Should We Fear Russia?

1 Analysis of Fears

Fears of Russia in the West predate the Cold War (1947), the formation of the Red Army (1918) and the Bolshevik revolution (1917). A good summary of them could be found in an article by Frederick Engels in 1890, “The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsarism.”[5] To Engels and his colleague Karl Marx, the principal source of fear was the expansionist nature of the Russian state, which, in its quest for hegemony in Europe and Asia, devoured some of its neighbors and subjugated others. Russia’s rampant expansionism was made even more repugnant by the authoritarian and repressive character of its domestic regime.

This view from the West has not changed much, despite the peaceful toppling of the communist system by the Russian people in August 1991 and the unprecedented voluntary dismantlement of the historical Soviet/Russian empire in 1989–91. This process was not only led by Moscow, which accepted that 25 million ethnic Russians would be left outside the Russian Federation, it also drastically reduced the country’s armed forces and scaled back the defense industry. Today, the Russian state often continues to be credited with an “essentially predatory nature,” with a clear “preference to squeezing foreign countries to patient construction at home.”[6]

Just before Hillary Clinton stepped down as US secretary of state at the start of Barack Obama’s second term, she called Vladimir Putin’s project of a Eurasian Union an attempt to restore the Soviet Union. Beneath the veneer of “regional integration,” Putin’s goals, in her view, were “rebuilding a lost empire” and “re-Sovietizing” the Russian periphery; his method, like that of his predecessors, was “always testing, and pushing one’s boundaries.”[7]

Whether Putin was aiming at a new edition of the empire or at some loosely defined Moscow-led “power center in Eurasia,” one thing was clear. After a brief delusion in the early 1990s when Russia’s foreign minister confided in a former US president, who was stunned by the confession, that Russia did not have interests that differed from the common interests of the democratic West, Moscow has learned not only to define its own interests but also to assert them. The most vital of these interests have always been concentrated in the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Russia’s break with its empire was not immediately considered as final. As far back as 1994 Henry Kissinger warned about the risk of the “reimperialization” of Russia.[8] The very use of such an unwieldy term suggests that it was carefully chosen. The United States, with a long history of helping others – starting with the British – divest themselves of their colonial possessions, was clearly pursuing the same policy with regard to post-Soviet Russia. It was one thing for George H. W. Bush to fear the collapse of a nuclear superpower; once the division of the Soviet Union became official, and its nukes were secured, Washington became a supporter of the new states’ genuine independence from the Russian Federation. Moscow’s initial instinct to treat its ex-borderlands as something not-quite-foreign, captured in the phrase “near abroad,” immediately became suspicious and had to be resisted.

The new states themselves, for their part, sought to rely on US and, to a lesser degree, European support to protect their independence, which still looked too fragile. The West leaned hard on Moscow to make sure that the Russian forces left the Baltic States by 1994. By that year, the last remaining Russian garrisons had left Germany and Eastern Europe. Once their departure was completed, the Russian military presence in Europe, in geographical terms, reached its lowest ebb in three centuries. Moreover, almost immediately, the opposite tide began, as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic applied in the same year to join NATO. To many Russians, this was zero-sum at its starkest: even as Russia’s power was receding, it was being replaced by the expanding power of the West. No vacuum, no middle ground was allowed to exist. When Moscow began to protest against NATO’s eastern enlargement, however, these protests were interpreted by the West as imperial nostalgia, another cause for concern.

Meanwhile, other fears arose as some of the former Soviet republics experienced ethnic separatism. In newly independent Moldova and Georgia, separatist groups have come to rely on the military protection of the Russian army garrisons and political and economic support from Moscow. Even though ad hoc peacekeeping arrangements were reached soon after initial clashes, Russian forces in Transnistria, Abkhazia and South Ossetia were regarded by Chisinau and Tbilisi as occupiers, impinging on their newborn sovereignty and threatening their independence. To those with long memories, the Russian Federation was clawing back the territories of the former Soviet Union, much like Soviet Russia in 1918–20 was “reintegrating” the former imperial borderlands, snuffing out their short-lived independence. Thus, the most serious fear of Russia is that of Russian imperialism.

