The West doesn’t have a Putin problem, it has a Russia problem

In November 1991, when the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the British ambassador in Moscow, Rodric Braithwaite, received a warning from an adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming leader who was about to be swept away, along with the country he had tried — and failed — to save.

“Russia may now be going through a bad time,” the adviser told Braithwaite. “But the reality is that in a decade or two decades, Russia will reassert itself as the dominant force in this huge geographical area.”

His words — repeated to me later by the ambassador — foreshadowed the increasingly assertive course of Vladimir Putin’s actions since he became president in 2000, culminating in the invasion of Ukraine in February.

Six months and tens of thousands of deaths later, the war Putin began grinds on. The stakes could hardly be higher. Fighting in recent days around the sprawling Zaporizhzhya nuclear plant on the Dnipro river prompted world leaders to warn of a nuclear catastrophe in the heart of Europe — akin to the meltdown in 1986 at Chernobyl,just over 400 miles to the northwest.

That accident both highlighted the failings of the Soviet system and precipitated its decline. A disaster at Zaporizhzhya would be the equally avoidable consequence of tensions that have boiled up in the region as a direct result of how the USSR collapsed.

The international community must somehow find a way to defuse these tensions. Yet the West appears to have given little thought to how it will co-exist with Russia when, as seems likely, both sides eventually fight each other to a standstill.

It would be wrong to believe we face a “Putin problem”. History suggests this is a “Russia problem” that will endure long after the current incumbent of the Kremlin finally leaves.

Violence postponed

The origins of the war lie in the unfinished business of 1991. The break-up of the Soviet Union into its 15 constituent republics took place along often arbitrary internal borders transformed overnight into frontiers between sovereign states. This left a poisonous legacy in the form of 25 million ethnic Russians who found themselves living in a foreign country.

Such was the determination of Boris Yeltsin, leader of Russia, the mightiest of the 15, to topple Gorbachev and break with the communist past that he was prepared to accept this — thereby avoiding the bloodletting that marked the slow-motion collapse during the 1990s of Yugoslavia, another multi-ethnic communist state.

Yet this largely peaceful transition merely postponed the violence: when the Chechens, whose homeland lay within Russia itself, tried to head for the exit, they were brutally crushed in two bloody wars, the second of which helped Putin consolidate his power. His invasion of Georgia in 2008 was ostensibly to protect the Ossetians, a pro-Russian minority, from what he claimed was “genocide” by the authorities in Tbilisi.

But it was the “loss” of Ukraine that particularly rankled with Putin, because of its size and shared origins with Russia more than a millennium ago in Kievan Rus’. Control of the present-day nation’s territory fluctuated wildly from the Middle Ages until the Soviet period, but from the 1660s onwards much of it was ruled from Moscow or St Petersburg. After 1991 Ukraine was home to the largest share of the 25 million-strong Russian diaspora.

In a census two years before the Soviet Union collapsed, 22.1 per cent of Ukraine’s population — about 11.4 million people — had identified themselves as Russian; the figure rose to 65.6 per cent in Crimea, which was only part of Ukraine because it had been transferred in 1954 from Russia by Nikita Khrushchev, the Kremlin leader, when both were part of the Soviet Union.

Opposite paths

In the early years, Putin was not strong enough to do anything about the Russians of Ukraine. Nor did he have a pressing need to do so: although the country swung west after the Orange Revolution of 2004, it tilted back towards Moscow under Viktor Yanukovych, a Russian-speaking former transport manager who came to power six years later.

The Kremlin’s reaction to the Maidan uprising of 2014 — encouraged by the West — that drove out Yanukovych was very different. Putin seized Crimea and fomented an insurgency in the eastern Donbas, ostensibly in the name of its majority Russian speakers. By the beginning of this year it had already led to the death of more than 14,000 people.

Putin’s conviction, repeated on the eve of February’s invasion, that Ukraine had “never had its own authentic statehood” reflected not just his own view but that of many of his compatriots. About 64 per cent of Russians considered themselves and the Ukrainians to be “one people”, according to a poll that month — the fruit not only of decades of Kremlin propaganda but also of centuries of close cultural, historical and linguistic ties.

Opinion in Ukraine, by contrast, had been moving in the opposite direction since independence. The country had rediscovered its rebellious past and developed a vibrant political culture shaped in large part by memories of wrongs perpetrated from Moscow: chief among them was the Holodomor, the 1930s famine formally recognised in 2006 by the Ukrainian parliament as genocide perpetrated by Stalin. In the same February survey, just 28 per cent of Ukrainians saw themselves and Russians as one, though the figure rose to 45 per cent in the country’s largely Russian-speaking east.

The target

Faltering attempts were made to integrate Russia into the West in the 1990s but the Kremlin remained wary of joining anyone else’s alliance as a junior member while its nuclear arsenal guaranteed a seat at the world table anyway.

