Ben Wallace helps us to understand Putin’s mission. But what is to be done?
(Alamy)
Regular readers will know that TheArticle has been sounding the alarm about Vladimir Putin ever since we started publishing some three years ago. The Russian President has been oppressing his own citizens, bullying his neighbours and disturbing global peace throughout his two decades in power. What is happening now on the borders of Ukraine, however, threatens to plunge the whole Continent of Europe into chaos: not merely a new Cold War, but a potential Third World War.
Is anybody in Britain listening to the ominous murmur of mobilisation from the steppes? The country may soon have had its fill of rogue royals and partying politicians. Becalmed in bleak mid-January, however, most of us remain oblivious of the impending clash of arms in Eastern Europe. We worry about other things, things that matter more to us: the consequences of the pandemic, the cost of coping with climate change, the price of staying warm.
In the corridors of power, however, the military and intelligence chiefs are thinking of little else but how to deter the Kremlin. Some of them read TheArticle and they share our concern. A rare insight into the thinking at the top of the British security establishment is afforded by an analysis of Putin’s own thinking in The Times by the Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace. (Unforgivably, this important statement is behind a paywall, but should be available on the Ministry of Defence website in due course.)
Wallace has been studying Putin’s essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, published last July by the Russian President’s office here. The Secretary of State points out that Nato and its potential expansion, supposedly the Kremlin’s casus belli, figures in just one paragraph of a 7,000-word dissertation. There Putin accuses the West of establishing control over Ukraine and fomenting what he calls “the anti-Russia project” in alliance with neo-Nazi forces there. By far the bulk of the essay, though, is about history: from the medieval origins of the proclaimed ethnic, linguistic and spiritual unity of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, through the vicissitudes of the modern era to the collapse of the USSR and the present crisis. Putin, in short, has concocted a comprehensive, if one-sided, justification for the reunification of Russia and Ukraine, if necessary by force.
As Wallace points out, Putin’s rationale ignores long periods when the Russian state did not rule over Ukraine, it ignores or distorts their profound cultural and political differences and crucially it ignores solemn international agreements to respect Ukrainian sovereignty, both between Russia and the West and between Moscow and Kyiv. Putin also glosses over shameful episodes such as the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact, which enabled Stalin to seize what is now Western Ukraine from Poland, or his own annexation of Crimea in 2014, which he justifies by bogus claims of real or threatened anti-Russian massacres. Much of the essay is a tissue of lies, but it is coherent and it will convince those who wish to believe in the Russian President’s Slavophile mission to restore the lands that once comprised the Soviet Union to Mother Russia.
The claim that Nato threatens or has deliberately encircled Russia is demonstrably untrue. In almost every case since 1991, nations have joined because they fear Russian aggression; and in fact Nato member states make up just 6 per cent of the borderlands of the Russian Federation. Yet many people will believe in this conspiracy theory, simply because they fear and distrust everything from the West. Russian nationalism is not necessarily malign — there is a moderate version, too, championed by such dissidents as Andrei Sakharov and Alexei Navalny — but it also has a long history of xenophobia and anti-Semitism, reinforced during the Communist era and now whipped up again by Putin. And there are just enough scraps of “evidence” — the existence of Ukrainian nationalist paramilitaries, Western naval exercises in the Arctic Ocean, small Nato units stationed in Poland and the Baltic states — for his propagandists to feed Russian paranoia.
Wallace is at pains to deconstruct the “straw man” of Putin’s imagination and to refute his claims of “false flag” Nato operations. But his conclusion is as wintry as the weather. If the Russians invade Ukraine, he urges us to remember Putin’s essay “and ask yourself what it means, not just for Ukraine but for all of us in Europe. What it means for next time…”
One can only assume from these words that Ben Wallace is preparing us for the possibility of a conflict that spreads far beyond the borders of Ukraine. We can only hope that Putin has no serious intention of risking the lives of millions, but merely seeks leverage in his incessant efforts to bolster his own fragile prestige and to disguise the kleptocratic nature of his regime. But the game of nuclear poker that he is playing is a dreadfully dangerous one, in which one miscalculation could lead to catastrophe.
The Kremlin may be assuming that the United States has already written off Ukraine. What about Europe? Here the British play a crucial role: unlike most of our allies, we have fought and won wars in the last forty years. We have heard from the Foreign Secretary and the Defence Secretary. It is time that we heard from the Prime Minister, too. Boris Johnson has listened to Vladimir Putin. Now he must speak up on behalf of Western civilisation. Johnson should remind Putin that both Ukraine and Russia are part of that civilisation.
The apostle of Slavophiles of Putin’s ilk, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose bicentenary has recently been celebrated, never preached hatred of the West. He loved Europe, “a terrible and sacred thing”, but feared that it would always see Russians as “barbarians”. When he died, in 1881, his funeral cortège was followed by 30,000 people, the largest in Russian history, and now he is more popular than ever. We should beware of Putin’s belligerence, but read Dostoyevsky to understand its origins and its antidote.
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