The Russia Conundrum

CHAPTER 18

EXPANSIONIST DREAMS

Whatever politicians may say, the foreign policy agenda of all nations is based on self-interest. Political leaders may declare they are taking action to support other nations and help right moral wrongs, but altruism is rarely the true motivation.

When the West sent support to the anti-Assad opposition in Syria, it was a gamble aimed at shoring up its own presence there. When Vladimir Putin sent the Russian military to defend Assad, he was doing the same. This was not a moral crusade, but an East–West arm wrestle. The difference was that Putin played things more ruthlessly and with greater purpose, and his aims were less the interests of the Russian state than the venal self-interest of his clique of cronies. Western leaders, on the other hand, were constrained by pressure from parliaments and critical voices at home, in ways that Putin was not.

Putin’s aim is always to secure for himself and his entourage a strong position in relations with the West, which will allow him to maintain his grip on power in Russia without criticism of the methods he uses, to legitimise his authority at home through recognition abroad and to persuade Russian citizens that the country is surrounded by hostile forces. The West allowed him to do this. The US withdrew from Syria, leaving the field to the forces of the Kremlin, while American wavering on the future of NATO left the Baltic countries and others in anxious limbo. NATO may have advanced to Russia’s doorstep, but it no longer constrains the Kremlin.

Shortly after Joe Biden became president of the United States, I was asked by an American interviewer for my opinion of Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy intentions and whether his aggression against neighbouring countries was likely to continue. I could see that my interlocutor was concerned about the damage the Kremlin was inflicting on the prospects for world peace, but I could offer him little in the way of reassurance. My assessment, I told him, is that Putin is a former KGB agent who regrets the loss of the USSR and has set himself the goal of regaining control of as much of the old Soviet Union as possible.

When my interviewer asked me what the West could do to curb an escalation of international confrontation, my response was equally gloomy. The United States, I predicted, would do nothing, except maybe impose a few more sanctions. The Democrats’ lack of resolve would give the Trumpian faction of the Republican Party enough ammunition to beat up on Biden and proclaim that the US was now led by a weak and incompetent president. As for Europe, I expected that the EU would do even less than the US, since Germany, the only country whose opinion really matters, does not want to alienate the Kremlin and risk jeopardising its supplies of Russian gas or seeing Russian markets closed to German manufactured goods. The consequence of Western weakness, I concluded, would be to further embolden Putin in his campaign of foreign expansionism. It gives me no pleasure to note that just a year after my remarks to the American journalist, my predictions were borne out by his invasion of Ukraine.

Putin’s intentions evidently revolve around the acquisition of control over more and more territory, for reasons which, frankly speaking, make very little sense. Even if he achieves his aim, Russia will be no better off than before: it will have taken on responsibility for more territory, which it doesn’t need, and more people, most of whom will be unhappy and resentful, in political, economic and social terms.

Yet, despite all the obvious disadvantages, Putin has clung to his expansionist dreams. In his 2005 State of the Nation address, he called the collapse of the Soviet Union ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century’. ‘For the Russian people,’ he said, ‘it has become a genuine tragedy – tens of millions of our fellow countrymen are condemned to live beyond the boundaries of the Motherland … and the pestilence has spread to Russia herself.’ In 2018, he repeated his remarks to an audience in Kaliningrad, declaring that the dissolution of the USSR was ‘the one single event of Russian history’ he would most like to see reversed.

It is no secret why Putin was doing it. Opinion polls show that 55 per cent of Russian people expect Putin to make Russia ‘a great country’ again. The older generation have preserved the memory of the Soviet Union as a superpower and there is nostalgia for those bygone days. Many of them say they want Russia to be respected; but being respected is different from being feared. In opinion polls, however, they don’t differentiate between the two. Older Russians have been inculcated with the dangerous belief that for Russia to be respected by the world, she needs to be feared by the world. For younger folk, things are more complicated. I would say that maybe half of them share the same dead-end nostalgia for a lost superpower, having imbibed the values of their parents; but the other half genuinely want a Russia that is open and integrated into the global system of values. It is on this section of the population that we, in the democratic opposition in Russia and worldwide, must focus our best efforts to secure a more rational, less belligerent future for the nation.