The causes of Putin’s invasion this year — and how it could have been prevented — continue to divide those in the West who purport to know Russia best, with the so-called “realists”, led by Henry Kissinger, blaming America for driving the Kremlin leader into a corner by extending Nato to its borders.

The 99-year-old former US secretary of state insists it would have been better if Ukraine, with its 44 million people spread over a territory larger than France, had remained a neutral buffer between Russia and the West. “I was in favour of the full independence of Ukraine,” he told The Wall Street Journal this month. “But I thought its best role was something like Finland” — ironic given that the government in Helsinki has itself been persuaded by the conflict to give up decades of neutrality and join Nato.

Yet would the “Finlandisation” of Ukraine really have prevented war? Or would Putin, for whom aggression abroad has gone hand in hand with mounting repression at home, have found another pretext for grabbing a chunk from his neighbour of what he considers traditional Russian lands?

Either way, the West had created the worst of both worlds. Nato had declared as long as ago as 2008 that Ukraine could join the alliance — much to the fury of Putin, who in a landmark speech in Munich a year earlier stunned western policymakers by lambasting America for imposing a unipolar world “in which there is one master, one sovereign”.

More than a decade later, a timetable for Ukrainian membership had still not been agreed, nor did it look likely to be.

Ukraine was left with the worst of both worlds: it could be portrayed by the Kremlin as a Nato stooge, yet, despite growing flows of western arms, it did not enjoy the reassurance of mutual protection guaranteed to members under Article Five of Nato’s founding treaty. It was as if a target had been painted on its back.

Engaging with Russia

There has been little discussion of western policy failings since Russia launched its invasion. Attention has instead focused on the progress of the conflict, as well as on the resistance of Volodomyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, and his forces, coupled with the brutality of the invaders.

While Russia struggles to conquer the Donbas, a series of mysterious explosions in recent days in Crimea have opened a new front. The immediate aim is to disrupt the Kremlin’s war effort, part of which is conducted from the peninsula. Yet the Ukrainians appear to want to go further. “This Russian war . . . began with Crimea and must end with Crimea — with its liberation,” declared Zelensky.

For Putin, the reconquest of the peninsula, which he has called Russia’s “holy land”, was a defining achievement. Losing it could pose an existential threat to his rule and encourage further escalation — perhaps, some fear, even the use of battlefield nuclear weapons — though Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, said last week there was “no need” for them.

Western leaders have largely kept silent on how to engage with Russia now and when the conflict finally ends.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, proved the exception by broaching the subject early in the war.

“We can’t simply wipe Russia off the map — it is still there,” said Sylvie Bermann, French ambassador to Moscow from 2017 to 2019, who defended Macron’s decision to keep talking to Putin in the first weeks of the invasion. “We are not going to find a solution by isolating Russia and not having any contact.”

Macron’s stance — and his warning of the perils of “humiliating Putin” — saw him pilloried for appeasement. Yet Joe Biden has not set out America’s own war aims since declaring in March that Putin “cannot remain” in power — prompting a hasty denial by the White House that the president was calling for “regime change”.

Policymakers in Washington and London appear inclined to hope Ukrainians will solve the problem for them on the battlefield by driving Russian forces from their country — followed shortly afterwards by the departure from the Kremlin of a humiliated Putin.

This looks like wishful thinking, and not only because the more likely outcome remains stalemate. Putin is not obviously at threat either from disgruntled oligarchs or an unhappy populace. Sanctions are taking their toll on the Russian economy, but the full effects will be a long time coming.

A retired Russian friend — and opponent of the war — was gloomy when we met recently. “The country is divided along age lines,” he said. “Younger people are opposed to the war, but older people — those who remember the Soviet Union — tend to be supportive.”

Moving forward

The East-West tensions of the past few years are unlikely to disappear whenever — and however — Putin leaves the Kremlin.

The almost naive admiration for everything western I encountered during seven years as reporter in Moscow in the late 1980s and early 1990s has long since disappeared. The period is instead remembered as a time when Russia was weak and enveloped in chaos and stabbed in the back — with the West blamed for wielding the dagger behind the scenes.

Putin’s popularity during the 2000s was based on his reputation as the man who brought order and prosperity. His drive to restore Russian greatness since has increasingly been based on antagonism towards the West — amplified by commentators such as Vladimir Solovyov, who think nothing of going on television and urging nuclear war. Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia’s security council, and other powerful figures in the Kremlin have ideas as hawkish as Putin’s own.

Russia will emerge weakened and isolated from its disastrous military adventure in Ukraine. But whoever succeeds Putin, the US and Europe will have to find a way of working constructively with the country whose course he has dictated over the past two decades. It cannot be allowed to remain an angry, brooding presence that casts a long shadow over the Eurasian continent.

Yet Russia itself must also change, just as Germany and Japan did after the Second World War, and western European countries did after accepting the loss of their colonies. Like former empires before it, Russia must shed its imperial mindset and accept that Ukraine and its other former lands have gone their separate ways. And it must learn to define its greatness in terms of its domestic achievements rather than at the expense of its neighbours. It is a big ask.