A major contributor to the fear factor is the Kremlin’s willingness to use military force, starting in the Russian North Caucasus in the 1990s and the early 2000s against local separatists turned extremists, which many in the West chose to see in terms of a colonial power fighting a national liberation movement. “The Kremlin has shown,” said the historian Norman Davies, “that it is quite prepared to use armed force; the West has shown that it is not.” Davies meant, not against Russia: US and other Western militaries had been consistently using force since the early 1990s. The problem, of course, was the practical impossibility of attacking a nuclear superpower. This, in Davies’s view, “creates an asymmetrical relationship with Russia, militarily weak but mentally decisive, which can expect to get almost anything it wants.”[9] Although this is obviously an overstatement, it points to a key problem: for all its military superiority that it has been using elsewhere quite liberally, the United States lacks serious military options vis-à-vis Russia.

One thing Vladimir Putin has learned from the history of both Gorbachev’s and Yeltsin’s dealings with the West, is never to be weak, and never to appear weak. “The weak get beaten.” Even if the odds are against Russia, Putin is punching above the country’s weight rather than submitting himself to the will of others. Over time, Putin went further. Summing up his own experience of fifteen years at the helm of the Russian state, he concluded that, if a fight is inevitable, one needs to strike first. Looking from the Kremlin, over the years Russia had drawn a number of red lines to its partners, which they chose to ignore. Finally, this provoked Moscow’s pushback. In Putin’s view, his predecessors’ main mistake was not being assertive enough in defending the country’s national interests.

These red lines, first drawn by Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov in 1996, referred to the issue of admitting ex-members of the Warsaw Pact, which had formed the Soviet Union’s strategic glacis in Europe, to NATO. The combination of Russian opposition to NATO’s enlargement and its support for self-proclaimed separatist states led in 2008 to the first large-scale use of Russian military power since the demise of the Soviet Union. The Russian forces were brought into action by the botched attempt by the impetuous Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili to re-establish control over the rebel region of South Ossetia, which led to the killing of a number of Russian peacekeepers there.

Once the war began, Russian troops did not confine themselves to the immediate area of conflict but proceeded to occupy areas of Georgia proper, coming within a striking distance of the Georgian capital Tbilisi. The point made, they were ordered to stop. Soon thereafter, Moscow formally recognized the separatist statelets of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, thus redrawing the post-Soviet borders for the first time. This was a loud warning shot. However, it was soon muted by the avalanche of the global financial crisis. A short-lived reset between Washington and Moscow followed.

In a somewhat similar move, reacting to the 2014 Maidan revolution in Kiev, which brought to power pro-Western elements within the Ukrainian elite in a coalition with western Ukrainian nationalists, Russian forces took control of Crimea (where Russia had long had a naval base), threatened to use military force elsewhere in Ukraine, staged a referendum in majority-Russian Crimea on joining Russia, formally incorporated the peninsula into the Russian Federation as a result, and actively supported an armed rebellion in Ukraine’s south-eastern Donbass region. This time, Russia not only redrew borders; it annexed territory, claiming the right to protect the interests of its co-ethnics. Many countries with Russian minorities became immediately concerned, from the Baltic States in NATO to Russia’s own allies in the Collective Security Treaty Organization such as Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Moscow’s more assertive foreign policy has been backed up by a reconstituted military force. After the 2008 Georgia war, Russian military reform began in earnest, and the decline of Russian military power which had lasted two decades began to be reversed. In 2010, a large-scale program of military modernization was adopted, with the stated aim of raising the share of “modern” weapons and equipment in the Russian arsenal from 30 to 70 percent by 2020. Military training and exercises were substantially upgraded. Russian military aircraft resumed routine patrols along the borders of the United States, the United Kingdom and other NATO countries, as well as Japan.

Even as Russia’s power began to grow, Moscow refused to live by the constraints imposed on it in its hour of weakness. When NATO countries refused to ratify the adapted Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, raising objections of the Russian military presence in Georgia and Moldova, Russia suspended its implementation of the original 1990 CFE document, which was negotiated when the Warsaw Pact was still around and which limited Russian troop movements within its own territory. With neither the adapted nor the original CFE treaty in operation, the risks of a surprise attack in Europe have grown.