It won’t be easy. Putin has shown himself to be adept at exploiting the politics of aggression abroad in order to boost his standing at home. It is a fact that the Russian economy has deteriorated dramatically since he illegally prolonged his hold on power; in the majority of Western democracies, such a disastrous performance would have resulted in a drubbing at the polls. Putin’s approval ratings slipped alarmingly between 2008 and 2014, when Russia officially went into recession, only for the Kremlin to launch its campaign to annex Crimea, followed by military intervention in eastern Ukraine. Almost immediately, Putin’s poll numbers soared to more than 80 per cent. But the cost of shoring up his own domestic standing has been to draw Russia into perilous foreign adventures that put the whole country at risk. The Kremlin-controlled media endlessly repeat the claim that Russia is beset by enemy forces, surrounded by a supposedly hostile West bent on destroying the Motherland. In such circumstances, it is little wonder that some people believe Putin is their only hope, a leader dedicated to defending Russia’s international clout whom they must trust implicitly.

Just like the Soviet leaders of the 1970s, Putin has increased military spending at the expense of the civilian economy, prioritising nuclear weapons that can destroy cities in Western Europe and North America over investment in health, education and social provision for his own citizens. He has used the narrative of conflict with the West to give lucrative contracts to his cronies who control the state arms industry. He announced that he has developed new generations of weaponry and presented them to the world in menacing terms. In March 2018, he gave a video presentation of what he said were new, ‘invincible’ nuclear weapons, developed in secret by Russia’s scientists. ‘No anti-missile system, either now or in the future, has a hope of stopping them,’ Putin told his audience. Images of the new missiles were projected on to a giant screen with animations of the destruction they were capable of inflicting. In one sequence, a missile was shown hovering over a map of Florida, a not-too-subtle threat that Washington was quick to condemn. ‘It was certainly unfortunate,’ said a State Department spokesperson, ‘to have watched a video presentation that depicted a nuclear attack on the United States. We do not regard this as the behaviour of a responsible international player.’ It was, though, exactly the response the Kremlin was hoping for: Washington’s discomfort was widely reported and apparently enjoyed by some Russian voters who were going to the polls just two weeks later. In an election where real opposition candidates were barred from standing, Vladimir Putin was re-elected to a fourth term in office with 77 per cent of the votes (of which only about half were the result of ballot rigging).

Russian military intervention in Syria had a similar effect. The fact is that Russian society a priori has very little interest in Syria and the Middle East, which means that Putin has a free hand to do whatever he wants there. The only problem would be if Russian soldiers started getting killed, so Putin has been clever. He has maintained the fiction that there will never be Russian boots on the ground in Syria, while pursuing his goals through the deployment of hundreds of ‘private’ troops, mainly belonging to the PMC Wagner Group controlled by his associate, Yevgeny Prigozhin.

The fiction of Russian ‘non-involvement’ was exposed in February 2018, when between 300 and 500 Wagner mercenaries with tanks and field artillery attacked a stronghold of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a largely Kurdish militia with close ties to the US-led anti-ISIS coalition, close to the town of Khasham. American advisers working with the Kurds called for US air support and a full-scale battle ensued. The attacking troops were pummelled by American artillery, fighter planes and helicopter gunships, with the Pentagon estimating their casualties at more than 100 men. It was the first direct confrontation between American and Russian forces since the end of the Cold War, with the potential for catastrophic escalation.

As international tensions rose, Putin continued to deny any knowledge of the operation or, indeed, of any Russian fighters on Syrian soil; but US intelligence reports told a different story. According to the Washington Post, covert Russian communications, intercepted by the intelligence services, revealed that Prigozhin had been authorised to carry out the attack by senior officials in the Kremlin. Prigozhin reportedly boasted to Bashar al-Assad’s Minister of Presidential Affairs that he had ‘secured permission for a … fast and powerful operation’ to be launched in early February. It would, he said, be ‘a nice surprise’ for Assad; and the Syrians, in return, promised Prigozhin that he would be properly rewarded for his services.

Having initially denied everything, the Russian Foreign Ministry was obliged to amend its story, eventually acknowledging ‘several dozen’ Russian casualties, killed or wounded in the attack. The wounded had been ‘provided with assistance to return to Russia, where they are now undergoing medical treatment at a number of hospitals’. The Kremlin’s deniability was strained to breaking point. ‘Russian servicemen did not take part in any capacity whatsoever [in the operation],’ maintained the spokesperson, ‘and no Russian military equipment was used.’ The troops were merely ‘Russian citizens who went to Syria of their own free will for various reasons … and the Ministry does not have the authority to comment on the validity or legality of their individual decisions.’

