JUL 14TH SINCE TIME BEGAN : salus populi suprema est lex - the right of the people is the supreme law : IN TRUTH WE TRUST 2017 ADE
GLOBE AND MAIL
MARK MACKINNON
How the West lost Putin: It didn’t have to be this way
It’s a
narrative that’s growing in popularity in the West: Vladimir Putin as a
21st-century Adolf Hitler, an unhinged dictator bent on collecting lost Russian
lands.
It was floated first on CNN last week, where
former Georgian president Mikhail Saakashvili – who fought and lost a war with
Russia six years ago over a place called South Ossetia – compared Mr. Putin’s
stealth takeover of the Crimean Peninsula to the Nazi annexation of Sudetenland
in 1938. The Canadian government has since embraced the storyline, with Foreign
Affairs Minister John Baird using the Sudetenland comparison while denouncing
Russian military moves in the Ukraine.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has made
similar remarks, and former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton told a
fundraiser in California: “If this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back
in the ’30s.”
We are, worryingly, in a situation where such comparisons can’t immediately be
laughed off. Mr. Putin’s own press conference this week was characterized by
two things: his alarming insistence that Russia had a right to use its military
to protect ethnic Russians living in other post-Soviet countries, and his
bitterness at the West for ignoring him until he was pushed into a corner.
The immediate triggers for Mr. Putin’s fury
are now plain. The Kremlin feels (and has evidence) that the West put its
shoulder behind the Ukrainian opposition that toppled the government of Viktor
Yanukovych last month following a deadly week of street battles between
protesters and police.
Mr. Yanukovych was pro-Russian and clearly
corrupt. But he was also the elected president of Ukraine, with 12 months to go
in his five-year term. His overthrow was inspiring to watch, but it was also
unconstitutional. (For the record, the Kremlin says it’s the West that is
encouraging fascism by siding with the revolutionaries in Kiev who include
right-wing ultranationalists in their ranks.)That precedent set, Mr. Putin now
seems willing to go as far as he needs to in order to regain Russia’s lost
influence in Ukraine – in the entire country, if he can, or any pro-Russian
part he can snap off.
But this New Cold War didn’t start last
month. Nor was it doomed to happen this way.
When Mr. Putin came to power 15 years ago, he
did so as a candidate who appealed to many sectors of Russian society. His KGB
background suggested to those nostalgic for the Soviet days that Mr. Putin was
the tough leader Russia needed after the chaos of Russia’s 1990s. But his track
record as an aide to Anatoliy Sobchak, the reformist governor of St.
Petersburg, also persuaded Russia’s pro-Western liberals that he was a man who
shared their mindset, too.
Mr.
Putin’s first four years as president were marked by an battle inside the
Kremlin, pitting a camp of ministers and aides known as the siloviki, the men
of power, who had KGB backgrounds like Mr. Putin’s, against the reformers, men
like Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and Alexander Voloshin, the powerful chief
of staff Mr. Putin inherited from Boris Yeltsin. Mr. Putin was seen as
listening to both sides, favouring neither. This was the man who was the first
foreign leader to call former U.S. president George W. Bush after the Sept. 11,
2001 attacks, the man who shared intelligence with and opened his airspace for
the subsequent NATO invasion of Afghanistan.
But
the siloviki gained
strength, and the reformers faded, as Mr. Putin saw that favour go unreturned.
He furiously railed against the U.S. attack on Iraq in 2003, but was ignored.
Then came the 2003 Rose Revolution in the former Soviet republic of Georgia –
which saw the U.S.-educated Mr. Saakashvili brought to power – and the Orange
Revolution in Ukraine a year later.
The Georgian and Ukrainian revolts had many
things in common, among them the fall of autocrats who ran semi-independent
governments that deferred to Moscow when the chips were down. Both uprisings
were also spurred by organizations that received funding from the U.S. National
Endowment for Democracy. As in the Middle East, “promoting democracy” in
Eastern Europe became a code word for supporting pro-Western politicians.
The Western-backed revolts came alongside
several tranches of eastward expansion by NATO, an alliance that Moscow sees as
retaining its Cold War intent, as well as the establishment of an
anti-ballistic missile shield in Europe that Russia saw as upsetting the
strategic balance by eliminating its treasured nuclear deterrent.
Mr.
Putin became convinced that the siloviki were
right, that the West was intent on keeping Russia weak, as it had been under
Mr. Yeltsin. By the beginning of his second term as President in 2004, Mr.
Kasyanov and Mr. Voloshin were gone from the Kremlin. Only the KGB remained.
Barack Obama saw the damage done, and came to
office in 2008 promising a “reset” in relations between Washington and Moscow.
The timing was right, with Mr. Putin stepping down the same year to the
theoretically junior post of prime minister in favour of one of his few
remaining liberal aides, Dmitry Medvedev.
The two new presidents got along well, and
Mr. Medvedev even gave Russian acquiescence (in the form of an abstention at
the United Nations Security Council) to the establishment of a NATO no-fly zone
over Libya in 2011. But Mr. Putin – still the most powerful man in Russia – was
furious to see Russia’s goodwill again misused and the no-fly zone expanded to include
airstrikes that helped rebels topple and kill Moammar Gadhafi, a long-time
Kremlin ally.
Six months later, Mr. Medvedev awkwardly
declared he would step aside so that Mr. Putin could return to the presidency.
“We are often told our actions are illegitimate,
but when I ask, ‘Do you think everything you do is legitimate?’ they say ‘yes.’
