Since the beginning of September, Russia has sent dozens of drones into European airspace. In response, NATO governments have briefly shut down civilian airports, scrambled fighter jets, and invoked NATO’s Article 4—calling for formal consultations among allies.
This pattern of incursions is Vladimir Putin’s most overt attempt to show NATO as hollow and unable to defend its own territory, much less Ukraine. But more remarkable than the provocation itself is how confidently observers in the West deemed it a victory for the Russian president. The intrusions had contributed, one CNN analysis asserted, to a level of confusion and distraction that represented a “win for Putin”—yet another instance of his being depicted as enjoying one success after another, regardless of battlefield losses, unfavorable geopolitical shifts, and growing turbulence at home.
After taking over from the ailing Boris Yeltsin a quarter century ago, Putin started his presidency by projecting a near-comical image of manliness and invincibility. But no one in the Kremlin could have imagined how the West would adopt and then amplify this narrative.
Putin, a ruthless septuagenarian bent on restoring Russia to its imperial glory, is simply too good a villain for Western politicians and media commentators to ignore. Casting him as omniscient and unstoppable creates a clear story amid the chaos of global affairs. For Trump’s critics, emphasizing Putin’s strength has become another way of denigrating the U.S. president. But this emotionally convenient mythmaking spills over into news and political analysis.
Early in my career, I worked inside several propaganda outlets in Russia. All had an unspoken rule: No matter the crisis, Putin can’t lose. Many Western commentators are unwittingly following that rule too. But overestimating Putin’s power means doing his job for him. It means amplifying every one of his threats, mistaking posturing for reality, and making policy decisions based not on facts but on what Putin wants us to believe. And although he has had some successes—his annexation of Crimea, to name one—Putin’s biggest win comes from convincing the world that he’s winning, even when he isn’t.
Even before Putin’s plane touched down in Alaska for a meeting with Trump in August, many outlets called the summit a victory for the Russian leader. John Lyons of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation wrote of the Anchorage summit, “This was vintage Putin who spent years studying the art of psychological war and subterfuge as he rose through the ranks of the notorious Soviet intelligence service, the KGB.” But substantively, the summit did not advance Putin’s goals. American weapons are still flowing into Ukraine, and the U.S. will now provide Kyiv with intelligence to strike targets, including energy infrastructure, deep inside Russia—something even Joe Biden once opposed.
Citing unnamed Kremlin officials, Bloomberg reported in late September that Putin, after meeting Trump in Alaska, decided to intensify drone and missile attacks on Ukraine, believing Trump had no interest in intervening in the conflict. But the shift toward civilian attacks was going on long before the summit, and reflects Putin’s growing frustration with his inability to achieve any military goals. The recent drone escalation appears minor compared with the scale of the war that Putin began in 2022, when hundreds of thousands of Russian troops, tanks, and warplanes poured into Ukraine. Today, Russia’s armed forces are bogged down. There are no tanks rolling toward Kyiv, no lightning offensives seizing regions, no major cities under siege. Russia does not have air supremacy, or even superiority, in Ukraine. . . . . far from seizing all of Ukraine, Russia has not even fully conquered the regions that it has written into its constitution.
Meanwhile, Putin has lost influence in his own backyard. Russian peacekeepers stationed in Armenia, a former Soviet republic long aligned with Moscow, stood by in 2023 as it was attacked by neighboring Azerbaijan. The Kremlin didn’t just abandon an ally; it also could no longer reliably enforce stability in the Caucasus, a region it has long considered vital to Russia’s national security. . . . . Now a peace treaty between Armenia and Azerbaijan has been brokered by the United States—not Russia—and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev is openly weighing the possibility of supplying Ukraine with lethal aid. Putin was forced to confront the reality of a neighbor slipping from Russia’s orbit.
Although Russia is a militant autocracy, the reason for Putin’s lifetime presidency isn’t gulags, mass executions, or forced labor. It’s a set of deals with the Russian people.
Amid unprecedented economic sanctions imposed by the West, Moscow has mostly managed to preserve the living standards expected in a modern consumer economy: Chinese cars have replaced European ones, domestic tourism is booming, and for the perhaps half a million Russians who received Schengen Area visas this year, even a European vacation is still within reach. . . . And the restaurants, as a friend who recently returned from Russia insisted to me not long ago, “are somehow even better than before.”
But consumer access to vacations, streaming services, and more depends on an economy that is showing clear signs of strain. Herman Gref, the head of Russia’s biggest bank, recently admitted that the country has entered “technical stagnation,” as wartime industrial mobilization has run out of steam. Last week, Reuters reported that Russian Railways, a state-owned company employing about 700,000 people, asked its central-office staff to take three unpaid days off a month. In September, Avtovaz, Russia’s largest carmaker, introduced a four-day workweek in an attempt to cut payroll costs without increasing unemployment.
Putin’s end of the bargain, stability, is becoming elusive, and Russians are seeing palpable changes in their daily life. Amid widespread internet outages, shuttered airports, and gasoline shortages from Ukrainian strikes on oil infrastructure, Russian propaganda outlets are using euphemisms like planned cooling of the economy and ignition of an oil tank to mask what looks like a deepening crisis.
Another rule of Russian propaganda is that if Putin’s not winning, he’s simply out of the picture. It’s one of the reasons Russia’s commander in chief almost never visits the occupied Ukrainian territories. Doing so would remind everyone where his war against Western hegemony really stands: stuck near Pokrovsk, a town with a prewar population of 70,000 that Russia hasn’t managed to take in two years of fighting.
Underestimating Putin is dangerous, but ascribing dark powers to him makes the Russian leader mightier in Western minds than he is in reality. If Americans had a more clear-eyed view of Putin, they would see a dictator who’s bet everything on a failed invasion, a country losing its sphere of influence, and an economy that’s rapidly cooling. A realistic view of his power would strip Putin of his biggest leverage: the perception of his invincibility.
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