As with all the other conflicts he provokes around the world, Putin views Syria as a means to blackmail the West. The tension surrounding the confrontation and the threat it poses to global stability put the Americans on the defensive; they find themselves obliged to sit down at the negotiating table with Putin, on terms that are advantageous to him. What does Putin want from these negotiations? Ideally, he wants a return to the old days, when the world was divided into recognised spheres of influence, allowing Moscow and Washington to maintain autonomy of action in their sector of the globe, with a guarantee of non-interference in the other’s affairs. Most importantly, such an outcome would ensure the impunity of Putin and his inner circle to travel and spend their money anywhere in the world without constraints.

When Western countries dutifully came to the table after Russian interventions in Georgia, Syria and the Donbas, they assumed that Putin shared their desire to find solutions, to end wars that were – and still are – causing human misery and taking human lives. But the Kremlin’s overriding motive in talks with the US and the EU was to secure a better strategic position for itself, which frequently meant simply freezing the conflict. The confrontation in the Donbas, for instance, was carefully prolonged by Moscow as a means of undermining Ukraine’s independence. Putin pretended to the West that he wanted a diplomatic accord to satisfy all parties and persuaded the EU to include him in negotiations as a peacemaker, whereas, in reality, he was an instigator and a warmonger. The evidence of what all this was leading to is now plain for the world to see – and we are far from reaching the end of it.

The same is true in Syria. Putin has no interest in ending the fighting, because it is to his advantage to deepen the conflict and thereby secure for himself a role of global influence. By keeping Bashar al-Assad in power and tying down US troops on the ground, Putin has created the illusion that he holds the key to peace in the Middle East. But peace is not on his agenda. What he really wants is to boost his domestic approval ratings by publicly humiliating Washington and its allies in scenes that can be shown nightly on Russian television. At a time when the Russian people are suffering poverty, recession and isolation from the rest of the world, a foreign war in which Moscow is seen to be sticking it to the Western ‘enemy’ is a dog whistle call to the Great Russian sense of pride, which precludes criticism of the man who claims to be fighting for the honour of the Motherland.

A common thread in nearly all of Putin’s foreign ventures has been a determination to support authoritarian rulers – those who maintain their grip on power through the use of force against a dissatisfied population. In 2014, he tried with all his might to prevent the overthrow of the dictatorial, pro-Moscow Ukrainian leader Viktor Yanukovych when a groundswell of popular discontent made his position untenable. In that case, Putin failed; but he did much better in Syria, where his resolute intervention rescued the murderous Bashar al-Assad from the vengeance of a population revolted by his record of oppression. In Belarus, too, Putin’s unwavering support has become the crutch on which the unpopular president, Alexander Lukashenko, has come to rely. In 2021, Lukashenko violated all international norms to detain a Western airliner overflying Belarus in order to arrest one of his many vocal critics. The Kremlin was alone in the international community in coming to his rescue, emboldening the Belarusian leadership to continue its crackdown on domestic dissent.

It is not hard to understand why Putin is doing this. He supports endangered dictators because he knows that he himself is in the same category, haunted by fears that he too might be overthrown by the Russian people. Putin was concerned by the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in Ukraine and Georgia, where popular uprisings ousted repressive regimes and replaced them with democratically elected governments. His alarm deepened in 2011, when the Middle East was rocked by the events of the Arab Spring, in which the leaders of Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Libya were all toppled. While the West greeted the uprisings as a victory for democracy, Putin viewed them as ominous harbingers of chaos and destabilisation, which he believed were covertly stoked by the CIA. Later the same year, the threat came closer to home as hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg, protesting about the rigging of parliamentary elections. The aforementioned demonstrations were briefly dubbed the ‘snow revolution’, a worrying augury that Russia was not immune to the bacillus of revolt. Putin’s response was to blame Washington. He accused Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, of fomenting unrest in Russia as a prelude to a Western-sponsored coup, aimed at bringing about a regime change similar to those in Georgia and Ukraine.