The actual employment of force in Crimea in 2014 and in Syria in 2015 returned Russia to the ranks of major conventional military powers. The Crimea operation featured a very different military than the one that saw battle in Georgia six years previously, not to speak of the decayed army that fought in Chechnya in the 1990s. The actual use of Russian air and naval power in Syria was even more impressive. Russia’s post-Cold War military weakness has become history. Countries with strained relations with Moscow had to take notice.

Yet this concern needs to be put in perspective. Russia’s military power is a far cry from that of the United States. The Russian military budget is a small fraction of America’s. It trails far behind China’s. Except in the category of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, there is no balance between Russia and the US, not to speak of a comparison with NATO. The new emerging front line in Europe passes just a hundred miles west of St Petersburg. Kaliningrad is completely surrounded on land by NATO territory. Similarly, the scale and intensity of Russia’s military operations, from the Balkans to the Middle East, are dwarfed by those of the United States and its allies. And Russia has practically no allies.

Many Russians have recently grown accustomed to quoting Emperor Alexander III, that Russia has only two friends in the world – its army and its navy. However, to protect and actively promote its interests, Russia is not relying solely on its military instruments. In the areas of conflict in the post-Soviet space, it has used a number of local allies – pro-Russian political formations, businesses and paramilitary groups – as well as bona fide volunteers and military advisers, specialists and other personnel from Russia. This heterogeneous combination of assets has made it possible to wage what has been called in the West “hybrid warfare” – in reality, the combined employment of military, paramilitary and non-military means in support of political objectives, which also made it more difficult to accuse Russia of direct military intervention.

The use of these assets in Crimea allowed Moscow to claim absolute victory “without firing a shot.” In Donbass, the situation was less favorable to Russia, and Moscow’s intervention carried a risk of escalation to an all-out war. However, the Kremlin managed to keep its direct military involvement on the ground to the minimum required to keep the cities of Donetsk and Lugansk off limits to Kiev’s forces and to preserve the vital cross-border link between the rebel republics and the Russian Federation. Throughout the active phase of the conflict, Moscow carefully stuck to the position of “plausible deniability” with regard to its actual involvement. The Kremlin summarily dismissed Western accusations of lying, basically assuming that, after the breach of trust between Russia and the West in Ukraine, few holds there were barred.

“Hybrid warfare,” Crimea- or Donbass-style, however, can hardly be used where it is feared most: in the Baltic States and Poland. Moscow’s intentions aside, the local Russians’ self-identification with the Russian Federation cannot be compared to that of the Crimeans. Even though naturalization in Latvia and Estonia was made hard for local Russians, they are not looking to Moscow for protection and guidance. Daugavpils is not Donetsk-in-waiting, and Narva is no Lugansk. Poland is an even more far-fetched case. The Donbass model is not easily transferable, and employing it on the territory of a NATO member state denies the Kremlin any rationality whatsoever.

The continuing steep rise in oil prices from 2000 to 2008 gave some Russians an idea that their resource-rich country could be an energy superpower, and its oil and particularly gas exports might be used as a tool of foreign policy – or, to put it simply, as an energy weapon. Rather maladroitly, Moscow used the threat of cutting off gas, which it sometimes executed, as a powerful argument in disputes with post-Soviet neighbors about energy price and other commercial issues. Not infrequently, these issues were richly mixed with politics, as in Ukraine after the Orange revolution in 2006 and 2009. In those disputes, the Western media and the public invariably sided with the victims of Gazprom’s energy blockades. Even though Russia never stopped supplying its Western customers with gas – not even at the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse – its reputation as a reliable supplier suffered.

As relations with Moscow began to sour in the mid-2000s, the West’s dependence on Russian gas supplies – roughly 30 percent of the EU’s imports – became a security concern, particularly in Poland, the Baltic States, Sweden, Britain and the United States. The fear here was that, by making Europe’s countries, including the EU powerhouse Germany, dependent on Russian gas supplies, Moscow was achieving undue influence over their policies and left other countries such as Poland and the Baltic States exposed to Russian diktat. What the United States, Poland and the Baltics really feared, however, was a Russo-German economic symbiosis – which Putin was advocating – that would ultimately lead to Germany distancing itself from America, taking on a more independent international role, and becoming more “understanding” of Russia’s geopolitical interests.

