Vladimir Putin, in his own telling, is no ordinary leader. He’s a lawyer on the throne. From the very beginning of his tenure, he has leaned on his legal background as part of his presidential persona. The reflex never left him. “After all, I have a law degree,” he told a group of businessmen in May, responding to concerns that a peace deal might bring Western competitors back into Russia. “If you give me the agreement, I’ll flip through it and tell you what needs to be done.”
We tend to think of a dictator as someone who tramples the law — and that’s absolutely true. But for a dictator like Mr. Putin, who rose from the disciplined ranks of the security services to the presidency by following orders, it is just as important to be able to cite the law as to break it. Today, every new wave of political repression in Russia is preceded by the passage or revision of a law — so that more and more people can be punished “according to the law,” rather than in violation of it.
The endless expansion of the legal order in service of one man’s power eventually calls for a higher justification. Indeed, Mr. Putin’s entire political career has been a search for a source of legitimacy deeper than the law itself, a personal obsession with proving his authority. This, as much as conquest, is what drives his war on Ukraine: The aim is to turn military victory into Russia’s return ticket to the club of the world’s great powers. But that remains impossible without recognition from the West. And increasingly, that seems like something Mr. Putin can’t get.
Legitimacy is a perennial problem for dictators. However strong they may appear, they always suffer from a deficit of it. Their power, after all, is not the result of popular preference. This explains autocrats’ fondness for rigged referendums and elections: A referendum was how Mr. Putin extended his tenure in 2020, and elections, held every six years, are used to provide a veneer of popular consent to his rule. Yet there’s only so much succor a dictator can draw from rubber-stamping. For many dictators, credibility truly comes on the world stage. Official visits and summits, along with successful military campaigns, are proof of their legitimacy.
In the early years of Mr. Putin’s tenure, this worked. He held court with Western leaders and won victories in the second Chechen war. But when his decision to return to the presidency in 2012 set off major protests, he began a new fight for so-called traditional Russian values against corrosive Western influence. This shift in emphasis entailed direct confrontation with the West, with Ukraine the proving ground. The annexation of Crimea, presented as the correction of a historical injustice, soon followed, along with the incursion into eastern Ukraine. The full-scale invasion of the country in 2022, conceived as a brilliant blitzkrieg, consummated the adversarial approach.
These were strikingly successful attempts to win support at home. But they were also efforts to refashion, not break, Russia’s relations with the West. Even after the annexation of Crimea and the conflict in eastern Ukraine, the Kremlin still pursued negotiations — most notably the Minsk agreements — aiming to end diplomatic isolation and reclaim its seat at the table of major powers. Those efforts foundered and Mr. Putin chose to up the stakes. Yet even today, the Kremlin is willing to show some degree of flexibility.
For all its uncompromising talk, the Kremlin has already retreated from some of its extreme positions. In March Mr. Putin floated ideas like a United Nations trusteeship over Ukraine or elections as a precondition for a start of any talks. No more. Moscow no longer insists that direct negotiations with Ukraine are meaningless and that any real agreement must first be reached with the West. The demand for a Ukrainian parliamentary vote repealing the ban on talks with Russia has quietly disappeared, too.
There are limits to this newfound flexibility, to be sure. Moscow hasn’t abandoned its main demands. That’s because over the past three years, Russia — despite the Kremlin’s reluctance to fully mobilize the whole nation — has become a country at war. The enemy has become mythic evil; soldiers are heroes; more are dead and wounded than in any war since World War II; the war economy is whirring; dissent is quashed. Even Mr. Putin often speaks of the “war,” not “special military operation.” The longer and broader the war effort, the more convincing the outcome must be.
That’s where negotiations come in. The Kremlin clearly sees them as a venue where it can claim a victory that has so far eluded it on the battlefield. This helps explain the seemingly absurd demand for Ukraine to withdraw from areas Russia doesn’t even control. For Mr. Putin, victory isn’t just about seizing territory — it’s about dictating terms, redrawing borders and having the new reality recognized. That’s how Mr. Putin can secure the legitimacy he craves.
It’s not surprising that this position is hard to understand. Even seemingly sympathetic members of the Trump administration believe that Mr. Putin is asking for too much. President Trump is clearly growing frustrated; his 50-day deadline for peace, now shortened to “10 or 12 days,” is evidence that his patience is wearing thin. As for Ukraine, despite signs of war fatigue and a willingness to consider painful compromises, there is no reason to believe it will accept an ultimatum from Moscow — even if some parts of it find support in Washington.
Long before Mr. Trump took office, the idea of a grand bargain between great powers was already popular in Russia. The model was always the Yalta Conference of 1945, where the West supposedly agreed to Soviet spheres of influence. This lies behind the recurring dream in Moscow of a “new Yalta”— a formal stamp of legitimacy for Russia’s claims today. Yet what few recall is that Yalta failed. Rather than harmony, it ushered in the Cold War. Stalin, after hesitating between legitimacy and force, chose the latter. The world was divided.
Mr. Putin appears to be caught in the same dilemma, between seizing as much as possible and legitimizing at least part of what has been taken. Like Stalin, after similar doubts, he is likely to make the same choice — trusting only in force, not the West, to secure his gains. That might be a victory of sorts. But it wouldn’t be what he wants.
Alexander Baunov (@baunov) is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center and a senior fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Putin Wants Something He Can’t Get appeared first on New York Times.