Putin’s stock reply to criticism of his aggressive foreign ventures is to protest that the West is doing worse. He is quick to highlight alleged Western transgressions, including interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, the attempted ‘imposition of democracy’ and military intervention. But at the same time, the Kremlin claims for itself the right to a ‘sphere of privileged interests’ in the former Soviet territories and a ‘right to defend our compatriots wherever they live’. A 2017 report for the Foreign Relations Committee of the US Senate, titled ‘Putin’s Asymmetrical Assault on Democracy’, pointed out the inherent contradiction between the two positions:

If Putin can demonstrate to the Russian people that liberal democracy is a dysfunctional and dying form of government, then their own system of ‘sovereign democracy’ – authoritarianism secured by corruption, apathy, and an iron fist – does not look so bad after all. As the National Intelligence Council put it, Putin’s ‘amalgam of authoritarianism, corruption, and nationalism represents an alternative to Western liberalism … [which] is synonymous with disorder and moral decay, and pro-democracy movements are “Western plots” to weaken traditional bulwarks of order and the Russian state.’

If the West had paid more attention to Putin’s public pronouncements in recent years, the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine might not have come as such a surprise. In July 2021, he published a long treatise, setting out Russia’s claims on the country. The essay’s title, ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, was an indication that he has little time for an independent Ukrainian state.

Russians and Ukrainians are one people and the wall that has emerged in recent years between Russia and Ukraine, between the parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space, is a great misfortune and tragedy. These are … the result of deliberate efforts by those forces that have always sought to undermine our unity. The formula they apply is – divide and rule. Hence the attempts to sow discord among people, to pit the parts of a single people against one another.

In his essay, Putin names the malevolent ‘forces’ who he claims are bent on sowing division between Moscow and Kiev. Historically, he says, they have included Ukrainian nationalists who sought alliances with Poland or Germany in order to sabotage the ‘brotherly’ bonds with Russia. In the Second World War, some Ukrainian leaders were willing to collaborate with the Nazis in the struggle against Soviet domination, and Putin draws a direct – and defamatory – comparison between them and the modern Ukrainian independence movement:

The Nazis, abetted by collaborators from the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, did not need Ukraine, except as a living space and slaves for Aryan overlords. Nor were the interests of the Ukrainian people thought of in February 2014. Public discontent was cynically exploited by Western countries who directly interfered in Ukraine’s internal affairs and supported a coup. Radical nationalist groups served as its battering ram. Their slogans, ideology, and blatant aggressive Russophobia have become defining elements of state policy in Ukraine.

Putin equates the democratically elected government of today’s Ukraine with the Nazi collaborators of 80 years ago, casting the Western democracies in the role of Hitlerite aggressors:

The leaders of modern Ukraine and their external ‘patrons’ prefer to overlook these facts. And we know why: if they bring about the weakening of Russia, our ill-wishers are happy with that. Ukraine is being turned into a springboard against Russia … comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us … under the protection and control of the Western powers. We are witnessing direct external control and the deployment of NATO infrastructure.

He then hints that he is ready to re-take the lands he believes should belong to Russia, advancing a number of spurious claims to prove that Moscow would be justified in doing so.

In 1954, the Crimean Region of the RSFSR was given to the Ukrainian SSR, in gross violation of legal norms that were in force at the time … The right for republics to freely secede from the Soviet Union was the most dangerous time bomb planted in the foundation of our statehood and it exploded … in 1991, when all those territories and people found themselves abroad overnight, taken away from their historical motherland … It is crystal clear that Russia was blatantly robbed.

Having established the narrative of historical injustices and interfering foreign enemies ‘robbing’ Russia of her rightful territory, Putin lays out the pretexts on which he might take it back. Just as Hitler alleged mistreatment of ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland as a reason for its annexation, Putin cites tales of oppressed Russians in eastern Ukraine, bullied, abused and demanding the Motherland come to their rescue.

[They] have peacefully made their case. Yet, all of them, including children, have been labelled as separatists and terrorists. They have been threatened with ethnic cleansing and the use of military force … after the riots that swept through Ukrainian cities, after the horror and tragedy of Ukrainian neo-Nazis burning people alive. Russia has done everything to stop the fratricide … but Ukraine’s representatives, assisted by Western partners, depict themselves as ‘victims of external aggression’ and peddle Russophobia. They arrange bloody provocations in Donbas, pandering to their external patrons and masters.

The Ukrainian government, says Putin, is no more than ‘a tool in foreign hands’, being used to wage war on Russia. In the face of such injustice, Russia will not stand idly by.

