Shortly after Joe Biden became president of the United States, I was asked by an American interviewer for my opinion of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy intentions and whether his aggression against neighbouring countries was likely to continue. I could see that my interlocutor was concerned about the damage the Kremlin was inflicting on the prospects for world peace, but I could offer him little in the way of reassurance. My assessment, I told him, is that Putin is a former KGB agent who regrets the loss of the USSR and has set himself the goal of regaining control of as much of the old Soviet Union as possible.
When my interviewer asked me what the West could do to curb an escalation of international confrontation, my response was equally gloomy. The United States, I predicted, would do nothing, except maybe impose a few more sanctions. The Democrats’ lack of resolve would give the Trumpian faction of the Republican Party enough ammunition to beat up on Biden and proclaim that the US was now led by a weak and incompetent president. As for Europe, I expected that the EU would do even less than the US, since Germany, the only country whose opinion really matters, does not want to alienate the Kremlin and risk jeopardising its supplies of Russian gas or seeing Russian markets closed to German manufactured goods. The consequence of Western weakness, I concluded, would be to further embolden Putin in his campaign of foreign expansionism. It gives me no pleasure to note that just a year after my remarks to the American journalist, my predictions were borne out by his invasion of Ukraine.
Putin’s intentions evidently revolve around the acquisition of control over more and more territory, for reasons which, frankly speaking, make very little sense. Even if he achieves his aim, Russia will be no better off than before: it will have taken on responsibility for more territory, which it doesn’t need, and more people, most of whom will be unhappy and resentful, in political, economic and social terms.
Yet, despite all the obvious disadvantages, Putin has clung to his expansionist dreams. In his 2005 State of the Nation address, he called the collapse of the Soviet Union ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’. ‘For the Russian people,’ he said, ‘it has become a genuine tragedy – tens of millions of our fellow countrymen are condemned to live beyond the boundaries of the Motherland … and the pestilence has spread to Russia herself.’ In 2018, he repeated his remarks to an audience in Kaliningrad, declaring that the dissolution of the USSR was ‘the one single event of Russian history’ he would most like to see reversed.
It is no secret why Putin was doing it. Opinion polls show that 55 per cent of Russian people expect Putin to make Russia ‘a great country’ again. The older generation have preserved the memory of the Soviet Union as a superpower and there is nostalgia for those bygone days. Many of them say they want Russia to be respected; but being respected is different from being feared. In opinion polls, however, they don’t differentiate between the two. Older Russians have been inculcated with the dangerous belief that for Russia to be respected by the world, she needs to be feared by the world. For younger folk, things are more complicated. I would say that maybe half of them share the same dead-end nostalgia for a lost superpower, having imbibed the values of their parents; but the other half genuinely want a Russia that is open and integrated into the global system of values. It is on this section of the population that we, in the democratic opposition in Russia and worldwide, must focus our best efforts to secure a more rational, less belligerent future for the nation.
It won’t be easy. Putin has shown himself to be adept at exploiting the politics of aggression abroad in order to boost his standing at home. It is a fact that the Russian economy has deteriorated dramatically since he illegally prolonged his hold on power; in the majority of Western democracies, such a disastrous performance would have resulted in a drubbing at the polls. Putin’s approval ratings slipped alarmingly between 2008 and 2014, when Russia officially went into recession, only for the Kremlin to launch its campaign to annex Crimea, followed by military intervention in eastern Ukraine. Almost immediately, Putin’s poll numbers soared to more than 80 per cent. But the cost of shoring up his own domestic standing has been to draw Russia into perilous foreign adventures that put the whole country at risk. The Kremlin-controlled media endlessly repeat the claim that Russia is beset by enemy forces, surrounded by a supposedly hostile West bent on destroying the Motherland. In such circumstances, it is little wonder that some people believe Putin is their only hope, a leader dedicated to defending Russia’s international clout whom they must trust implicitly.
