What does Putin really want? It’s a question sometimes asked by politicians, imagining there may be some piercing insight into the Kremlin occupant’s true ends in his ongoing war against Ukraine. The answer is key to understanding how he will approach any attempt to end the conflict.
The question is not altogether unreasonable, since Putin’s declared goals, the oft-referred to “root causes” of the conflict, sound outright absurd (as the US administration reportedly discovered at August’s Alaska summit, when it was treated to a Putin lecture on the details of early medieval East European history).
There is one goal, however, that does not always receive as much serious consideration as it deserves — namely, Russia’s fierce desire that its supposed great-power status be recognized and deferred to. It is true that this aspiration is not a new item on the Kremlin’s menu of ambitions. But recent months have made plain that the Russian regime has redefined who could confer this recognition, and on what grounds it could be granted. Understanding this might offer a clue to future conflict resolution.
The essence of Putin’s goals was articulated at the annual Valdai Club meeting on October 2. Putin always uses this event to reflect on current global trends and to formulate his own vision of the international order. This year’s meeting was titled “The Polycentric World: Instructions for Use.”
While the idea of multipolarity, or polycentricity — Putin seems to use the two terms interchangeably — has long been favored by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and associated think-tankers, this year the discussion introduced an important twist. Previously, multipolarity was presented as an established fact. Now, the message has shifted to a need to achieve it, suggesting that there is an ongoing evolution of world politics toward multipolarity and that this remains incomplete. It is no longer a fact of world politics but is now a goal. To complete this project, there must be a final act, a decisive move that would make multipolarity real.
This idea might sound radical, even brazen. In his speech, Putin described what the current multipolarity looks like, offering a detailed account of its fundamental conditions. Yet, the project’s incompleteness was underscored when he applied the idea to the present.
If true multipolarity existed, Putin speculated, NATO would not have attempted to expand, and countries would have sought a deeper understanding of the causes of the Ukraine war. The perennial host of this forum and the chief intellectual interpreter of the Kremlin’s foreign-policy goals, Fyodor Lukyanov, reiterated this point, optimistically assessing that the process is on a clear trajectory toward realization.
What could bring this to its natural completion? Answering this means placing Putin’s position in the context of global geopolitics. The war against Ukraine has reached a stalemate. Although the Russian army is currently advancing, slowly, it is far from clear whether a fighting force that has lost more than 219,000 dead and hundreds of thousands of wounded can wrestle significant military gains.
To compensate for the deterioration of relations with the West, its principal trading partner, the Kremlin has pivoted to China. That proved life-saving but has colored this reinvigorated friendship with shades of dependency. To hedge against such dependence, the Kremlin sought to diversify its coalitions, most importantly through partnerships with global players under the auspices of the expanded BRICS+ organization and the Chinese-dominated Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
Yet in all these coalition-building efforts, which could one day become the global infrastructure of multipolarity, China remains first among unequals, with a GDP now almost 10 times as large as Russia’s. In global terms, Russia is an economic weakling. It is not even among the top five trading partners (if the EU is counted as a single entity) of any of the original BRICS members. While it may be useful to discuss economic grievances at the same table as Russia, the primary actors with whom members of these coalitions seek to strike deals are the genuinely big players — China, the United States, and the European Union (EU).
The question Russia’s peers might well ask is what the country offers and why it matters to an imagined multipolar world. Even Russia’s great strength in hydrocarbon energy resources is declining in value and significance as renewables become increasingly important.
Putin’s bid for recognition as a power capable of achieving multipolarity may be linked to a broader deal with the United States on security guarantees, however vaguely defined. This ambition has formed part of the Kremlin’s narratives at least since 2021, when it demanded the Biden administration end guarantees and withdraw garrisons from some of NATO’s new members.
Moscow persists in the claim that the war against Ukraine is in fact a war with NATO; in the attempt to reframe the so-called “negotiation” process preceding the Alaska summit as a renewal of relations with the US on a broader platform; and in Putin’s recent proposal to further extend the New START treaty.
While the original calls for such an agreement were little more than window dressing for invasion plans, achieving a deal at this pivotal moment could offer Putin a low-cost exit from the war and, even more importantly, a diplomatic prize to leverage in coalition-building with the so-called Global South.
If Putin were to secure such a deal from Donald Trump, it would make him stand out among other global contenders, who can at best hope for a favorable trade arrangement with the new US administration. In this sense, Putin would have outperformed even China in its attempts to balance against the US, and would have gained a louder voice among leaders of the Global South in discussions on global and regional security arrangements.
In other words, the Kremlin needs a deal not so much to normalize relations with Washington as to increase its international heft and so justify its role in global forums — including the United Nations, BRICS+, the SCO, and beyond.
If this is indeed the path to peace in Ukraine that the Kremlin wishes to pursue, it will involve trade-offs, but even a vaguely worded agreement with the US would represent a win by recognizing Moscow’s position on the global stage.
While the costs of such recognition may seem manageable to the US, it would inevitably strengthen the agency of the recognized. In this new role, Moscow would have greater freedom to muzzle or even de-fang international law, and reshape global governance to fit its design.
Evgeny Roshchin is a Visiting Scholar at the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and a commentator on Russia’s foreign policy and international politics. He is the author of the book “Friendship among Nations” (Manchester Uni Press), as well as “Exit as Voice” and “Crime and Punishment in International Politics” and many other academic articles, and media commentaries. Until March 2022, he was the Head of School of Politics and International Relations, RANEPA St. Petersburg. He resigned in protest of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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