Then, I have to recall the actions of the United States in Afghanistan, Iraq
and Libya, where they either acted without any UN sanctions or completely
distorted the content of such resolutions, as was the case with Libya,” Mr.
Putin fumed during a press conference Tuesday, his first remarks since the
Ukraine crisis erupted. “Our partners, especially in the United States, always
clearly formulate their own geopolitical and state interests and follow them
with persistence. Then, using the principle ‘You’re either with us or against
us’ they draw the whole world in. And those who do not join in get beaten until
they do.”
Even while Washington was talking at home
about a reset, the messages it sent to Moscow were more confrontational. Mr.
Obama’s first secretary of state, Ms. Clinton, made headlines during her own
2008 bid for the presidency by stating Mr. Putin, as a former KGB agent,
“doesn’t have a soul.” (Mr. Putin shot back that anyone seeking to be U.S.
President “at a minimum … should have a head.”)
Even
more controversial was Mr. Obama’s choice of academic Michael McFaul as
ambassador to Moscow in 2011. By his own description, Mr. McFaul, who couldn’t
be reached for an interview, was an expert on how popular uprisings happen in
authoritarian regimes. A decade earlier, he had authored the provocatively
titled book Russia’s
Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. One
of his first acts after arriving in Moscow was inviting several key members of
the anti-Putin opposition to the U.S. embassy for a private meeting.
The opposition protests that swelled before
and after that visit, and which tarred Mr. Putin’s 2012 election win, were seen
in the Kremlin as more proof of Western meddling in and hostility to Russia.
Mr. Putin accused Ms. Clinton of personally giving “the signal” for his
opponents to rise up against him.
Since returning to the Kremlin, Mr. Putin has
made it clear he’s no longer interested in co-operating with the West. He has
backed Bashar al-Assad to the hilt in the bloody struggle for Syria, another
long-time Soviet ally. Last month, he welcomed Egypt’s Abdul Fattah el-Sissi to
Moscow, and offered him military aid and an endorsement of his undeclared
presidential run, as Washington backed away from Cairo’s latest military man in
charge. A win for the West is a loss for Moscow. And vice-versa.
In a September essay in The New York Times
arguing against U.S. intervention in Syria, Mr. Putin took on the idea of
“American exceptionalism,” and by extension U.S. world leadership. “It is
extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional,
whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and
poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way
to democracy. Their policies differ, too,” he wrote.
“You have to understand the world in which
Mr. Putin believes he lives. He’s sure he’s in a power struggle, a geostrategic
battle with the West,” said Alexander Golts, a Moscow-based military analyst.
“One of the battlefields is Ukraine. In the beginning of December, he thought
he’d won, and then [Mr. Putin believes] the West organized these protests in
Kiev and stole his victory. Now he has to show his Western counterparts that
he’s not weak. He also has to show his inner circle that he’s not weak.”
In Ukraine, it’s Mr. Putin who is bending the
rules and distorting the facts in the same way he has accused the West of doing
elsewhere. But the battle for Ukraine is existential for him. Ukraine is
central to Russian history and culture, and crucial to Mr. Putin’s ambition of
restoring a sphere of influence over Moscow’s post-Soviet neighbours. He’s
almost certainly not going to back down, whatever the cost. There “will be
mutual damage,” Mr. Putin said when asked about the possibility of Western
sanctions over Crimea.
We knew this, or at least we should have. But
a lack of Western scholarship on Russia – and the closure of many foreign media
offices (including The Globe and Mail’s own Moscow bureau a few years ago) –
has contributed to a dangerous lack of understanding of Russia in the West.
China, by contrast, has in the past 15 years
been deemed far more worthy of study and journalism than Russia. Lobby groups
such as the Canada-China Business Council badgered Mr. Harper relentlessly when
he didn’t visit Beijing during the first two years he was in office. No one
seems bothered that Mr. Harper – eight years into his prime ministership – is
the only G-8 leader who has never made an official, bilateral trip to Moscow.
“In North America, the thinking was that
European affairs are European affairs,” said Andrew Robinson, a former Canadian
ambassador to Ukraine. “We don’t have a relationship with Russia right now.”
Which, we can see now, has its costs. Every
Western leader understands that opening an embassy in Taiwan would bring a
furious response from Beijing. But no one in Washington, Brussels or Ottawa
seems to have expected what Moscow might do if the West encouraged the
overthrow of a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine.
When Mr. Baird was in Kiev last week to show
his support for Ukraine’s post-revolutionary leadership, I asked him when was
the last time he had met with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. There
was a pause of nearly 10 seconds before Mr. Baird recalled that both he and Mr.
Lavrov had attended a Syria peace conference in Montreux, Switzerland in late
January. They’ve had no interaction at all, then, since the change of power in
Kiev, or the Russian moves in Crimea.
A decade ago, The eXile, a now-defunct
satirical magazine based in Moscow, published a list of 101 ways that Mr.
Putin’s Russia then resembled Weimar Germany. It was meant to be humourous, but
the issue in fact made for extremely depressing reading. Anger at foreigners
was rising, the eXile noted, as was militarism.
Russia then was a proud but wounded country,
one suffering from collapse of its empire. The fall of the USSR was Russia’s
Treaty of Versailles.
Mr. Harper, Mr. Baird and Ms. Clinton say Mr.
Putin’s Russia today reminds them of Nazi Germany. Scary words to describe a
scary situation.
If only they paid such attention to Russia in
the decade before we got to here.
Follow me on Twitter: @markmackinnon
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