Particularly suspicious to the critics were direct Russian–German energy links, such as the North Stream gas pipeline across the Baltic Sea, which did not cross any third country territory, and thus, the fear ran, Gazprom held the countries in between – Poland and Lithuania – to ransom. A similar Gazprom plan to build a pipeline, dubbed the South Stream, to Italy and Austria across the Black Sea and the Western Balkans would have gone around Ukraine and left it in the lurch, making it a blind alley and also robbing cash-strapped Kiev of transit fees. The plan, moreover, might also have increased Russian influence in the Balkans and Southern Europe – Italy and Greece. The EU’s opposition to the South Stream was strong enough to block it in 2014. Any future expansion of the North Stream, despite Berlin’s clear interest in it, is meeting active resistance in Brussels, Warsaw and Washington.

With the end of the commodities super-cycle and the collapse of the oil price in 2014–16, the use of energy as an instrument of political pressure has become impractical. Moreover, the countries which feared such pressure – Poland, Lithuania, and now pro-Western Ukraine – have taken steps to minimize or even end their historic dependence on Russian direct energy supplies. In the case of Ukraine, this applies not only to purchases of Russian gas but also to electricity. As of 2016, Russia is delivering only coal to Kiev. The situation has reversed itself: the low oil price, which is hitting Russia very hard, has become a powerful factor in the Western strategy of “disciplining” Moscow. This invites a parallel to the mid-1980s, when the Saudi-engineered collapse of the oil price drove Gorbachev to the wall, turned the Soviet Union into a major debtor, and limited Moscow’s freedom of maneuver.

Russia has other means of impacting on other countries and influencing their behavior. It has a powerful cyber warfare capacity, which it probably used against Estonia in 2007, Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2015. None of these cases, however, was decisive in the conflicts between Russia and the neighboring states. Georgia and Ukraine lost on the actual battlefield, not the virtual one, and Estonia did not change its policies on moving Soviet monuments and war graves away from Tallinn’s city center. Moreover, Tallinn has since become a NATO center for countering cyber warfare operations.

In a cyber war, Russia would certainly be a formidable foe. Its capabilities in the field add to its nuclear arsenal as an effective deterrent to the United States. International agreements on cyber security, a twenty-first-century equivalent of twentieth-century nuclear arms control, are many years away. While the area remains much more impervious to outside observers than nuclear weapons and missile technology, there are good reasons to believe that the United States and its allies are at least as advanced there as are Russia and China. And they too use cyber weapons when they see a need for it – as against Iran.

When on New Year’s Eve 2016 Russia adopted its new national security strategy, most Western commentators highlighted the portions of the document which referred to the United States and NATO actions as a threat to Russia. The document itself, however, hardly breaks new ground. Rather, it sums up the changes which have occurred since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis in 2014. Moscow does see the enhancement of NATO’s military infrastructure in the Baltic States and Poland, the US and other foreign military deployments in Eastern Europe and the adjacent waters and airspace, and US missile defenses in Poland and Romania as posing a military threat to Russia, and it will respond in kind.

Many observers point out that Moscow’s “declaration of a threat from the West” is largely beamed at the domestic audience. It may be annoying to many Europeans and Americans that the Kremlin is now using Russian–Western confrontation as a source of domestic support. In the recent era of Russian–Western cooperation, however, there were similar complaints in the United States and Europe that the Kremlin was using good relations with the West to legitimize its rule. That the Kremlin can thrive politically on both good and bad relations with the West says something about the Russian political system, Russian society and the Kremlin’s ability to manage it, but hatred of the West is clearly not an obsession with the Russian leadership, which remains essentially pragmatic.

