Don’t pay Putin the Dane-geld
Even as Russian forces continue to escalate their total war on Ukraine, peace talks between the two sides and various proxies are taking place. In his latest video address, President Zelensky even sounds a note of optimism: “All wars end in agreements…As I am told, the positions in the negotiations sound more realistic.”
We should of course take the Ukrainian leader’s words at face value. He is right that this war will probably end in an armistice on mutually agreed terms that may or may not then lead to a formal peace treaty. For this to happen, both parties will have to address the new facts on the ground created by the war. But there are also the long-standing grievances that Vladimir Putin has used as a pretext to launch his invasion. He is reported to have told the EU High Representative, Charles Michel, that Kyiv is “not showing a serious commitment to finding mutually acceptable solutions”. By this the Russian dictator presumably means that Ukraine refuses to concede his minimum demands: recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk plus some form of neutrality.
One of the main issues at stake, NATO membership, was provisionally resolved when President Zelensky conceded on Tuesday in a video call to northern European leaders meeting in London: “Of course, Ukraine is not a member of NATO. For years we have been hearing about the alleged open door, but we have also heard now that we cannot enter. This is true and must be acknowledged.” The fact that NATO has not and will not come to Ukraine’s aid speaks for itself. Russian war crimes don’t affect that calculus.
But it is also important to see Zelensky’s olive branch (if that is what it is) in context. Addressing Russians in their own language, the Ukrainian President is directly appealing to functionaries and propagandists to quit their jobs and leave while they still can, or risk “a whole life of international persecution”. He lists their army’s losses and failures, warning those who know the score of how the war will end for them.
This, he says, is what they can expect if they go on collaborating and do not come out against the war. “Shame, poverty, long-term isolation, a very cruel, repressive system that will treat citizens of Russia exactly the same way, as inhumanely, as you, the occupiers, have treated Ukrainians.”
These do not sound like the words of a man who is about to give in to the enemy. Zelensky still has faith in the innate decency of the Russian people. He still hopes to touch their hearts and minds, or at least to appeal to their self-interest — and he is succeeding. Scores of Russian propagandists have already resigned from state broadcasters, while 200 independent journalists have emigrated. Perhaps 200,000 Russians have left their country since the war began; most will never return. The cost of this war for Russia alone in just three weeks must run into the hundreds of billions, if not the trillions. Putin’s cronies are starting to panic. For example, there are reports of meetings in Moscow between two of the most notorious figures on either side: Gerhard Schröder, the former German Chancellor and chief toady of the Kremlin, and Roman Abramovich, the disgraced and sanctioned oligarch who denies being Putin’s main money man. The rats are deserting Battleship Putin.
As for the Russian opposition: at home and abroad, it has not been crushed but rather emboldened. The live protest by the state TV editor Marina Ovsyannikova symbolises a system that can no longer frighten everyone into submission. She may yet receive a 15-year prison sentence but the fact that she was released with only a fine after 14 hours of interrogation suggests that the Kremlin prefers to close down the story rather than make an example of a brave woman. Similarly, Alexei Navalny’s trial is almost certain to end this week with effectively a life sentence in a penal colony, but he has shown an almost light-hearted contempt for the process and punishment. He evidently expects Putin to lose power soon and others will take their cue from his confidence. The “old man in the bunker” may not after all be “President for life” — unless his life proves to be much shorter than he expects. Zelensky says he expects the war to end in May because by then the Russian forces will have been so “ground down” that Putin will have no choice but to settle for peace. He could be right. In that case, this war will end in at best the most Pyrrhic of victories for Russia. And that could spell doom for Putin and his entire system.
Meanwhile, how should NATO respond to these ambiguous signals? Garry Kasparov, the leading Russian opposition figure in exile, has a warning: the West, he says, is ignoring the fact that “every act of appeasement makes Putin’s inevitable escalation more dangerous. This overconfidence affects not only Putin, but the generals who give orders and press even the biggest button. Instead of knowing that escalation will seal their own fate, they begin to believe that there will be no retaliation because there hasn’t been in the past. This is what I have warned against for so long. Impunity breeds carelessness, overconfidence, and catastrophe.”
When President Biden visits Europe for a NATO summit next week, the allies must recognise that their warnings and even arms supplies have so far proved insufficient to deter Putin and his generals. Several EU countries are still buying half of their energy from Russia at a cost of tens of billions, funds that are being directly channeled into the Kremlin’s war effort. Europe must stop paying Putin or he will go on until Ukraine is crushed.
Rudyard Kipling is no longer taught much, if at all, in British schools, being damned as an imperialist poet. But Boris Johnson could do worse than to recite his once-celebrated but now seemingly forgotten verses, Dane-geld, to the assembled NATO leaders (with apologies to the Danish delegation):
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: —
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if you once pay him the Dane-geld
You will never get rid of the Dane.
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