What concerns me is the fact that there are seemingly no specific indicators of what Russia is willing and not willing to do. It’s hard to see where Russia would be willing to stop. It has not been as hurt by the different types of sanctions and the behavior of companies as we thought it would be, at least not in the short term.
For a government like Russia that does not require elections to stay in power and that uses extensive propaganda to keep its society in check, there’s not many things that it might be afraid of doing, again in the short term. That’s the biggest concern; we really don’t know what we can expect. The more comfortable the U.S. or NATO feel, and look, the more unexpected the moves by Russia could potentially be, especially if Russia feels out of options. Unelected governments have many more tools at their disposal than democratic governments. That is what Putin is going to be feeding off of when he justifies his actions to his society.
When you look at what’s happening in the West, many of the governments—governments that are against Putin, that have imposed sanctions on Russia, spoken out against Russia, and have sent weapons to Ukraine—are currently faced with very difficult economic conditions. They are related to post-COVID recovery, to high prices of energy that that the sanctions have, to some extent, generated, and to high inflation.
It is a situation where leaders of these democratic governments might be affected by electoral outcomes. We’ve seen it already in France where President Macron lost the majority in the parliamentary elections. We've seen the Italian government have to be reconstructed, and we will potentially see more democratic governments changing hands. For Putin, he can go to his people in Russia and say, ‘Nothing they do works against us, we are just fine. Our inflation is lower than these other countries; we are getting paid for whatever energy we are selling and those other governments are falling.’ But that’s how democracy works. People vote for change. Peaceful transfer of power is a hallmark of democracy. Nevertheless, this is going to be fodder for Putin setting the stage and justifying it to his population, and it can and will potentially protract this conflict.