A bigger issue is Russia’s self-isolation as a result of the deepening estrangement from the rest of Europe and the West. This is happening not only as a result of Russian-imposed counter-boycotts, such as the food embargo against the EU, and the multiplying elements of xenophobia in the public domain, but also on account of the new penury which makes Russians buy fewer foreign goods, cut back on foreign travel, and keep their children in the country. The notion of the West “ganging up” on Russia has undercut the empathy toward Europe which prevailed not only in the two decades after the end of the Cold War but had existed even in the Soviet period. The already wide gulf between Russia and Europe keeps growing.

When Russia was rich, money was considered its prime political weapon. Moscow, it was often claimed, could exploit the interests of various business circles, above all in Europe, in the Russian market, to the Russians’ advantage. Surprisingly for Moscow, these groups chose not to protest too loudly against the sanctions imposed on Russia in 2014 and have accepted significant losses as a result. However, they may not have given up entirely on the potential profits of Russian trade and economic cooperation. Some have left, while others have managed to adapt to the sanctions regime. Most are looking forward to the day when the sanctions are eased or lifted.

Sanctions, however, are not Russia’s worst problem. After growth ground to a halt in 2013, Russia has been in a deep economic recession. When and if Russia comes up with a new economic model of development to replace the now inoperable one based on a high and rising price for oil, European and other Western investors will start paying attention again. This is likely to be a long wait, at best. Meantime, money, which used to be called Russia’s main tool for getting ahead with “greedy Westerners,” has become scarce. Like the energy weapon, the money weapon is now in other hands. It is the United States that decides how much of Russia it wants in the global money market.

Quite apart from the money magnet, there are also political groups within the European Union who occasionally side with Moscow on various issues. These range from the unease about US dominance (felt, e.g., within the German Die Linke party or among a few of France’s surviving true Gaullists), to US spying on its allies (even among Chancellor Merkel’s CDU associates), to anti-Brussels nationalism (as among Marine Le Pen’s voters in France or Viktor Orbán’s supporters in Hungary). Most of these forces are either left or right of center, which makes it difficult for Moscow to build ideological alliances with them. Some European nationalists, such as the Polish PiS party, are vehemently hostile to Moscow. The Kremlin’s pragmatism is good for tactical connections but prevents long-term cooperation. As for the European political mainstream, it is largely skeptical or inimical to Russia’s policies.

Even where there is a certain amount of popular support for friendly relations with Russia, the political elite remains largely Western-oriented. In Moldova, with its mercurial and notoriously corrupt politics, even the Communist Party headed by a former Russian police general is pro-EU. Serbia, for all its occasional Russophile rhetoric, is on track toward long-term integration into the European Union. Montenegro is soon to be admitted to NATO. Bulgarian elites are historically anti-Russian, having joined with Germany against Russia in both world wars. Greece, like Hungary, is using Russian connections as a bargaining chip in their relations with the EU. Cyprus used to profit hugely from Russian money on the island, but it obeyed the eurozone demands which hit Russian depositors very hard.

Russia is usually accused of implementing divideand-rule policies toward the European Union. It is indeed difficult not to engage in this practice, given the absence of a common foreign policy in the EU. The twenty-eight member states of the EU have differing interests, experiences and views of Russia. There are the former Soviet republics Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940; there is Poland, divided several times by Russia and Germany; but there is also France, with strong historical and cultural ties; Austria, with strong business connections; and Germany, with its rich and twisted history of relations with Russia, which remarkably reached the point of historical reconciliation that permitted the country’s reunification in 1990.

Any outside power – be that the United States or China – dealing with a Europe which is more than a common market but less than a federation would be seeking the best ways to promote its interests through individual influential members of the Union besides going to Brussels. Russia, with its centuries-long history of relations with all European countries, has been doing this naturally. To the Russians, Europe is still mainly Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Spain, plus two dozen middle- and small-sized countries. However, any advances that the Russians have been able to make in relations with one member can be checked and reversed by other members less friendly toward Moscow. With the accession of Central and Eastern European states to the EU, the skeptics have won a de facto veto on ties with Russia that are too close. After Berlin toughened its stance toward Moscow, the Union’s most powerful country also joined the ranks of the skeptics. So much for the argument about Russian-fed Trojan horses inside the EU.

