Former US top diplomat Kissinger says Putin survival ‘improbable’ if Ukraine prevails

NEW YORK – President Vladimir Putin may struggle to hold on to power if the war in Ukraine forces Russia to abandon military aggression and accept a peace deal with Europe, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said.

“I would like a Russia that recognises that its relations to Europe have to be based on agreement and a kind of consensus and I believe that this war will, if it’s ended properly, make it achievable,” he told Bloomberg’s editor-in-chief John Micklethwait in an interview.

Asked whether Mr Putin could survive in power if the war ends on those terms, he replied: “It’s improbable.”

The veteran diplomat said it is important that Ukraine emerges from the conflict as a strong democracy, and it is preferable to avoid “the dissolution of Russia or the reduction of Russia to resentful impotence” that risks stoking new tensions.

He described Mr Putin as a “Dostoevsky-type figure beset by ambivalences and unfulfillable aspirations” who is very capable of wielding power as a leader and uses it “excessively” in relation to Ukraine. 

The June 7 interview in New York was a retrospective on Dr Kissinger’s life and career

after he recently turned 100.

Mr Putin has frequently welcomed Dr Kissinger to Russia during his near quarter-century rule in the Kremlin. The strongman said at a 2012 meeting that their relationship stretched back to the mid-1990s when he was deputy mayor of St Petersburg.

Dr Kissinger said in his interview that Mr Putin was both the inheritor of a traditional Russian outlook and also someone who grew up on the streets of Leningrad, now St Petersburg, where more than half the population died of starvation during World War II and faced constant threat.

Mr Putin “translated that into never wanting European military power to be in easy reach of St Petersburg and major cities like Moscow”, and reacted “at the edge of irrationality” to its expansion, Dr Kissinger said. 

While the US and its allies are correct to resist Russia’s attack on Ukraine, it is “increasingly important” that parties to the conflict consider how they want to end it through diplomacy, he added.

There is a risk that military relations between powers dominate geopolitical thinking and turn the war into a global conflict by drawing in countries like China, he said.

“Europe will become more stable, the world will become more stable when Russia accepts the fact that it cannot conquer Europe, but it has to remain part of Europe by some sort of consensus as other states do,” he added.

“But at the moment, Russia is so crushed that it sees it’s being a factor of international politics in other regions and becomes a subject for European competition among the various states.” Bloomberg