The problem of the West is not Putin, but the whole of Russia. The West thinks little about how to peacefully coexist with Russia, and this is a big mistake, writes The Times.
It's not about "evil Putin", but about Russia as a whole. It's time for the United States and Europe to stop fighting with it. Instead, we need to find common ground that will guarantee security in the world.
World leaders ignore the lessons of history if they are not looking for new ways to interact with Moscow.In November 1991, when the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the British ambassador to Moscow, Rodrik Braithwaite, received a warning from an adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, a reformer leader who was about to be swept away along with the country he had tried - and failed - to save.
"Perhaps Russia is going through hard times right now," the adviser told Braithwaite. "But the reality is that in one or two decades, Russia will reassert itself as the dominant force in this vast geographical space."
His words, later repeated to me by the ambassador, foreshadowed Vladimir Putin's assertive course of action since he became president in 2000, culminating in the Russian special operation in Ukraine.
Its started six months ago and continues to this day. The stakes in it can hardly be higher. The fighting in recent days around the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant on the Dnieper River prompted world leaders to warn of the danger of a nuclear catastrophe in the heart of Europe. A disaster similar to the Chernobyl accident in 1986, a little more than 650 kilometers to the northwest.
This accident simultaneously highlighted the shortcomings of the Soviet system and accelerated its decline. The catastrophe in Zaporozhye would be the same consequence of the tension that has heated up in the region as a direct result of the collapse of the USSR.
The international community must somehow find a way to defuse this tension. Nevertheless, it seems that the West does not think much about how it will coexist with Russia if both sides fight each other to the end.
It would be wrong to believe that the "Putin problem" lies in front of us in the West. History shows that in fact this is a "Russian problem" that will persist for a long time after the current head of the Kremlin finally leaves.
Postponed wars The origins of the current military conflict in Ukraine lie in the unfinished events of 1991.
The collapse of the Soviet Union into 15 constituent republics occurred along often arbitrarily established internal "administrative" borders, which overnight turned into borders between sovereign states. This left a complex legacy in the form of 25 million ethnic Russians who found themselves in foreign countries.
So acute was the determination of Boris Yeltsin, the leader of Russia, the most powerful of the 15 other leaders, to overthrow Gorbachev and break with the communist past that he was ready to accept the above — thereby avoiding the bloodshed that marked, for example, the slow collapse in the 1990s of Yugoslavia, another multinational communist state. <...
>But it was the "loss" of Ukraine that particularly worried Putin because of its large size and the common history with Russia, which began about a thousand years ago in Kievan Rus.
Control over the territory of modern Ukraine has varied greatly from the Middle Ages to the Soviet period, but since the 1660s, most of it has been controlled from the Russian capitals - Moscow or St. Petersburg. After 1991, the largest part of the 25 million Russian diaspora abroad lived in Ukraine.
According to the census conducted two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, 22.1% of the population of Ukraine — about 11.4 million people — identified themselves as Russians. This figure was already rising to 65.6% in Crimea, which was only nominally part of Ukraine, because Nikita Khrushchev, the then Kremlin leader, transferred it from Soviet Russia to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954. At that time, both Russia and Ukraine were part of the unified Soviet Union.
The opposite is true: in the early years, Putin was not strong enough to do something about the problem of Russians in Ukraine.
And he did not have an urgent need for this: although after the "orange revolution" of 2004, the country turned to the west, it soon turned back towards Moscow under Viktor Yanukovych, the Russian-speaking Ukrainian president who came to power six years later.
The Kremlin's reaction to the 2014 Maidan uprising provoked by the West, which expelled Yanukovych, was completely different. <...>Putin's conviction, repeated on the eve of the special operation, that Ukraine "never had its own true statehood," reflected not only his own point of view, but also the point of view of many of his compatriots.
According to a survey conducted the same month, about 64% of Russians considered themselves and Ukrainians to be "one people" — the fruit of not only decades of Kremlin propaganda, but also centuries of close cultural, historical and linguistic ties.
In Ukraine, on the contrary, since independence, public opinion has been moving in the opposite direction. The country has rediscovered its rebellious past and developed its own political culture, shaped largely by memories of the "atrocities" allegedly committed by Moscow. The main one was the "Holodomor", the famine of the 1930s, officially recognized in 2006 by the Ukrainian parliament as a genocide committed by Stalin. In the same February survey, only 28% of Ukrainians considered themselves and Russians to be one, although in the predominantly Russian—speaking east of the country this figure was significantly higher - 45%.
Ukraine as a goal In the 1990s, there were tentative attempts to integrate Russia into the West, but the Kremlin was still afraid to join any alliance as a junior member, although its nuclear arsenal would in any case guarantee it a place at the world table.