For all the talk of Russia’s bullying its neighbors, which is not without foundation, what is most striking is how little influence Moscow actually wields beyond its borders, even in the former USSR. Russia’s “sphere of influence” is actually limited to the territories it physically sustains and protects: Abkhazia; Donetsk and Lugansk; South Ossetia; and Transnistria. Even Moscow-allied Belarus often acts rather independently from Russia. Minsk still recognizes Georgia and Ukraine in their 1991 borders and keeps active relations with both Tbilisi and Kiev; it has become a prime re-exporter of the EU foodstuffs that Moscow banned from crossing into Russia, and President Alexander Lukashenko is adamant that Belarus remains a sovereign country, independent from Russia. Kazakhstan is even more explicit in following its “multi-vector” foreign policy. Its president, Nursultan Nazarbaev, was offended by Vladimir Putin’s suggestions of Kazakhstan’s statehood being only a “recent” phenomenon and was reportedly “unnerved” by the Russian Navy’s October 2015 cruise missile strikes at Syria from the Caspian. The Moscow-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, which also includes Armenia, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, is remarkable for the lack of solidarity among its members with its de facto leader, Russia.

In the quarter-century since the Soviet Union’s disintegration, Russia has been dealing with the ruling elites in the newly independent states, usually seeking trade-offs with them, often subsidizing them, and – until very recently – ignoring their domestic opposition. For two decades it was prepared to stick to the 1991 borders and abandoned that stance only when the Kremlin saw a threat of NATO closing in, first in Georgia and then in Ukraine. So far, Russia has been reacting to revolutions and coups in the neighborhood rather than plotting and staging them. In Eastern Europe, Russia has finally “lost” Ukraine and Moldova; it has had to accept the massive growth of China’s economic and political influence in Central Asia and that of America (in Georgia) and Turkey (in Azerbaijan) in the South Caucasus. In the future, Russia’s sphere of influence is more likely to shrink further than to expand. The Russian Empire is definitely not making a comeback.

For about a decade and a half after the break-up of the Soviet Union, defending the rights of compatriots abroad – i.e., some 25 million Russians who were left behind in the newly independent states when the Russian state receded to its current borders – was a fringe activity perpetrated by Russian nationalists, often in opposition to the Kremlin. It was only in 2008 that President Dmitri Medvedev, in the wake of the Georgia war, fought ostensibly to protect South Ossetians against Georgian “genocide” and declared Russia’s right to defend and protect its co-ethnics, particularly in former Soviet territory, which was termed a “zone of privileged interests” of the Russian Federation.

In 2008, this essentially applied to the Ossetians, whom Georgian President Saakashvili tried to bring back, alongside their self-declared republic, into Georgia. Six years later, this argument was used by President Putin to support the actions he had ordered in Crimea and with regard to Donbass. Putin talked about Russians as “the world’s biggest divided nation,” put forth the concept of Novorossiya (“New Russia,” a historical term for the northern Black Sea coast conquered by Russia from the Ottoman Empire in the late eighteenth century) for the Russian-speaking southern and eastern provinces of Ukraine, and discussed “the Russian world” as a habitat of Russophones and those who associate themselves with Russian culture and the Russian state.

This provoked Putin’s critics to draw comparisons with Hitler’s policies of bringing all Germans under one roof and the use of German minorities to undermine neighboring countries before their annexation or subjugation. Not only Latvia and Estonia, with their proportionally large contingents of ethnic Russians, many of them still – twenty-five years after independence – without the citizenship of their countries of origin, but also Russia’s own allies, such as Belarus and Kazakhstan, became worried. It took some time for the neighboring countries to see that the analogy with Hitler was wrong: the Kremlin had no plans to stoke ethnic tensions in order to destabilize and then annex former Soviet lands.

In the days of the abundance of financial resources, Russian money was considered to be a major tool in the hands of the Kremlin to buy influence in the West, not only “wholesale” but in a retail mode as well, recruiting “agents of influence.” In the most celebrated case, Gerhard Schroeder, soon after resigning as German chancellor in 2005, agreed to serve as chairman of the board of North Stream, Gazprom’s pipeline to Germany. A number of other senior Western businessmen, retired politicians and the like were offered positions in Russian companies, including some that were state-owned. Many accepted. A Washington K Street public relations company, Ketchum, was tasked with improving Russia’s public image in the West.