The machinations of the anti-Russia project and its Western authors are no secret to us. We will never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia. And to those who would undertake such an attempt, I would like to say that this will result in the destruction of their own country.

It is worth pausing to consider what psychological impulses lie behind Putin’s decision to write his July 2021 article, which appeared like a bolt from the blue. If you read it carefully, its language is very much in the tradition of the pseudoscience that Stalin and Brezhnev used to come up with. On closer analysis, though, we can see it as a natural result of the evolution of Putin’s views on Ukraine and a conscious political provocation that betrays his very concrete, real-world intentions.

At first, Putin had no strong opinions about Ukraine – like most Soviet and Russian people, he simply didn’t think about it because it didn’t impinge directly on the daily life of their country. Ukrainian independence was no great tragedy; he probably regretted the loss of Crimea, but it wasn’t something worth fighting for. As the Putin regime evolved, however, he began to realise that ‘post-imperial nostalgia’ could be a useful tool to deploy at times of economic decline. He based his imperial idea on a couple of ideological tropes: the concept of a Slavic brotherhood of the three nations – Russia, Ukraine and Belarus – which Putin borrowed from Solzhenitsyn; and the old Slavophile movement, which venerated the Russian empire and believed that owning Ukraine was vital to keeping the empire going. These were the deep-seated historical stereotypes that got him into thinking that Ukraine is an inseparable part of Russia – and now, as a result of Putin’s rhetoric, there’s a good part of Russian society that believes it, too. Putin’s thesis represents a deep historical prejudice that is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Putin’s discovery of these post-imperial possibilities might have remained a matter between him and his conscience if history hadn’t intervened. When the Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych, Putin saw it as an attack on Russia’s sovereignty, a personal slight that kick-started the transformation of his personal beliefs into a national policy. And the essence of this policy is that Russia must control Ukraine at all costs. So, annexing Crimea clearly wasn’t the end of things: it was just an intermediate step on the path to the full-scale invasion of 2022.

Putin has little or no hesitation about the use of military force. Spurred on by the military General Staff, he has long accepted that everything that is happening is now the first phase of the Third World War. When he massed Russian military forces on Ukraine’s borders in the spring of 2021, it may have begun as a bluff; he may have intended to use the show of intimidation as a means to extract concessions from NATO and the West. But if he had genuinely wanted to negotiate with the Americans, it was unlikely that his public proposals would have been so blatantly unacceptable. Putin was demanding a block on NATO expansion into Ukraine and Georgia, and a ban on NATO forces in the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, both of which the West had always made clear it was not prepared to accept.

The reality of the situation was very different. The fact is that Putin and part of his entourage genuinely believe that all the problems inside Russia and in the countries surrounding it are the result of hostile American special operations. Putin genuinely believes – and genuinely fears – that if the Americans have missiles in Russia’s neighbouring states against which even the bunker in which he now hides will provide no protection, it means they intend to use them. He has a deep-seated conviction that everyone wants to tear Russia apart and gobble up its natural resources.

Such a distorted view of the world convinced Putin that the only solution is the creation of a belt of buffer states around Russia. And for this to work, the Americans must be made to recognise Moscow’s right to dominate this ‘zone of influence’ and to hold sway over the sovereignty of countries located in it. The problem for Putin and his associates was that they did not know how to get Washington to sit down at the negotiating table and agree to Russia’s demands. Economic levers, the type of ‘energy blackmail’ that can be used against Western Europe, have very little impact on the United States. Putin tried to cause trouble in the US elections as a mechanism to influence its politicians there, by creating havoc and chaos among the electorate, playing on their fears for their personal security or political corruption. Those methods might work in some countries of Western Europe, but in the United States threats and provocations result not in fear, but in reciprocal antagonism.

For all those reasons, Putin concluded that apart from the never-ending threat of the nuclear arms race, his most effective bargaining mechanism was the instigation of international conflicts. The Kremlin fomented political and humanitarian crises in Syria, in Libya and in Venezuela, followed by the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. There were, though, significant downsides. The Russian public may have approved of the bloodless annexation of Crimea by the Kremlin’s ‘polite little men’, but having their sons called up to serve in a foreign conflict against a fellow Slav nation is considerably less attractive. And then, there are the practical questions that arise from it. The Kremlin can occupy Ukraine, but what does it do next? How does it feed the population? And, God forbid, what happens when local partisans start to fight back? When sabotage begins? Ukraine is not Chechnya: there are 30 million people in mixed Russian-Ukrainian families currently living in Russia and neither they nor anyone else has any appetite for war.

