Douglas Murray: Putins playbook is the same a quarter-century later peace talks are pointless

President George W.Bush famously underestimated Vladimir Putin.

Asked about his impressions of the Russian president after a brief meeting in 2001, the then-US president claimed that he had “looked into Putin’s eyes” and “saw his soul.”It is odd that Bush imagined he had some mystical ability to divine the soul of his Russian counterpart.His secretary of state, Colin Powell, had a different reaction.

Powell said that he, too, had looked into Putin’s eyes “and I saw the KGB.”Almost a quarter of a century has passed since then.US presidents have come and gone.

But Putin remains, still perplexing his US counterparts.Bush found out what was behind Putin’s eyes a little too late.Toward the end of Bush’s second term, in 2008, Putin’s Russia invaded the neighboring country of Georgia.

Although Putin didn’t get everything he wanted from that conflict, his brutal invasion did allow him to purge Georgians from South Ossetia and Abkhazia and install Russian forces in those regions.It was a relatively small war, but one that many people in the West seem to have forgotten.Ever since Putin repeated his Georgian maneuver on a much grander scale in Ukraine in 2022, there are still people who like to pretend that Ukraine is all that Vladimir Putin wants.To think this is to repeat a historic mistake.In general you can weigh up world leaders in two ways: what they say, and what they do.Putin is by turns open and sphinx-like about what he wants.

Speaking to the Russian people, he can be explicit about the expansion he wants — including the reconstruction of the Soviet Empire.To others he can play a subtler game, bamboozling ignorant foreign interviewers and running rings around them.But it is by his actions that you can really know Putin.

And just consider his actions lately.This week he ordered some of the largest aerial assaults to date on the people of Ukraine.President Trump, who believed that he was in the middle of a cease-fire negotiation with th...