Certainly, Russians then were looking for partners and image-makers in Europe and America to help them move around and integrate into the wider West which they aspired to join. They were doing what others – Asians, Middle Easterners, and the like – were doing before them. They were probably doing less than those others. And, clearly, Russian penetration of Western societies was no match for Western penetration of the Russian government in the early to mid-1990s, when US and European advisers acted at times as decision-makers in Russian ministries. Yet, this is definitely passé. In the current climate in Europe and the United States, being linked to Russian interests is a kiss of death for anyone with a public career in mind. Russia is now more appealing to retired actors and sports figures.

Russian spying in the West was an issue during the Cold War. Then there was a brief period, in the early 1990s, when a premium was laid on cooperation on issues of common concern, such as non-proliferation, terrorism and transnational crime. In a sincere and unique but obviously foolish step, the Russians in 1991 even gave the Americans plans of their listening devices in the US embassy in Moscow. CIA officials, such as Robert Gates, were fêted in Moscow as colleagues and nearly comrades-in-arms. In 2001, Putin ordered the General Staff to give full intelligence support to the US operation in Afghanistan. The return of adversity in Russia–NATO relations saw, predictably, a fresh expansion of traditional and new (cyber, etc.) intelligence activities. Still, what struck the Europeans in recent years more than reports of Russian intelligence becoming more active were the revelations of friendly spying on them and their leaders by their senior ally, the United States.

For the Western liberal establishment, the very nature of the Russian political and economic system is a threat. In the Western mind, Russia has long been associated with tsarist autocracy, then communist totalitarianism, and now authoritarian kleptocracy. Its successive political systems have been the very antithesis of the rule of law, political freedom and human rights. Now, it is clearly authoritarian, despite the formal trappings of democracy. Its political economy is bureaucratic capitalism, which lives off natural resources and favors those closest to the center of power. Property rights are conditional, and the legal system is managed by the powers that be. Civil society is under pressure.

The present primacy of the raison d’état – when corporate interests have been satisfied – rests on the memories, ideas and ideals taken from the past. Today’s Russia is frankly statist, patriotic/nationalistic and revisionist. Having lost the state in the botched attempt at reform under Gorbachev, the Kremlin is now focused on upholding its own supremacy. Having lost their empire, Russians are now in the process of building a multi-ethnic nation-state which puts a premium on nationalism. And, having been unable and unwilling to adapt to the US-dominated post-Cold War world, Russia is out to rebel against it, breaking the written and unwritten rules of behavior as it seeks to obtain recognition for its great-power status.

The Byzantine system of governance still prevailing in Russia makes the Kremlin decision-making process opaque, while the concentration and centralization of power in the hands of the sole individual at the top provides for policy steps which can be both sudden and surprising to outsiders. Whereas, in the US system, taking a decision on the use of force can take a lot of time and require a major effort at the inter-agency level, as well as between the White House and Congress, in the Russian system, one man essentially decides all. As a result, Russia can move very quickly, and by stealth, surprising even seasoned outside observers – as in Crimea, Donbass and Syria.

Many in the West traditionally view Russia as a country apart from Europe, the classical “Other.” The 1990s Western debate on the “borders of Europe,” which accompanied the NATO/EU enlargement process, revealed strongly held convictions – though by no means universal – that Russia was, indeed, an outsider, which could at best be a partner of Europe, not part of it. In the late 2000s and 2010s, the center of gravity shifted to the view of Russia as an authoritarian alternative to the European values, norms and principles. Initially, the view of a “Russian model” was supported by the country’s rapid oil-fired economic growth. When the growth stalled and was followed by recession, Russia came to be portrayed as a country that bullies its neighbors and corrupts everyone around.