What do ordinary Russians think? Regardless of the truth or otherwise of such claims, the Russian people have been endlessly told that NATO is a danger; but for the Russian in the street, it hardly matters whether the flight time of a US missile is 20 minutes, as it is now, or 5 minutes, as perhaps it might be if it were launched from Ukraine or Eastern Europe – in either case, the end result is the same because, unlike Vladimir Putin, they don’t have a bunker to run to.

Putin is weaker than he makes out, and his solution for domestic weakness is almost always aggression abroad. He knew the adverse consequences that military intervention in Ukraine would have on East–West relations, and while he says he is prepared to weather that storm, he has begun work on an insurance policy. Throughout its history, when Russia has encountered difficulties in its relationship with the West, it has threatened to make common cause with China. Stalin used the triumph of Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949 to put pressure on the newly founded NATO alliance. Brezhnev, Chernenko and Andropov all flirted with Beijing when relations worsened with Washington. And Putin is making the same move today.

There is, however, a difference: in former times, Russia held the whip hand, while China was the weaker party, economically, politically and militarily. Moscow could therefore manipulate the relationship to its own advantage. But that has changed. China has outstripped Russia in all respects, making Putin’s gambit decidedly risky. His hope is that Russia could find a strategic and civilisational solution to its struggle with the West by offering to become China’s junior partner. It has been done before – Putin’s role model is the great Russian prince, Alexander Nevsky, who agreed to kowtow humiliatingly to the rulers of the Horde in return for their support against the West. But Putin is in a weak position if he thinks he can use economic talks with the Chinese as a counterbalance to deteriorating relations with the USA and Western Europe. My own experience of working with Chinese companies taught me that the Chinese are tough negotiators. We supplied them with several million tons of oil per year, helping to construct rail border crossings to transport it, and we reached agreement on a pipeline to China from Angarsk in Siberia. In all our negotiations, the Chinese were quick to exploit every advantage they held over us. The only way we could get a fair price for our oil was by demonstrating to them that we had the capacity to sell it on the European market where rates were higher, so the Chinese could not demand a cut-price deal from us. Putin does not have that luxury. If he wants to sell to China to spite the West, Beijing is not going to be generous in the terms it offers. The Chinese offers so far have been remarkably bad. According to the leading Russian oil and gas analyst, Mikhail Krutikhin, Gazprom’s sales in 2021 went for an average of $170 per thousand cubic metres of gas, compared with the European gas price of $270 per thousand cubic metres. Rosneft’s sales of oil were similarly uneconomic. Putin has failed to learn the lesson that China and Chinese companies will never fail to take advantage of the geopolitical follies of a would-be trading partner. Not only has Putin agreed to unprofitable commercial contracts, he has also made concessions in the historic border disputes on Russia’s eastern frontier, ceding territory to China on the Amur and Ussuri rivers.

The geopolitical benefit to Russia from all these concessions is very doubtful. But Putin’s real aim in signalling that the Kremlin is willing to take on the role of junior partner to Beijing is to cause alarm in Washington. It has raised the stakes in East–West negotiations, forcing the West to turn a blind eye to some of the domestic and foreign policy misdemeanours of the temporary occupant of the Kremlin. There is real alarm in some European capitals that Beijing will henceforth have a hidden role in determining Moscow’s future policy direction. In my opinion, the alarm has been raised too late – this is now the reality with which we have to live. Indeed, the main problem for Putin is not the reaction of the West, but the potential discontent of the Russian people. Russians are much more wary of Beijing gaining influence over their domestic affairs than they are of Paris or Berlin. Putin’s spin machine has helped to dampen domestic discontent, but it won’t be able to do so forever.

Putin is the victim of a disastrous geopolitical miscalculation. Strategically, China doesn’t need a junior partner, and it will never quarrel with the West in order to side with Russia. Quite the opposite. China’s long-term interest is possibly to see Russia fall apart so it can snap up our Siberian territories. It doesn’t want Russia clinging on to its coattails; and it has no interest in helping to prolong the lifespan of Russia’s unviable centralised state, if that were to become necessary. China will not go to war over this, but neither will they offer to help us.