Why Navalny? Why Now?

The "ultimate geopolitical shark" smells blood in the water

Nikita Pishchugin on Unsplash

It was December 2021. Russia hasn’t yet invaded Ukraine but the writing was on the wall. Putin will invade. And soon. But why—and why now?

American and European foreign policy hands were perplexed, but settled on a probable explanation. “A key theme arose as U.S. and European officials spoke to one another during those frigid months: Putin was planning to invade not only because he hated Ukraine’s existence, but also because he sensed western weakness,” Politico’s Alexander Ward writes in his excellent new book The Internationalists. “Putin, the ultimate geopolitical shark, smelled blood in the water.”

As the thinking went, the U.S. effectively ceded Afghanistan to the Taliban months earlier, which following the Iraq debacle was yet another disastrous end to an American war. Meanwhile, Europe was spending little on defense and China was globally ascendant. The West looked weak—and anyway, the transatlantic response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and parts of eastern Ukraine in 2014 was rather muted. For Putin, the time was ripe to strike.

At first, it looked like Putin made a grave mistake. Blinded by an ideology that rejects the existence of Ukrainian nationalism, he could not fathom Ukraine’s willingness to fight for its survival. Putin also deeply underestimated American and European resolve in those early days of the war. For a while, Russia was very much on the back foot. In June 2023, Wagner Group chief Yevgeny Prighozin’s rebellion rattled Putin to the core and marked the most significant challenge to his 20-year reign.

But to Putin, the world in June 2023 is very different from the world in February 2024.

The Russian economy has weathered Western sanctions just fine. He has a new supply of weapons from North Korea and Iran. And with Prigozhin dead, there’s little apparent internal dissent. On the battlefield, Russia is slowly but steadily gaining territory. Ukraine is playing defense.

But most significantly for the trajectory of this conflict: Putin’s efforts to undermine American support for Ukraine are wildly succeeding!