Would Putin stop if he wins in Ukraine? Let’s not find out

Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Addressing his nation on Thursday, a buoyant President Vladimir Putin ridiculed the very notion that he might attack Europe. Not only was that idea nonsense, he said, but it’s the West that was picking targets to attack in Russia, at the risk of nuclear Armageddon. It’s tempting to roll your eyes and move on. Yet the question of what the Kremlin does next if it wins in Ukraine is too important to ignore.

A debate is underway, particularly in Washington, on whether to pressure Ukraine into a negotiated settlement with Russia or help its continued defense. If Putin has no further ambitions beyond what he has seized in Ukraine already, then the interests of Europe and the US might indeed be best served by forcing Kyiv to settle by starving it of the means to fight — as brutal a betrayal as that would be.

If Putin really is just fighting a limited defensive war, you could go further to ask why the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and its core Article V collective defense clause are needed at all. The same would go for the sudden and expensive drive to rearm in Europe.

Yet getting that calculation wrong would be catastrophic, and according to the eastern Europeans who — unlike US House Republicans —  have spent centuries living and fighting with Russia, it is wrong. If Putin’s goal in Ukraine is instead to restore the sway that Moscow lost with the USSR’s collapse in 1991, which he has famously described as the greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century, then he may pause his invasion to regroup, but he won’t stop until Kyiv is fully under Russian control.

This is the future that beckons if Putin isn’t forced to give up his dreams of joining the pantheon of the Russian Empire’s greatest leaders, regathering lands that he sees as rightfully Russian, alongside his idols Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.

After that, there would be every reason to expect a triumphant and vengeful Putin to try to recover more of the control that Russia used to wield, from the Balkans to the Baltic States. What he’s looking for, Putin said during his speech, is nothing less than a new security architecture and international order for Eurasia.

His denials of aggressive intent aren’t much help in deciding who is right. For one thing, Putin as president has repeatedly proved the skills in disinformation he learned during his KGB tenure. To name just one instance, he’d ridiculed the idea that he would invade Ukraine, right up until he ordered close to 200,000 troops over the border.

But just because Putin is a serial liar doesn’t prove he is being untruthful now. Nor does it reveal how much Russian TV propagandists routinely talk about retaking Poland or nuking London. So, what actual evidence of ​​​​​Putin's intent do we have?

One piece comes from the rest of Putin’s address, which — like many of his orations — was filled with pledges to keep expanding the military, protect Russian “compatriots,” continue the so-called special military operation in Ukraine, create a new security order and increase birth rates to boost the population. He made clear that he considers himself to be at war with the West, which he accused of wanting to turn Russia into a “dying space.” This, I think, he sincerely believes.

His comments, like the invasion of Ukraine itself, were a call for Russia’s growth as a great power, a centuries-long project that always had rolling geographical limits. The further Moscow's control extended, the bigger Russia was and the bigger the buffer zone it needed to feel secure.

A second piece of evidence comes from the Kremlin’s continued efforts to destabilize Moldova, a mainly Romanian-speaking ex-Soviet republic that’s now bidding to join the European Union. An opportunity to unseat President Maia Sandu, a former World Bank economist, is coming up in December, when she faces reelection.

Russia has been working hard at this for a long time. It tried turning off the country’s heat and energy, until Moldova switched to buying gas and power from Europe. It tried insurrection, organized and funded by a fugitive, Kremlin-friendly oligarch. And, according to the Moldovan government, it attempted a coup. All of those efforts have taken place since the start of the war in Ukraine, and Moscow still has cards to play.

These include the separatist Moldovan territory of Transnistria, a mainly Russian-speaking region where virtually the entire population has been handed Russian passports. On Wednesday, an extraordinary session of the self-styled republic’s legislature appealed for Moscow to "implement measures for defending Transnistria" and its 220,000 Russian citizens. 

The echoes of separatist appeals for Russian intervention in Ukraine were as unmistakable as the response from Moscow was predictable: This was NATO’s fault. The alliance "is literally trying to mold the republic into a second Ukraine,” said Maria Zakharova, the Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman, stoking the greatest fear of ordinary Moldovans — that they could get drawn into the war next door.

Moldova gets to the heart of Putin’s ambiguity over what Russia is and where Europe starts. On Thursday, he described his invasion of Ukraine as a defense of the motherland and of his “compatriots” in the Donbas region, as well as in Novorossiya, an area he has defined as stretching from Kharkiv in the north of Ukraine,  to Odesa in the south. Odesa, a “Russian city” Putin reiterated as recently as December, is just 40 miles from Transnistria. “The entire Black Sea coast went to Russia as a result of the Russo-Turkish wars,” he said during his end-of-year press conference, adding rhetorically, “What does Ukraine have to do with this?”

If not Odesa, then you might think that Moldova, a Romanian-speaking country where about half the population has EU passports, would qualify as Europe for Putin, and would therefore be off his hit list. But no. The former Russian empire wrested Moldova from the ailing Ottoman Empire, in 1812.

If NATO does become involved in Moldova, ​​then as with Ukraine it will be because Russia attacks it. That's something it can do only from the air for now, unless Putin attains his goals in Novorossiya (New Russia) and his army reaches Odesa. New options would at that point open — to dominate the Black Sea and project power and influence toward Romania and the Balkans.

“Putin aims to secure victory in Ukraine to demonstrate geopolitical superiority over the West and reshape the European security landscape,” including a NATO retreat to its size in the 1990s, before its eastward enlargement, Estonia’s intelligence services said in their 2024 annual report. Without NATO in the way, Moscow would be free to reassert its sphere of influence in eastern Europe, by the whole array of economic, cyber and in, the last resort, military means he has used already.

The Estonians may be wrong, but I doubt it. This is what Putin demanded in writing before invading Ukraine two years ago. It’s also what Soviet leaders and Russian tsars did or sought over centuries. The best time and place to break this pattern — allowing Russia to adjust to a new status as a normal, if vast and powerful, nation-state within internationally recognized borders — is now and in Ukraine.