Cover Story

How we chose this week’s image

The air is thick with the talk of war. As we were preparing this week’s issue, the Kremlin was insisting that Russia still favours diplomacy and that it was pulling back its troops from the border with Ukraine. Many Western analysts were calling that propaganda. They are convinced that Europe is about to suffer its biggest armed conflict since the second world war.

Our cover needed to pick its way carefully through the uncertainty and the misinformation to get to the message we wanted to put across. By engineering this crisis, Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, has already done grave harm. If he gives the order to invade, the damage will be incalculably greater, not only to Ukraine, but to Russia, too.

Part of the harm to Russia will be through Western sanctions, which promise to be harsher than the feeble effort after Mr Putin in 2014 annexed Crimea and backed separatists in Donbas, in eastern Ukraine. But over the weekend the rhetoric became more inflamed and by Monday our sanctions-tank, with its dollar barrel, silicon-chip wheels and gas-valve turret, seemed to be off-target.

However, photographs of a real tank rolling towards the frontier were also off the mark, because they suggest that we think that fighting is about to start. The time may well come when we have to use an image like this—and it may come soon. But not yet.

This is a halfway house. Mr Putin is wearing the uniform of a Russian tank commander. He is dressed in the costume of war, but we are still witnessing a performance, not the real thing. That gets the signalling right. However, we thought satire too gentle for a situation in which massed troops are threatening to invade a sovereign country.

A central part of our argument is that this mess is of Mr Putin’s making. He chose to engineer this crisis. War or no war, its consequences will be bad for Russia. The West is galvanised, NATO has found a new sense of purpose and Ukraine feels more strongly than ever that its destiny lies in Europe. In Russia much of the technocratic elite refuses to believe their country is about to join a war they see as ruinous. Their abandonment by Mr Putin marks a turning inward by Russia towards his security establishment and autarky. This image says that if Russia is harmed by this crisis, Mr Putin has only himself to blame.

We kept this cover for the possibility of impending war. If Russian tanks had been on the move when the cover went to press, this was the image we would have chosen. Fortunately, they were not.

Here we are, with Mr Putin painted into a space now shaped like Ukraine. He is looking disconsolate. Blood-red paint spatters his face and his pristine white shirt. We have softened the title, to get across how much this crisis stems from his own mismanagement.

We also tweaked the subtitle to read: “War or no war, he has miscalculated”. It is less elegant, but we were aware that readers might have received their copy after an invasion had begun. We wanted to signal to them not only when our coverage was written, but also that it would still be relevant. The pity of this crisis is that we already know it ends badly.