Russia’s strongman is a serial loser.
First Vladimir Putin lost Ukraine and Ukrainians by stupidly launching a horrific war against them on Feb. 24, 2022.
Then he lost the Russian speakers and Russians living in Ukraine’s southeast by bombing their cities to smithereens, while believing that genocide and war would endear him to the people he claimed to be liberating from the “neo-Nazi” Ukrainian Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
He lost his legitimacy and authority by demonstrating that he cannot win the war, even as tens of thousands — and perhaps hundreds of thousands — of Russian soldiers were sacrificed on the altar of his incompetence and criminality.
Having lost the support of most of the Russian elites who’ve sustained him for the last two decades, he will likely lose his head, whether politically or physically, in the coming weeks or months, thereby unleashing a vicious power struggle and even civil war.
In the meantime, Putin’s most recent loss is Ukraine’s port city of Odesa.
Established in 1794 on the site of an ancient Greek settlement and a Crimean Tatar fortress, Odesa, like port cities the world over, was always a multiethnic and multiconfessional city that served as a conduit for cultural influence into the Russian Empire. Odesa also developed an identity of its own and, thanks to the vibrancy of its own culture, managed to exert an outsize influence on Ukrainian and Russian literature, music, cinema and the arts. The scene depicting a massacre on the city’s steps in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece “Battleship Potemkin” is one of the most famous in film history.
Russia’s war against Ukraine led the UNESCO World Heritage Committee to declare Odesa’s historic center a World Heritage Site and add it to the List of World Heritage in Danger on Jan. 25, 2023.
Little did that help, when in the last week Putin’s missiles rained down on that historic city center, severely damaging the Transfiguration Cathedral and 25 landmark buildings. Ironically, the cathedral belongs to that branch of Ukrainian Orthodoxy that remains under the Moscow patriarch’s jurisdiction.
By bombing Odesa, Putin effectively cut off Russia from the world and Russian culture from one of its main sources of inspiration. Thanks to his barbaric acts, Odesa has permanently left — or, more exactly, been pushed out — of Russia’s sphere of influence. Odesa may remain international or it may become unequivocally Ukrainian, but it will never be Russian again.
In that sense, Putin’s loss of Odesa is tantamount to Russia’s loss of a major part of its own cultural heritage. At this rate, the country’s transformation into a cultural wasteland may be nearer than one thinks.
Alfred Kokh, a Russian policymaker during the Yeltsin era, writer and Putin critic, put it well in his Telegram response to Putin’s militarily senseless and culturally suicidal attack on Odesa.
“If there are still Russian people left in Russia,” writes Kokh, “then they must understand that they are shooting themselves in the head. They are killing the city that largely created their culture, the greatness of which they talk about all the time. They shout all the time that Ukrainian nationalism threatens Russian culture in Ukraine, while they themselves are bombing Odessa, that is, one of the sources of this culture!”
Kokh then draws some important political consequences of Russia’s wanton destruction of Odesa: “I understand that the alienation between Ukrainians and Russians, the hatred that now divides them, will not pass in an instant. It will take years before ordinary human communication becomes possible again.”
“But until now,” Kokh continues, “I was convinced that if ever the restoration of the former friendship began, it would begin in Odesa. But now it’s impossible. Putin cut the last thread.”
Indeed, concludes Kokh, “Putin lost Odessa. He lost the Odessans. And, knowing their character, I can confidently say: now they will be the last to forget the evil that Russia has done to them.”
Putin and Russia will never be the same, thanks to the war that both are losing in such dramatic fashion. The man who wanted to make Russia great again will go down in history as the Great Loser. The country that claimed to be a major source of world culture will soon be another North Korea.
As Russian culture goes into decline, expect its neighbors to pick up the slack. Ukrainians, Balts, Poles and other survivors of Putin’s mad war will likely experience an outburst of creativity after the war ends. They will be the winners.
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”