenian territorial defences is combined with lukewarm support for Georgian EU ambitions—failures that collectively embolden Russia’s quest for regional dominance.
The need for decisive action is not only a matter of regional stability but a question of global strategic integrity.
Only through clear-eyed and resolute support can the international community prevent a historic repeat, safeguarding these nations from the ambitions that would otherwise seek to dominate them in a landscape eerily reminiscent of pre-World War II Europe.
Dr. David A. Grigorian is a Senior Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC.
