We CAN stand up to Putin... but if we don’t, his next victim will be Europe itself
Recently they f lew planes capable of nuking us into our airspace. Without action, this aggression will continue
FOR 25 years Europe and America have been enjoying the warm glow of victory. We – and our ideas of democracy and freedom – won the Cold War. To be sure, we realised that Russia was a big, troubled and even troublesome country. But those worries were on the sidelines. Now the warm glow is gone. Instead we feel the icy realisation of something else: a real threat – and possibly even looming defeat.
Russia is not the Soviet Union. It is a nuclear superpower and the largest country in the world by landmass. But its economy has a GDP of under €2trillion. The economic might of North America and Europe combined is 20 times bigger. Its military – despite the huge modernisation of recent years – is still no match, on paper, for NATO.
That said, it doesn’t need to be. Mr Putin is determined, while we are weak. He knows he is in a race against time. Russia’s infrastructure is crumbling. Its population is shrinking. Its industry – guns and vodka aside – is uncompetitive. The oil and gas wealth that poured into the country in the past 15 years has been squandered and stolen. But Russia has one asset that we lack: willpower. Mr Putin is willing to accept economic pain in pursuit of his national interest. We are not.
He is willing to threaten and use force. We are not. He is willing to take risks. We are not. He is willing to lie, brazenly and repeatedly, about what he is doing. There are no Russian troops in Ukraine. Russian warplanes do not break international rules when they buzz other countries’ airspace, including Ireland’s. The West is a nest of paedophiles and fascists.
Again and again, the Putin regime has tested the West’s resolve. It murdered Alexander Litvinenko, a fugitive official who had become a British citizen, on the streets of London in 2006. Britain did nothing.
It launched a cyber-attack on Estonia, after that Baltic country had the temerity to move a Soviet war memorial. We did nothing. It invaded Georgia in 2008. We imposed the mildest possible sanctions and lifted them as soon as we could.
Now it has annexed Crimea, in flagrant violation of international law.
In 1994, Russia, along with the US, UK and France, solemnly promised in the Budapest Memorandum to respect Ukrainian territorial integrity in exchange for the government giving up its nuclear arsenal, inherited from the Soviet Union. There were no ifs, and no buts, in that agreement. By attacking Ukraine, and sponsoring the insurgents in the ongoing war in the east of the country, Russia has torn up the European security order on which our safety and freedom has been based for decades.
MR Putin wants a different world: in which might is right, in which the st r ong do t he deals that they can, and the weak do the deals that they must. He knows that Russia’s size, and its forceful decision-making, will always give it the edge over democracies, where politicians have to reach a consensus, and take public opinion into account. And he knows that he can deal with like-minded strongmen.
Mr Putin has three aims. He wants to regain sway over neighbouring countries: not (mostly) by military conquest, but with money (especially corruption), murky energy deals, economic dependence, mischief and propaganda.
He has made great strides here – not only in Ukraine, but also in Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia and other countries. He is dangerously close to doing the same i n the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. These are EU and NATO mem- bers. But they are vulnerable, either to a surprise attack, or to subversion.
He wants to derail the EU, which has come dangerously close to busting his most important business: the corrupt and exploitative export of gas to client states. Most of all, he wants to break the West. He sees (and stokes) an anti-American mood in Europe. It comes at a time when t he United States is i ncreasingly introverted and beset by other difficulties. Why should American soldiers risk their lives in defending Europe, and American taxpayers foot the bill, when European countries themselves are unwilling to do so?
I have been dealing with European security for more than 30 years. I have never been more worried. If Russia succeeds in the Baltic, then NATO is over.
The weakest point is in our nuclear defences. Russia regularly conducts military drills in which it rehearses the use of battlefield nuclear weapons. If we have a security crisis in the Baltics, and Russia announces that it has put its nuclear forces on alert, I am not sure that President Barack Obama will respond with firmness. Many Europeans would agree.
