Putin: how much should we blame him?

Every week Vladimir Putin “finds new ways to scare the world”, said The Economist. He has threatened to shoot down any plane that attacks Syrian forces; he has moved nuclear-capable missiles close to Poland. And last week he humiliated Britain by sending the Admiral Kuznetsov aircraft carrier, and seven other ships, down the English Channel. It was one of the biggest demonstrations of Russian naval power since the end of the Cold War, said Patrick Wintour in The Guardian, but its purpose was unclear. The fleet was making its way to the eastern Mediterranean but it’s not really required in the bombing campaign against Aleppo: Russia can accommodate all the planes it needs for that purpose on its airbase in Syria. No, this was more in the nature of sabrerattling: it isn’t “the beginning of WWIII”, as Russia expert Igor Sutyagin puts it, “more a public relations exercise, a show of force”.

Putin is undoubtedly “amoral and ruthless and belligerent”, said Rod Liddle in The Spectator. But I’m less scared of him than of politicians on our side who ratchet up the rhetoric against Russia and talk about shooting down Russian jets over Syria. At the very least they should acknowledge that Putin is partly our creation. In five short years the West divested his nation of “its empire, its political system, its industry and its prestige”. Absurd to think he wouldn’t retaliate. Equally absurd is to single out Putin as the troublemaker in the Arab world. What we’ve done there, from Iraq to Libya, is just as catastrophic. The bias in how the foreign media reports on the Middle East is startling, said Patrick Cockburn in The Independent. The coverage of the Russian-backed bombing of Aleppo has rightly caused worldwide revulsion. But look how different is its treatment of the Us-backed bombing of Mosul in Iraq. In both cities the populace is holed up with the militants: but in Mosul the militants are blamed for using civilians as human shields, whereas in Aleppo it is Moscow that is blamed for bombing them.

What the US finds hard is adjusting to the new distribution of global power, said John Sawers in the FT. For 25 years it has been top dog; and seesawing between warm engagement with Russia and then “frostiness and sanctions”, it has striven to stay that way. But neither Moscow nor Beijing is prepared to play second fiddle any longer. What’s required now is acceptance of their systems of government, and “clear limits to hostile action”. We may hate the undemocratic nature of their regimes, but we must “treat the world as it is, not as we’d like it to be”.