The Russia Conundrum

It is not hard to understand why Putin is doing this. He supports endangered dictators because he knows that he himself is in the same category, haunted by fears that he too might be overthrown by the Russian people. Putin was concerned by the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in Ukraine and Georgia, where popular uprisings ousted repressive regimes and replaced them with democratically elected governments. His alarm deepened in 2011, when the Middle East was rocked by the events of the Arab Spring, in which the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya were all toppled. While the West greeted the uprisings as a victory for democracy, Putin viewed them as ominous harbingers of chaos and destabilisation, which he believed were covertly stoked by the CIA. Later the same year, the threat came closer to home as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg, protesting about the rigging of parliamentary elections. The aforementioned demonstrations were briefly dubbed the ‘snow revolution’, a worrying augury that Russia was not immune to the bacillus of revolt. Putin’s response was to blame Washington. He accused Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, of fomenting unrest in Russia as a prelude to a Western-sponsored coup, aimed at bringing about a regime change similar to those in Georgia and Ukraine.

Putin’s stock reply to criticism of his aggressive foreign ventures is to protest that the West is doing worse. He is quick to highlight alleged Western transgressions, including interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, the attempted ‘imposition of democracy’ and military intervention. But at the same time, the Kremlin claims for itself the right to a ‘sphere of privileged interests’ in the former Soviet territories and a ‘right to defend our compatriots wherever they live’. A 2017 report for the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Senate, titled ‘Putin’s Asymmetrical Assault on Democracy’, pointed out the inherent contradiction between the two positions:

If Putin can demonstrate to the Russian people that liberal democracy is a dysfunctional and dying form of government, then their own system of ‘sovereign democracy’ – authoritarianism secured by corruption, apathy, and an iron fist – does not look so bad after all. As the National Intelligence Council put it, Putin’s ‘amalgam of authoritarianism, corruption, and nationalism represents an alternative to Western liberalism … [which] is synonymous with disorder and moral decay, and pro-democracy movements are “Western plots” to weaken traditional bulwarks of order and the Russian state.’

If the West had paid more attention to Putin’s public pronouncements in recent years, the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine might not have come as such a surprise. In July 2021, he published a long treatise, setting out Russia’s claims on the country. The essay’s title, ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, was an indication that he has little time for an independent Ukrainian state.

Russians and Ukrainians are one people and the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, is a great misfortune and tragedy. These are … the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity. The formula they apply is – divide and rule. Hence the attempts to sow discord among people, to pit the parts of a single people against one another.

In his essay, Putin names the malevolent ‘forces’ who he claims are bent on sowing division between Moscow and Kiev. Historically, he says, they have included Ukrainian nationalists who sought alliances with Poland or Germany in order to sabotage the ‘brotherly’ bonds with Russia. In the Second World War, some Ukrainian leaders were willing to collaborate with the Nazis in the struggle against Soviet domination, and Putin draws a direct – and defamatory – comparison between them and the modern Ukrainian independence movement:

The Nazis, abetted by collaborators from the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, did not need Ukraine, except as a living space and slaves for Aryan overlords. Nor were the interests of the Ukrainian people thought of in February 2014. Public discontent was cynically exploited by Western countries who directly interfered in Ukraine’s internal affairs and supported a coup. Radical nationalist groups served as its battering ram. Their slogans, ideology, and blatant aggressive Russophobia have become defining elements of state policy in Ukraine.

Putin equates the democratically elected government of today’s Ukraine with the Nazi collaborators of 80 years ago, casting the Western democracies in the role of Hitlerite aggressors: