Should We Fear Russia?

3 Bringing Russia into Line

For a number of years, the Russian challenge, in gestation, was largely ignored. Russia was expected by some to bite the bullet and adapt or adjust to the new world-order realities. Others expected it to transform itself – e.g., from Saul to Paul. In any event, Russia was perceived as too weak to matter much; as sufficiently integrated into the global economy, on the one hand, and highly vulnerable because of its dependence on the oil price, on the other; and too corrupt to take on the West, for fear of having their hidden riches or dubious transactions exposed and risking court proceedings and even arrests. Essentially, this condition was expected to last a very long while.

The West as a whole did not have a Russia strategy: Russia simply was not an issue big enough to warrant that. The European Union, which on account of its geographical proximity had to pay more attention to Russia than the United States, became progressively disillusioned with the prospect of Russia’s “Europeanization.” The EU, however, does not operate as a strategic unit at all. As mentioned, the operators of the Eastern Partnership project grossly misjudged the stakes involved in Ukraine. When the Ukraine crisis broke out, the EU essentially withdrew to the background.

The United States has learned to look down on Russia, which was neither an issue nor a big enough partner. In Ukraine, the US, which had remained in the background during the Maidan stand-off, had to step forward when the Europeans proved unable to manage the crisis they had helped create. Washington soon forged a new NATO-wide approach to Russia which combined political isolation, economic pressure and information warfare, plus strengthening NATO and support for Ukraine itself. The policy’s stated objective was to make the Kremlin back off on Ukraine and step back in line. Europe basically went along with it.

The Ukraine crisis first resulted in largely symbolic measures. Russia was de facto expelled from the G8, which reverted to its more homogeneous G7 format. Cooperation in a number of other fora, from the NATO–Russia Council to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, was restricted or frozen. Top-level meetings and high-level contacts were reduced to the bare minimum. The aim was to demonstrate the West’s strong disapproval of Moscow’s policies and to send the message that there will not be business as usual until Moscow changes its behavior.

The result, after more than two years, has been the sealing of the chasm between the West and Russia. The relationship has taken a new, clearly adversarial quality. Mutual adversity is now the new normal. Political isolation, however, is little more than a phrase. There is nothing like an iron curtain physically separating Russia from the West, the way it was with the Soviet Union. Top-level visits became rare, but since the start of the Ukraine crisis President Putin has been to Austria, Australia, France, Hungary, Italy, Turkey and the United States, sometimes for multilateral summits. He has also toured key non-Western countries – Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Iran, and others – and received leaders of dozens of countries in Russia.

Other forms of communication were not broken off. Leaders’ phone calls, particularly between Putin and Obama, and between Putin and Merkel, have become, if anything, more frequent. In 2015 alone, the US secretary of state and the Russian foreign minister met about twenty times. The Normandy format brought together the Russian president and the leaders of Germany and France, as well as Ukraine, to discuss the Ukraine crisis. Despite his supposed “isolation,” Vladimir Putin held a number of informal but substantive meetings with Barack Obama.

True, there is no more warmth in these contacts, but they focus on issues that cannot be resolved without Russia – Ukraine, Iran and other non-proliferation concerns, and Syria. Russia, of course, remains a very active permanent member of the UN Security Council. It is also a member of the G20, and attempts to suspend it from the group were immediately rebuffed by China and other non-Western states. Against the background of deteriorating relations with the US and the EU, Russia’s ties with non-Western countries – including in such clubs as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), whose back-to-back summits Putin hosted in 2015 – have grown, even though they do not replace or compensate for the broken ties with the West. Russia, no longer an aspiring candidate for membership in an expanded West, is now positioning itself as part of the global non-West.

Within Russia, alienation from the West has had the effect of rallying the bulk of the population around the flag, the Kremlin and Putin. The Western insistence that isolationist measures are directed against Putin’s policies rather than the Russian people is not cutting much ice. Most Russians see Western attempts at isolating the Kremlin as a proof of the United States and its allies being Russia’s historical competitors, and the Kremlin, to them, becomes a symbol of national resistance. True, this image, spread by state-controlled television, is not shared by the 20 percent or so who remain committed to Russia’s European/Western vocation, but it rings many bells with the rest of the population. For the Kremlin, history is a very powerful ally. It is also joined by another highly improbably ally, economics.

Western disapproval of Russian policies in Ukraine did not remain symbolic for long. In July 2014 real punitive measures came. The aim of the “sectoral” sanctions, covering banking, high technology and other sectors of the economy, was to put pressure on members of Putin’s inner circle, who were known to have substantial assets in the West; pinch hard the oligarchs who were used to borrowing in the West to keep their empires going; target several branches of the Russian economy as a whole, particularly the defense industry and oil exploration, by denying high-technology transfers to them; place Crimea off limits to international business; and, eventually, bring home to ordinary Russians that the Kremlin policies which they supported en masse carried a cost that they now had to bear.

The immediate result of these steps was manifold. The inner circle clung even closer to Putin: the sanctions have become a loyalty test, which they were all determined to pass. They were duly rewarded for their losses by new opportunities in Russia. For some, Western censure came as a badge of distinction which protected them from the president’s displeasure on other grounds. The oligarchs faced a choice between staying in Russia and moving out. Some chose the latter, but most stayed: rather than being the real owners of their holdings, they were actually managing them on the Kremlin’s behalf. The economy was offered the option of import substitution, including as a result of Russia banning food supplies from the sanctioning countries, and Crimea received an influx of federal transfers. As for the ordinary Sergeis and Natalias, they suddenly discovered that they were Russians.

Western sanctions, of course, had a major impact on the Russian economy. They added to the structural economic crisis that the country had entered in 2013. Stagnation turned into recession in the fall of 2014 as a result of the sharp drop in the price of oil, which continued to slide downward in 2015 and 2016. The lack of Western investment and technology transfers and the inability to raise finance in Western money markets are not the most serious elements of the current Russian economic recession, but they add to the severity of the crisis. This economic crunch remains the main hope of Western governments: that the Kremlin runs out of reserves to keep the country running and to maintain even the minimum support of the population, and so will have to start rolling back its policies.

This outcome will become evident only in several years’ time: for the present moment, Moscow has enough resources to stay the course, even if some expenses have been trimmed or pushed back. The crisis is forcing the Kremlin toward hard choices in its economic policy, essentially between a more liberal approach to unchain the energies of the national business community, on the one hand, and an effort to mobilize all available resources under strict government control, on the other. Neither option, however, promises a softening of Moscow’s policies toward the West: a replay of the 1980s situation which thrust Mikhail Gorbachev into the hands of the Soviet Union’s Western creditors, and constrained Moscow to make geopolitical concessions, is unlikely this time around. 2015 was a difficult year for the Russian companies which have had to repay Western loans, but as a result the country’s corporate debt has markedly decreased.

While they are not part of a formal response to Russian actions in Ukraine, the European Union’s steps to reduce dependence on Russian energy supplies have resulted in the forced abandonment of Gazprom’s South Stream project which would have supplied gas to Southern and South-Eastern Europe. An expansion of Gazprom’s other project, the North Stream, which connects Russia and Germany across the Baltic Sea, which Germany wants, is under pressure within the EU and from across the Atlantic. In conjunction with other measures, Gazprom’s share of the EU’s gas market has shrunk considerably. The energy relationship, the mainstay of EU–Russian trade, has frayed.

Next to putting pressure on Russia, supporting NATO allies on its borders has been a priority for Western leaders. In the wake of the Ukraine crisis, the three Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – felt they might be the next targets of “Russian aggression” – a striking expression of their lack of confidence in the alliance which they had joined a decade before. Poland also felt exposed. NATO, at its September 2014 summit in Wales, essentially reclassified Russia as a problem rather than a partner and decided to build a rapid reaction force to deal with contingencies along its eastern frontier and to enhance the heretofore very light alliance presence in the eastern member states. Following that, some US heavy weapons were positioned in those countries, and NATO exercises were held there, sometimes virtually right across the border from Russia. As a next step, the United States will keep a rotating – and thus quasi-permanent – troop presence in the eastern NATO countries.

There is no evidence to suggest that Russia harbored any designs on the former Baltic republics of the Soviet Union, not to mention the former Soviet satellite Poland. NATO steps, however, are designed to provide a degree of reassurance to the eastern allies that they will not be left one-on-one with Russia in the event of a crisis. This is reminiscent of the Cold War situation, when US boots on the ground, rather than a formal pledge under Article 5 of the Washington Treaty, were considered a credible guarantee – a “tripwire” – of defense in the hour of need. Even that, however, was not enough then: remember the never-to-be-answered question of whether the United States would risk losing Chicago to defend Hamburg or West Berlin.

At the same time, expansion of NATO military infrastructure, not just the alliance’s “political” membership, toward the Russian border is leading to consolidation of a new permanent stand-off between NATO and Russia. The “Suwalki gap” – 70 kilometers or so of Polish and Lithuanian territory which separate Kaliningrad from Belarus which, if controlled by Russian forces, could cut off the Baltics from mainland NATO territory – is taking the place in NATO’s strategic minds of the famous Fulda gap on the former inner-German border. Add US missile defenses in Poland and Romania, and US Navy ships patrolling the Baltic and the Black Sea, and the message to Russia cannot be ignored.

The message, however, is inevitably read in Moscow not so much as a warning to keep off NATO territory as the United States and its allies demonstrating their capacity to apply military pressure on Russia, now from very close range. The Russian General Staff, which before the Ukraine crisis had regarded Russia’s western border as relatively safe, is consequently revising the armed forces’ posture, deployment pattern and military exercise scenarios. Kaliningrad, after all, is much bigger than West Berlin, and there are no constraints regarding the deployment there of powerful Russian weapons systems, including missiles. This, in turn, would only make the Baltic countries and Poland more nervous.

In 2014, Western countries gave immediate and full support to the leaders of the Euromaidan revolution that toppled the corrupt Yanukovych regime. Western support, however, was powerless to prevent the seizure of Crimea by Russian forces or the Russian intervention in Donbass. What NATO would have done in the event of a large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, which might have been an option considered by the Kremlin in 2014, is a moot point. In actual fact, the United States and its allies supplied Ukraine with intelligence and non-lethal military equipment, but stopped short of sending weapons which could have led to an escalation toward direct collision with Russia.

For the same reason, NATO membership for Ukraine is difficult to imagine while the conflict with Russia continues. Analogies with post-World War II Germany are far-fetched here, and, while they recognize Crimea as part of Ukraine, Western governments would not risk going to war with Russia over it. The United States, focused elsewhere, has de facto subcontracted daily management of the Ukraine crisis to Germany, flanked by France. The Minsk I and II agreements, which Berlin and Paris helped forge, resulted in a ceasefire in Donbass by the spring of 2015 and offered a tentative path to a political solution, but in reality they froze the conflict.

The terms of Minsk II, incidentally, are actually quite acceptable to Moscow but are anathema to Kiev. The agreement would result in Ukraine giving its regions, including Donbass, the power of veto over accession bids to alliances such as NATO and, moreover, would legitimize the anti-Maidan authorities in Donbass. No wonder that Kiev’s best option is to sabotage the accord’s implementation.

Ukraine’s association with the European Union – the issue which sparked off the revolution in Kiev – has been a reality since 2015. A deep free trade area between the EU and Ukraine is a fact, even if EU membership for the latter is at best a long way off. Trade between Ukraine and Russia has collapsed. Ukrainians are on track to visa-free entry into the Schengen countries, while Kiev has banned all air travel with Russia. Post-Maidan Ukraine, while still ruled essentially by a corrupt oligarchy, is geopolitically westward-leaning, and the Ukrainian political nation is being built on a clear anti-Russian foundation. Russia may control Donbass for the time being, and may keep Crimea for good, but the bulk of Ukraine has become a ward of the West. Ukraine’s overall stability now depends not so much on defense from Russia as on Kiev’s ability to deal with the hard-hit economy and deep-seated corruption.

