VLADIMIR PUTIN – WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG? PART TWO
In my last essay I misinformed you (impossible, I hear you cry) when I said that Litvinenko was murdered in 2000. While he legged it to England in 2000, he was actually murdered in 2006. Apologies. I would say even Homer nods, but that would be pompous and presumptuous, so I won’t.
There can be little doubt that when Putin became the second president of the Russian Federation in March 2000 he wanted to bring Russia in from the cold and normalise relations with the West. Perhaps things began to turn sour over the Second Gulf War. Despite having lots of oil of her own, Russia bought Iraq’s oil, and Putin is believed to have tried to persuade Saddam Hussein to resign to avoid invasion. When that did not happen and the intervention happened, Russians felt that they were being ignored and that their views were not being taken into account. The ABM talks appeared to be going nowhere and Russians were increasingly concerned by what they saw as Western interference in Georgia and Ukraine. It was perhaps unfortunate that the USA and some European countries (France and Germany dissenting) had been indicating since 1994 that Georgia could eventually join NATO. Perhaps they had failed to look at a map, for it is inconceivable that Russia could accept NATO membership for Georgia. An analogy would be the British reaction if the Republic of Ireland had applied to join the Warsaw Pact, or the reaction of the USA if Mexico had applied.
In March 2008 Putin had served the two terms as president allowed by the Russian constitution, so rather than change the constitution, which he almost certainly could have done, he merely swapped places with his prime minister, Dmitry Medvedev, an old chum from Leningrad days. Nevertheless Putin was still very definitely in charge.
In the event Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008 when despite a very poor showing by the Russian army whose vehicles broke down and radios did not work, numbers told. When Sarkozy of France brokered a cease fire Russia was poised to take over the whole country had she wished. As it was, she effectively annexed South Ossetia and Abkhazia, although recognising them as autonomous republics, unrecognised by nearly everyone else. In 2012 Medvedev’s term as predicant ended and Putin was once more re-elected.
Relations were further soured after the close of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, expertly managed at considerable expense by Russia. According to my informant, an ex-Royal Marine now working in security, who was in Sochi prior to the games, all security staff were gathered to be given a pep talk by President Medvedev. At the end of the talk, simultaneously translated into the various languages of the contracted security organisations, one questioner enquired as to the level of Islamist terrorist threat to be expected. Medvedev replied that he had informed the Saudi Arabian ambassador that if there was a single incident he would nuke Mecca! I suspect this report has to be regarded with a healthy degree of scepticism, but it would reflect the Russian attitude at the time. It was at the close of the games that ‘little green men’ appeared at vital points in Crimea. Telephone exchanges, airfields, ports and television and radio stations were taken over, mostly without opposition and it was quickly apparent that the little green men were Russia troops shorn of insignia. A referendum showed that a large majority wished to be reunited with Russia, which then annexed the territory. The referendum was widely regarded as rigged, but while the majority in favour may have bene exaggerated, it is probable that the result was genuine. In September 1991, in the chaos surrounding the impending dissolution of the USSR, a referendum in Crimea had called for it to be an independent republic but part of the New Union Treaty, Gorbachev’s ultimately unsuccessful attempt to bring the ex-soviet republics back into the Russian orbit. In the rest of Ukraine, where attempts to reduce Russian influence in favour of relations with the West brought barely concealed threats from Russia, a separatist uprising east of the River Dnieper was supported by Russian troops masquerading as volunteers.
By now it was becoming increasingly clear that Putin had metamorphosed from a genuine reformer into an autocrat determined to recreate what he and others saw as ‘traditional’ Russia, a view reinforced with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. When one recalls that Tsarist Russia included the Baltic States, Finland and a large chunk of Poland, to say nothing of Ukraine, one wonders just how far Putin’s ambitions reach. Any attempt to reoccupy the Baltic states, (members of NATO), would of course trigger Article Five whereby an attack on one is regarded as an attack on all. Would Putin risk all-out war with NATO? Would Washington go to war for Riga?
Currently there is talk that Russia might be prepared for negotiations. Any such would only be a ruse to give time for Russia to rebuild her diminishing stocks of war materiel. It is unlikely that Zelensky or his US and British backers will be lured into talks without preconditions, such as a withdrawal from Russian occupied Ukraine, but pressure for such could come from Germany. We must wait and see!
There will be no essay next week as I shall be in the Ardennes conducting a battlefield tour of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. As that battle was fought in two feet of snow I am rather hoping that the weather will be kinder this year.
I think you may well have a very good point. As for the Middle East, Ben Ali, Assad, Mubarak, Gadhafi, Saddam Hussein et al may have been unpleasant pieces of work, but in a way they were our unpleasant pieces of work, in that their regimes were secular and they kept their boot firmly on any sign of religious extremism. Palmerston pointed out how unwise it was to get involved in somebody else's' civil war, and I think he was right!
The fact that he and his colleagues made serious attempts to build strong relationship with the West unsuccessfully may be a key reason for the pivot post the prime ministerial innings?
As you pointed out that the reaction to having an ever expanding NATO eastwards may have influenced the Russian policymakers to focus on securing areas that give them the ability to create a buffer towards the western borders. Further, hindsight indicates that the world might have been a tad safer without a number of interventions in the Arab world starting with the Iraq chapter. The spectre of unchecked unilateralism might be the single most important factor that started this repositioning?