Oct 30: The west appeased Putin once. They’ll do it again

Simon Kuper, The Financial Times, 26 Oct 2023.

The west appeased Putin once. They’ll do it again

By Simon Kuper, The Financial Times, 26 Oct 2023.

Monique: I hope not.

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Emmanuel Macron spent years talking to Vladimir Putin about partnerships. In summer 2019, he even invited Putin to the Côte d’Azur to discuss building “a new architecture of security and confidence between Russia and the EU”. Putin was bewildered, given that Macron hadn’t bothered checking beforehand with the other Europeans. “Do you think you’ll manage to convince them?” he asked Macron.

After Russia invaded Ukraine last year, the documentary-maker Guy Lagache asked Macron:

“You thought reasoning with Putin would lead to something else?”

“Yes.”

“It didn’t.”

“No,” Macron conceded.

In the film, he gazes into the distance, drinks water, then briefly falls silent. “For a moment,” French journalist Sylvie Kauffmann writes of the scene in her newly published history Les aveuglés (“The Blinded Ones”), “Emmanuel Macron gives the impression of finally having understood who Vladimir Putin was.”

Les aveuglés anatomises why the west misread Putin. Kauffmann traversed Europe, interrogating ex-leaders and diplomats, excavating long-buried shouting matches at international summits. I finished her book feeling that, yes, western leaders were often blind to Putin. And like him, they treated eastern Europeans as second-tier nations that needn’t be consulted. But in appeasing Russia from 2008 to 2022, westerners were also pursuing their interests. I suspect they’ll do it again.

Each western country had its own incentive to misread Putin. The French retained a fantasy they were a superpower, dealing head to head with their peers, not just following the US. Germany’s psychologically damaged embrace of Russia was made up of guilt, greed and fear. The Germans, Kauffmann recounts, felt they owed Russia (though not Ukraine, Belarus, etc) for every Soviet killed in the second world war. And German industry craved cheap Russian energy. Economic interdependence brought friendship with France; surely it would work with Russia, too? German leaders imagined that Putin pursued economic rationality, just like they did.

The US simply didn’t care much. Sure, it was affronted by Putin’s invasion of Georgia in 2008. During a panel debate earlier this year, Condoleezza Rice, then-secretary of state, recalled a White House discussion with “the testosterone flying on the table”. But, she said, “We were not going to use American military forces against the Russians.” That always remained true. Little Georgia lacked military force. So did Ukraine in 2014. When Russia invaded Crimea, Kauffmann reveals, the Obama administration instructed Ukraine not to resist. Much of Ukraine’s army in Crimea defected to Russia. Its own defence minister fled to Crimea and took Russian citizenship. His successor told Ukraine’s president: “We don’t have an army.”

What changed between 2014 and 2022 wasn’t Putin or the west, but Ukraine. It built a serious army. Only after it resisted Putin did surprised western countries finally do likewise. Now the battle is for the lands between the two worlds. Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova will either join the west or be recolonised.

But however this plays out, western armies won’t defeat Russia. The country has one military advantage over the west and possibly even over China: it treats its citizens as cannon fodder. The US lost about 7,000 soldiers in two decades in Iraq and Afghanistan and gave up fighting wars. The Russian army lost perhaps 120,000 in the war’s first 18 months and didn’t bother burying many of them.

Young Germans, Americans, Britons and French people aren’t going to die in freezing trenches to save eastern Europe. Angela Merkel, the chancellor who presided over Germany’s addiction to Russian gas, worked from that premise. Even her eastern European critics admit she actually understood Putin. In a wonderful exchange in Kauffmann’s book, he says to Merkel, “Listen, I’ll tell you the truth,” and she replies, disingenuously: “But Vladimir, I hope you always tell the truth.” “Everyone lies,” he retorts. “I lie, you lie, Emmanuel lies, even Mr Zelenskyy will lie, it’s normal.” All western leaders now know Putin lies. Yet, when the time comes, they will try to bully Zelenskyy into laying down arms — let’s not even call it peace — just as then-French president Nicolas Sarkozy bullied Georgia’s leader Mikheil Saakashvili in 2008.

Since the west won’t bring down Putin, it will have to live with an imperialist Russia. It learnt from 1945 to 1990 that it can, even as it knows that eastern Europe cannot. When British soldier Fitzroy Maclean was fretting in 1942 about postwar Yugoslavia going communist, Winston Churchill asked him, “Do you intend to make your home in Yugoslavia after the war?” No, Maclean responded. “Neither do I,” said Churchill. Substitute Ukraine for Yugoslavia, and traces of that western attitude linger: no longer blind, just selfish.