Yet if Putin wins, the misery and destruction we now see in Ukraine is just a foretaste of what awaits us. We risk returning to the Europe of the 1930s: demoralised, riven with economic and social discontent, awash with refugees, prey to demagogues and warmongers. That will bring great opportunities for strutting tyrants like Mr Putin. It will be terrible for the small, the weak, the law-abiding and the peaceful.
For the bleak truth is that Putin is winning. We do not have the stomach to stop him. We make token efforts – military and financial – to help Ukraine. But we are letting our weakest and most vulnerable allies bear the greatest burden.
If we truly wanted to help Ukraine, we would hit the Russian regime where it hurts: in the private lives of its senior figures. We could and should impose sweeping visa sanctions on the Russian elite: not just the politicians and senior officials, but all the phonies and cronies who feast at the Kremlin trough. The docile lawmakers, the propagandists who masquerade as journalists, the goons in police uniform and the judges and prosecutors who betray their duty of impartiality – all of them should be banned from the European Union and other Western countries.
And not just them: throw in their spouses, siblings, parents and children for good measure. For the visceral anti-Westernism of the Putinistas is hypocritical. They decry us as decadent, meddling and repulsive – but they educate their offspring at our universities, holiday in our luxury resorts and stash their ill-gotten gains in our financial system.
AS well as banning them from travelling here, we should freeze their assets, just as we do with drug barons and warlords. The vast majority of the Russian elite’s wealth is looted from the Russian people. One day we may be able to return it – doing something to restore our credibility with ordinary Russians, who rightly think we are as hypocritical as we are weak.
In the meantime, we should investigate the means the Russian elite used to salt away the money. Who were their pinstriped accomplices – the bankers, lawyers and accountants who took their 30 silver roubles for perverting their professional duty? Some of these people are already becoming nervous because of investigations which are starting in the United States.
In truth, they should be scared. Britain’s criminal justice system and financial supervisors have a deplorable record of inaction when it comes to investigating money-laundering.
But the American system is different. For an ambitious district attorney, the scalps of snooty, corrupt European financiers are a fine prize. We have already seen the US administ r ati on humble t he once - impregnable citadel of Swiss
banking, which was used by rich clients to dodge American taxes. My sources tell me that they are limbering up for new targets in Europe. Such measures could stop Putin’s Russia – but I am not optimistic. Putin has created a ‘fifth column’ in London, Brussels and Berlin and it will do its best to protect him.
The sad truth is that Russia is partly right. Our system is weak. Many in the West feel justified doubt and distrust at the sleazy, secretive and unfair ways in which our countries are run. Yet we fail to see that all the things we dislike about our own system are far worse in Putin’s Russia. That is a true plutocracy – run by the rich, for the rich, with ruthless reprisals for anyone who gets in their way.
I am still mourning my friend Boris Nemtsov – a brave, brilliant and charming Russian opposition leader, gunned down within a stone’s throw of the Kremlin in a murder that will, I fear, never be satisfactorily investigated. Boris repeatedly exposed Kremlin corruption and lies. He was just finishing a new report about the secret use of Russian conscripts in the war in Ukraine. He spoke openly of his fear that he would be killed.
So many Kremlin critics have been killed: politicians, lawyers, journalists and activists.
Others have been beaten senseless, maimed or brain-damaged. They all warned us of what was happening: repression at home, aggression abroad.We didn’t listen.
We are still remarkably reluctant to see what is happening before our eyes. Our politicians believe that it is only a matter of time before sanctions and the low oil price bite and the Putin regime changes course. Then we can go back to ‘business as usual’.
That is rank fantasy. The problem is not just Putin: it predates him and will continue even if he is replaced in the Kremlin by one of his cronies. The real problem is us: if our societies, countries and international organisations were self- confident, strong and united, Putin would not be a serious threat.
But they are not, and we feel his cold breath on our naked shoulders. ÷ Edward Lucas is author of The New Cold War And Deception. He is also a senior vice-president at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Wa sh i n g t o n , DC.