Indeed, the Kremlin has a different approach than the EU governments to a number of important issues: state sovereignty, the use of military force, and the world order. Angela Merkel was right to say in 2014 that Vladimir Putin lives in a different world. This is a realist’s world. Whereas the countries of Europe, and Germany above all, have largely transcended their troubled history, Russia is still going through it. But, truth be told, wherever Russia may be, it keeps company there with much of the rest of the world. The EU is a happy exception: not even the United States, with its distinct view of America’s exceptionalism, sovereignty, military power and world order – one “American century” succeeding another – is where Europe is on these issues.

To strengthen the case of Russia’s un-European nature, adherents of that view pointed to official Russian concepts of the country as a separate Eurasian civilization, facing both the East and the West. These concepts, of course, have deep roots in Russian history – and this is another issue of concern to the West.

Post-Soviet Russia’s unwillingness to do to the Soviet Union’s legacy what West Germans had done to that of the Third Reich is disturbing to quite a few people in Europe. In Russia, the Communist Party was not put on trial, nor were its members limited in their political rights. The Soviet Union itself is viewed as a historical form of the Russian state, a seventy-year period in Russia’s millennium of history, a legitimate polity rather than a criminal aberration – even though officially the Romanov dynasty is revered and the Bolshevik revolution is rejected. In this scheme of things, Stalin, the World War II commander-in-chief and builder of the Soviet state, is a more respectable figure, despite his well-known crimes, than Lenin, who destroyed the Russian imperial state and worked for Russia’s defeat in World War I.

This reading of history jars with the views of those in Eastern and Central Europe who see their countries primarily as victims of both the Soviet Union and, before it, the Russian Empire. What is most sacred in the Russian history textbook – the Soviet victory in World War II – appears to many in Europe’s east as a replacement of Nazi rule by Soviet totalitarianism. In Estonia and Latvia, those who served with the Wehrmacht and even the German SS between 1941 and 1945 are recognized as national heroes, while those who fought on the side of the Red Army are termed occupiers. Present-day Ukraine puts Soviet World War II veterans and the nationalists who fought against them, also in alliance with the Nazis, on an equal footing. While Russia and Poland made a productive effort in the late 2000s and the early 2010s to discuss the dark issues of their common history, there is unlikely to be much agreement between the Russians, on the one hand, and the Baltic countries, on the other.

In the victims’ optic, Russia is equated with communism and its most brutal practices. The famine which in 1932–3 hit large parts of the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, southern and central Russia, and Kazakhstan, is officially characterized by Kiev as genocide of the Ukrainian people by Moscow. The fact that Stalin, six decades after his death, is still viewed by a large portion of the Russian population as a great leader is presented as testimony to the evergreen penchant of the Russian people for a strong hand, even an exceedingly cruel one. That, for a lot of ordinary Russian people today Stalin is, however unlikely, a protest symbol against rampant corruption, is usually overlooked.

The fears described above are based on facts and have long roots in history. Russia is authoritarian and has a distinct view of itself as a great power. To the Europeans, Russia, a near neighbor sharing the continent with them but politically and ideologically alien, denies them the promise of a “Europe whole and free,” a “europäische Friedensordnung.” It also evokes the bitter memories of the past century and suggests frightening parallels.

These memories and parallels, however, paint a picture which does not exist now and has no chance of emerging in the future. Russia has no resources and no real will to re-create its Eurasian empire, all the more so because the would-be parts of that empire would resist being included in it; it has no ambition to conquer neighboring EU/NATO member states, thus risking a war with the US; its brand of authoritarianism is a domestic, not an export product; its state-dominated economic system is not a model for others to emulate; its ideology is nationalistic, not international; and its capacity to infiltrate Western societies is very modest.

If anything, the West should fear Russia’s weakness more than its strength. A quarter-century after the Soviet implosion, the country is very brittle. It is now going through a major economic crisis, which has structural roots; the modicum of political stability which exists depends essentially on the popularity of Vladimir Putin, thus hanging by a thread; and the absence of durable institutions within the present system and of a credible alternative to the current regime suggest that a serious political crisis, when it happens, might lead to chaos. Russia also gives precious little advance warning before it stirs; and, after it begins to stir, it soon starts to shake.

There is little that the outside world can do to affect the Russian internal political dynamic; the West needs, however, to see clearly the real challenge which Russia poses and find a constructive way of dealing with it.