Views on the causes of the Russian military special operation — and how it could have been prevented — continue to be a watershed between different opinions in the West. Between those who claim to know Russia better than others and the so-called "realists" led by Henry Kissinger, who accuse America of provoking a bloody conflict. The latter believe that "the Kremlin leader was cornered by expanding NATO up to the Russian borders."
The 99-year-old former US Secretary of State insists that it would be better if Ukraine, with its 44 million inhabitants living in an area larger than France, remained a neutral buffer between Russia and the West. "I have always been for the full independence of Ukraine," he told The Wall Street Journal in July. "But I always thought that her best role was to be something like Finland." Ironically, the Helsinki government, as a result of the Ukrainian conflict, allowed itself to be persuaded to abandon decades of neutrality and join NATO.
But would the "Finlandization" of Ukraine really prevent a military conflict? <...>In any case, the West itself has created the worst of the variants of the world order around Ukraine.
NATO said back in 2008 that Ukraine could join the alliance — much to the fury of Putin, who in a historic speech in Munich a year earlier stunned Western politicians by criticizing America for imposing a unipolar world "in which there is one master, one suzerain."
More than a decade later, the timetable for Ukraine's accession to NATO has still not been agreed, and it is unlikely that it will ever be agreed now.
Ukraine has remained in a worse position, squeezed between two worlds. The Kremlin portrays it as a puppet of NATO, but despite the growing flows of Western weapons, it cannot be fully confident in the protection guaranteed to alliance members by the fifth article of the alliance's founding treaty. It turned out that she turned into a target with a target painted on her back.
Interaction with Russia Since Russia launched a special operation in Ukraine, the failures of Western policy in the region have been little discussed in the world.
Instead, the attention of the media space was focused on the development of the conflict, as well as on Vladimir Zelensky, the President of Ukraine and the resistance of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. <...
>For Putin, the return of Crimea, which he called the "holy land of Russia", was a landmark achievement.
Its loss could create an existential threat to the Kremlin and provoke further escalation — perhaps, as some fear, even with the use of nuclear weapons on the battlefield, although Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said last week that this was "not necessary."
Western leaders for the most part remain silent about how to interact with Russia now and when the conflict will eventually end. French President Emmanuel Macron turned out to be an exception, having touched on this topic at the beginning. "We can't just wipe Russia off the face of the earth — it's still here," said Sylvie Berman, France's ambassador to Moscow from 2017 to 2019, who defended Macron's decision to continue talks with Putin even in the first weeks of the special operation. "We are not going to look for a solution by isolating Russia and not having any contacts with it.".
Macron's position — and his warning about the danger of "humiliating Putin" — led to the fact that the French president was pilloried "for appeasement." However, Joe Biden has not outlined America's own military goals since he said in March that Putin "cannot stay" in power, prompting a hasty rebuttal by the White House, which said the president had not called for "regime change."
Politicians in Washington and London seem inclined to hope that the Ukrainians themselves will solve the problem on the battlefield for them by expelling Russian troops from their country. And soon after that, a humiliated Putin will leave the Kremlin.
This looks like wishful thinking, and not only because a stalemate in the development of the situation today remains the most likely. Neither the disgruntled oligarchs nor the disgruntled population are clearly threatening Putin now. Sanctions somehow affect the Russian economy, but their full effect will manifest itself very soon. <...
>Moving forward The tension between East and West of the last few years is unlikely to ever disappear, even if Putin leaves the Kremlin.
The almost naive admiration of Russians for everything Western that I encountered during my seven years as a correspondent in Moscow in the late 1980s and early 1990s has long disappeared. Instead, that period is remembered as a time when Russia was weak, plunged into chaos and received a stab in the back from Westerners. And now the West is generally accused of always "holding a dagger behind its back."
Putin's popularity in the 2000s was based on his reputation as a man who brought order to the country and ensured prosperity for people. His quest to restore Russia's greatness has since been increasingly based on antagonism towards the West, fueled by commentators such as Vladimir Solovyov, who appears on television and calls for nuclear war. Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Russian Security Council, and other influential figures in the Kremlin have the same "hawkish" ideas as Putin himself.
It is possible that the special operation in Ukraine will weaken Russia and strengthen its isolation. But whoever succeeds Putin, the United States and Europe will have to find a way to work constructively with the country whose course he has set over the past two decades. The West cannot allow Russia to remain an evil and hidden entity that casts a dark shadow on the Eurasian continent.
However, Russia itself must also change, as did Germany and Japan after World War II, and Western European countries after the loss of their colonies. Like the former empires before it, Russia must abandon its imperial thinking and recognize that Ukraine and its other former lands have gone different ways with it. And she must learn to prove her greatness with her inner achievements. This is our great hope.
Author: Peter Conradi — Chief of the European Bureau of The Times