Georgia, two of whose former provinces, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, have been recognized by Russia as independent states – with Russian garrisons in place in both – has recently maintained a calm relationship with Russia, with low border tensions and a revival of trade. In 2014, the EU concluded an association agreement with Georgia, and NATO reaffirmed its pledge to admit the country sometime in the future. Interestingly, in contrast to what happened in Ukraine, this did not evoke overly negative reactions from Moscow. To the Kremlin, the current pro-Western but predictable government in Tbilisi led by the “Georgian Dream” coalition is much preferable to the regime of former President Mikheil Saakashvili, now governor of Ukrainian Odessa, whom Russia does not want to see back in power in Georgia.

In Moldova, the EU has been seeking to preserve the country’s European orientation, despite periodic corruption scandals in the ruling coalition and the rise of pro-Russian opposition parties. For Moscow, however, Moldova’s importance cannot be compared to that of Ukraine. The Kremlin is paying attention to the small impoverished country and is supporting its clients there, but it is not prepared to mount a major effort to draw Moldova into its orbit. However, Ukraine’s decision in 2015 to ban Russian military transit to Transnistria, a separatist enclave which broke off from Moldova in 1990, has squeezed the small (1,500 men or so) Russian garrison in the area and raised fears of incidents. This is a latent conflict which should be closely watched, lest it creates another hot spot in Russian–Western relations.

To roll back traditional Russian influence in the Balkans, NATO in 2015 invited Montenegro to join, despite the unsavory reputation of its government – whose leader Milo Jukanovich has been in place for twenty-five years, longer than Belarus’s Lukashenko – and the less than enthusiastic support for membership among ordinary Montenegrins. The EU has also been managing an ever closer association with Serbia (Russia’s main historical ally in the region) and Kosovo. Brussels essentially told Bulgaria, also known for long-standing ties with Russia, to withdraw from Gazprom’s South Stream project. Western capitals monitored closely the flirtations with Moscow of Viktor Orbán’s right-wing government in Hungary and Alexis Tsipras’s left-wing Syriza cabinet in Greece, but eventually concluded that both are simply opportunistic. In any event, a campaign to rid South-Eastern Europe of remnants of Russian influence was in full evidence.

Information space, which despite the confrontation has essentially remained a global commons, has become a major battleground in the new Western–Russian rivalry. The Western mainstream media were virtually unanimous in strongly condemning Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty in Crimea, the intervention in Donbass and the downing of the Malaysian plane, and were in wholesale repudiation of the Russian regime, its corruption and backward-looking ideological underpinnings, its cultural conservatism, and its neo-imperial ambitions backed by military force. As a result, the image of the Russian Federation in the West is now arguably worse than that of the communist Soviet Union in its heyday. Given such public attitudes, it was probably easier for US and British leaders to engage Joseph Stalin in the 1940s and Leonid Brezhnev in the 1970s than it is for their current successors to reach out to Vladimir Putin.

The Russian state-controlled media, for their part, have launched a most vitriolic campaign against the West, above all the United States. This campaign, too, has broken a few historical records. The disrespect and disdain accorded Vladimir Putin in the West is richly reciprocated by the Russian media depicting US and other Western leaders. Old taboos which were in effect during the Soviet period have been lifted. Apart from the invasion of Iraq, the bombing of Belgrade and the destruction of Libya, the United States stands accused of anything from plotting to dismember Russia to masterminding the Arab Spring to helping create al-Qaeda and ISIS. Arguably, this campaign can be stopped by the Kremlin at a moment’s notice, but the longer it continues, the more of a mark it will leave on Russian people’s minds.

Compared to stale Soviet propaganda, the products of the Russian state-owned media are of superior quality. The Kremlin may have created one of the most efficient and effective public information tools any government possesses in today’s world. Its TV broadcasts are timely, vivid and often highly persuasive, at least for the Russian audience. Vladimir Putin owes part of his phenomenal popularity to Russian television reaching out to ordinary men and women in the country and communicating to them a narrative they believe. Mr Putin himself is an accomplished story-teller, capable of connecting to the bulk of his electorate. Again, unlike his Soviet forerunners, Putin succeeds in an open information space, where the rate of Internet penetration has reached 72 percent.

