Putin

To demonstrate his point, Zolotov, without a word of warning, struck Tretyakov in the temple, knocking him unconscious to the floor. He came around a few seconds later, the general yelling: “You could have killed him!”

That may have been the tipping point for Colonel Tretyakov, who defected a month later to the United States, for which he had been covertly working for three years and which paid him more than $2 million, the highest sum any defector had ever received.

Officially, among the National Guard’s several functions, the most important would seem to be “countering terrorism and extremism,” categories that can cover a multitude of sins, especially the latter. Yet the real purpose of Putin’s personal guard is to prevent Putin’s personal nightmare scenario from becoming a reality. That scenario has several interlocking elements: military pressure from Russia’s chief enemies, which, as in the Cold War, are again NATO and the United States; an information war by those same enemies designed to create unrest among the populace, leading to a Russian equivalent of Ukraine’s uprising; and maintenance of the sanctions and, in the Kremlin’s view, the deliberate keeping of oil prices low to bring Russia to its knees, since economic suffering will only exacerbate the discontent of workers, some of whom have received no salaries for months. Economic pain and social turmoil will set the stage for a palace coup by ambitious officials and oligarchs disgruntled because Putin has gone from making them money to costing them money. In that worst-case scenario Putin is dragged through the streets like Qaddafi.

The creation of the National Guard, a sort of national secret service, is the sign of a person feeling vulnerable, not one brimming with confidence. So it was probably no coincidence that the American guided missile destroyer USS Donald Cook was buzzed dangerously close by two Russian Su-24 bombers in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Kaliningrad on April 12, 2016, a week after the decree creating the National Guard. That this is an area where Russia feels particularly vulnerable was demonstrated two days later when a U.S. reconnaissance jet was buzzed by a Russian fighter. It came close to creating an incident. Secretary of State John Kerry called the behavior “reckless,” “provocative,” and “dangerous,” adding that “under the rules of engagement that could have been a shoot-down.” A Russian official responded: “We will continue to use force to prevent any attempts by foreigners to come close to our borders. If they blink, we will shoot them down without a second’s hesitation.”

The Baltic states—Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia—as well as Poland were particularly alarmed by the Russian annexation of Crimea and incursion into eastern Ukraine. They all have long memories of Russian occupation and oppression under tsars and Communists. Some, like the city of Narva in Estonia, would seem ripe for the plucking. Narva is 94 percent Russian-speaking and 82 percent ethnic Russia. Fewer than half its residents are even citizens of Estonia. In Narva on February 24, 2015, during a parade that included U.S. troops and armored vehicles, the Estonian prime minister said: “Narva is a part of NATO no less than New York or Istanbul, and NATO defends every square meter of its territory.”

The irony is that Poland and the Baltic states really have nothing to worry about—Putin is happy to rattle the populace and humiliate NATO from time to time, but he has no vital interests there for which he would be willing to risk a confrontation with NATO. On the contrary, it is Putin himself who feels most vulnerable in the Baltic region.

Russia has a fleet at every point of the compass. The Northern Fleet, near Murmansk in the Arctic, and the Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok have always been secure. The southern Black Sea Fleet was secured with the annexation of Crimea; until then its use was ultimately dependent on the pleasure of the government in Kiev. It is the Baltic Fleet, which operates out of the Russian exclave province of Kaliningrad, that is the most unprotected. What Russia fears most—being surrounded by NATO—has already happened in Kaliningrad, a piece of Russia about the size of Connecticut, totally disconnected from the “mainland” and encircled by Poland and Lithuania.