It’s been a very bad week for Vladimir Putin. The rouble recorded its biggest recent fall against the dollar, the tumbling price of oil further squeezed Russia’s economy, and he cancelled the South Stream pipeline project across the Black Sea after sustained European Union opposition.
On Thursday, he warned members of the Russian parliament the country’s citizens should prepare for harder times because of these economic troubles. His popularity has not yet fallen a lot as a result, however EU and other western sanctions are hitting hard and most Russians admire him because he has restored national pride but also because of his ability to sustain economic growth and personal incomes. If that changes so might his position as leader.
His authoritarian profile has been sharply ratcheted up this year, pursuing critics and opponents into an expanding gulag of political prisons, going after oligarchs and radically curtailing media, which are a shadow of their former selves at home and much more propagandist abroad.
In parallel, he has pursued alliances with foreign critics of his western adversaries, notably on the hard right of European politics – echoing his own appropriation of “Eurasian” ideas from Russian neofascists. Marine Le Pen was courted in Moscow as a stateswoman willing to defend Russian sovereignty, while Hungary’s Viktor Orban defends its sphere of influence in Ukraine and elsewhere in eastern Europe. Putin’s reassertion of statist sovereignty chimes in with left-wing Euroscepticism in France and Italy too.
Putin’s backers
Alongside that, Putin’s Russia attracts support from ex-Stalinist and sovereigntist left-wingers in Europe and elsewhere, including the German Left Party; the various former communists; John Pilger; Jonathan Steele; US Russophile Stephen Cohen and wife Katrina Vanden Heuvel who finances the
Nation
in New York ; and surprisingly from more anarchist-leaning Noam Chomsky, veteran social democrat Helmut Schmidt and realist Henry Kissinger.
Most defend Russia against what they regard as a greater adversary – assertive US power, Nato expansion and the creation of a new cold war aimed at containing Russia’s necessary and legitimate sphere of influence in its near abroad. Their critique was echoed in Mikhail Gorbachev’s recent lament for the failure to overcome such a mindset in the structure of East-West relations since the 1990s, especially concerning Nato expansion in the region.
Such views chime with Russia’s playing games into German politics. German-Russian relations are, after all, the key determinant of wider European-Russian ones.
Following recent prolonged conversations with Putin at the G20 and elsewhere, Angela Merkel has been much more critical of his policies and intentions. She says he tramples "with his feet on international law" and fears a "wider conflagration" if he persists. She is annoyed by the resurrection of Ostpolitik in Germany, dividing the more US- and Nato-oriented Christian Democrats from the more Russophile SPD.
Values and interests
Germany and the EU have much deeper economic, energy-resource and political interests in good relations with Russia than the US has. So there is a real rational core to this debate; but it is nonetheless important to differentiate the relevant values and interests involved.
One of the most basic has to do with spheres of interest. These define the EU’s neighbourhood policy since 2004 and now subject to review 10 years on. It seeks to project the EU’s own values into that eastern and southern space. But how does that differ from Russia’s expressed interests in the same notion? The EU policy overlooked the “neighbours of neighbours” in both cases, assuming they would be more co-operative than they turned out to be. Russia and Saudi Arabia prove that wrong.
A more hardnosed policy is required – on both sides – if conflict is to be avoided. This is the working out of a new phase of multipolarity in world politics in the European setting. Geopolitics is returning alongside the revenge of geography on recent history dominated by the US proclamation of victory in the cold war. It is, above all, a struggle between competing international alliances of power. They both need to understand it is not a zero-sum game if they are to coexist peacefully.
It seems better to preserve an analytical detachment, rather than plumping for either camp on the assumption that a new cold war is indeed in the making.
The best interests of citizens in Ukraine and Russia are surely served by determinedly pursuing ways of co-existing through mutually controlled borderlands and intersecting diplomacy than stoking up this conflict to suit either main antagonist.
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