There can be no repeat of the high accomplishments of Western propaganda instruments during the Cold War, when, despite the Iron Curtain and the massive Soviet jamming of foreign broadcasts, the BBC, the Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, Radio Liberty and others had millions of listeners across the Soviet Union, who turned to them in search of reliable news and convincing explanations. BBC TV can be had on cable in major Russian cities; Radio Liberty has a studio in downtown Moscow; and VOA is freely available on the Internet. There is even a Russian government-supported web portal, Inosmi.ru, which publishes uncensored translations of all important articles in the Western media about Russia. Rather than hushing up criticism of Russia and its leaders, which the Soviet Union practiced all the time, the Russian state-run media attack this criticism immediately, head-on, and seek to demolish the Western story. Moscow is now not afraid of critical words and counters them with words and images of its own. Most Russians find this approach compelling.

This is one reason why Western counter-propaganda now targets not so much Russians in Russia itself as Russian speakers in the neighboring states, primarily the Baltic countries and Ukraine. The aim is to prevent them from becoming Russia’s “fifth column” on the Western side of the new divide cutting through Europe. This is realistic: the paradox of the common information space is that the media environment in a given area is usually dominated by the prevailing local narrative.

There are few illusions in the West that it can influence Russian domestic politics from the outside. This is not just the result of the measures taken by Putin and his supporters beginning in 2012, such as the law which branded foreign-funded NGOs “foreign agents.” The Russian elites, for all their wealth and familiarity with the West, are anything but pro-Western in their attitudes, outlook and ambitions. They are also closely tied to the Kremlin, with relatively few defectors. The Russian middle class is relatively small – even in happier times its share of the population was between 15 and 20 percent – and is currently shrinking, hard hit by the crisis. Much of it, moreover, is composed of government officials loyal to the state. The bulk of the Russian population at large – around two-thirds – are staunch Putin supporters. After Crimea, this fan club has swelled by another 20 percent. The pro-Western liberals, many of whom are strongly anti-Putin, are too few and far between, largely disunited and demoralized and, crucially, out of touch with the common people.

The hope of some in the West is that, in the war of values, soft power is their greatest asset. This soft power is most effective when it comes to such issues as peace and prosperity, affluence, prospects of a better future for the next generation, and the general quality of life. However, soft power is much more effective in attracting the more mobile elements in Russian society to emigrate to Europe or North America than in motivating the Russian people in Russia itself to embrace and practice Western values, not to speak of supporting Western policies. Even as the Russian people seek to deal with corruption, lawlessness, arbitrariness, rights abuse and monopolies of various sorts, it is not a given, to put it mildly, that a Russia which shares more values with Western countries will also align its interests with those of the United States or the EU.

Western leaders recognize, of course, that it is wrong to see Russia only as a threat. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, having taken a tough stance on Russian violations of the post-Cold War “peace order” in Europe, never stopped reminding others that fixing and maintaining security in Europe required cooperation, even partnership, with Russia. Berlin made it clear that it wanted the implementation of the Minsk II agreement as a prerequisite for normalizing relations between Germany and Russia. France’s François Hollande and other EU leaders also subscribe to that view.

For the United States, the geopolitical importance of Ukraine was never too high, and it waned when the armed conflict there abated. Washington, however, needed Moscow’s assistance in 2015 to complete the nuclear deal with Iran, which – to the surprise of the White House – did not fall victim to the Ukraine crisis raging at the time. After Iran, the US needed Russia to try to reach a political settlement in Syria, and a degree of cooperation became possible. North Korea’s experimentation with thermonuclear weapons also puts a premium on US–Russian collaboration.

To those fearful of Russia, these elements of cooperation constitute “appeasement” or even amount to a “betrayal” of a principled Western stance. In reality, national interests continue to prevail. The United States and the EU countries will reach out to Russia when they have to – and when they believe that the degree of commonality of interest is sufficient to expect productive collaboration. This, however, does not represent either appeasement or betrayal. Contemporary Western–Russian relations are highly competitive on account of the fundamental clash of interests regarding the global and regional order, and any cooperation between the parties will happen within the wider environment of continued confrontation.

US and EU responses to the Russian challenge suggest that they regard the challenge as real but moderate, manageable primarily by economic means. This may appear reasonable, but it misses the central issue: if the sanctions and other measures fail to bring Russia back into line, how then should the West relate to a major power which rejects the Western-dominated order and shares that attitude with other even more powerful non-Western countries.