Keeping the chains on Russia

When the war in Ukraine ends, as wars always do eventually, then the democratic West must come to terms with how they relate to Russia in the months and years that follow.

Whether Moscow wins or loses (and heaven forbid the former) it can never be business as usual. Those who advocate for it, and I am sure there will many whose business interests cross international frontiers, must be firmly rebuffed, at least until the Russian State can demonstrate to the world that blood-hungry demagogues no longer have access to its levers of power.

I am not suggesting that Russia should, or could, reform itself into a liberal democracy. I, and many others, went down that path after the collapse of the Soviet Union when we believed a reformed Russian Federation could be welcomed into the family of European nations — “a ‘Europe’ that stretches from Lisbon to Vladivostok” I so naively wrote at the time.

Russia can never be that, and I should have taken a closer look at its history to realise it. If the savagery of the Tsarist regimes can be excused as being a product of their times, it is harder to dismiss the barbarity of the 20^th century.

From throwing opponents into blast furnaces to starving them in engineered famines, successive Russian governments have been leading exponents of new and creatives ways of inflicting misery on opponents, or those simply deemed unworthy of the life ordered for them.

After decades of relative peace and prosperity, the world got soft on Russia. We welcomed the new man in charge, Vladimir Putin, as being right for the job of converting his country into a functioning democracy and a reliable partner for the West.

We dismissed as alarmist the persistent warnings of critics like Alexander Litvinenko who said Putin’s rise had been over the bodies of his fellow citizens in apartment explosions wrongly attributed to ‘terrorists’ allowing him to play the strongman who would deal with the ‘threat’ once he held power.

We passed off the so-called criminal acts against prominent Putin critics, which the Kremlin always promised to investigate but which somehow never had a satisfactory conclusion.

Even after Litvinenko himself was murdered on British soil by the Kremlin’s hit men, it was years before the UK was finally goaded into conducting an independent and damning inquiry, but by then the genie was out of the bottle.

Attacks on Georgia, the mass bombing of areas in Syria opposed to his crony, Bashar al-Assad, the conversion of Belarus into a client State under the control of his eager ally and fellow dictator, Aleksandr Lukashenko, the annexation of Crimea and support for rebels in eastern Ukraine…all have emboldened Putin to the point where he believed himself omnipotent, his rebuffs to Western protests so transparent as to be farcical.

Crimea’s citizens welcomed a “return to the motherland” in a clearly rigged referendum; Russian soldiers stiffening the rebel rebellion in eastern Ukraine were “volunteers helping out on their holidays”.

Putin’s luck ran out when Ukrainians, who have never
wanted to be part of Russia, taking every opportunity to separate themselves when the opportunities arose down through history, showed they were not going to give up the independence they gained from the break-up of the Soviet Union.

The West cried enough and supplied Kyiv with the means to resist. Putin’s forces are bogged down in a stalemate, lacking the resources (and perhaps the will) to launch a serious offensive with the only option a dogged rear-guard stalling of the Ukrainian advance in the hope that they still hold territory should the West tire of the contest and pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into a compromise.

Even post-Soviet Union, the Russian Federation is still the largest country in the world occupying more than one-eighth of the world’s inhabited land mass. Much of its hinterland is sparsely populated and under-developed. There are many internal problems that should be occupying the attention of a normal nation.

But Russia is not a normal nation and Putin, obsessed with the impossible dream of restoring Soviet grandeur and a KGB-trained liar, is far from a normal leader. Negotiation with him is impossible.   

The initial task must be to continue to assist in rolling back the land he has hijacked from Ukraine, and then to ensure he understands that while his method of government is a matter for his citizens, he will never, ever again, be allowed to export it beyond his borders.