Putin’s crass error in invading Ukraine has already led to NATO uniting as never before, an event which doubled NATO’s border with Russia.
LONDON
If you were to ask Russian President Vladimir Putin what he would like to achieve before he met his maker—presuming, of course, he really believes he has a maker and that his recent religiosity, like Donald Trump’s, isn’t just a sham—you would probably receive the answer, “Destroy NATO, and recreate the Soviet Empire.” Life would be so much simpler for the Kremlin if NATO didn’t exist; it is the primary reason Vlad hasn’t been able to achieve his dream.
Long gone are the days when the West clung to the notion that it could somehow work together with Putin’s Russia on a strategic level. After Russia emerged from the ruins of the Soviet Union, the United States and Europe spent years working to integrate it into a new post-Cold War order. Far from the triumphalist vengeance, as the Kremlin would have the world believe, the West provided Russia with substantial financial and technical assistance. But things began to change in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Russia was not happy with the NATO-led war in Kosovo against its friends in Serbia. Nor was it happy with US President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
This period coincided with the arrival of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin when he declared his intention to restore Russia’s greatness. We now know that this was not about strengthening the rule of law and building up the economy, but more about rebuilding the Russian military, modernising and expanding Russia’s nuclear arsenal, and reviving and expanding Russian intelligence services and activities. That in itself was not necessarily a problem, except Putin had also begun to dismantle the nascent Russian democracy by taking control of all media outlets. He also consolidated state industries and undermined any opposition to his United Russia party, including the assassination of political opponents if necessary. Putin didn’t just tame the oligarchs of the 1990s, he replaced them with his own, mainly drawn from his colleagues from his early days in Leningrad. Suddenly the world realised that Putin was creating an image of the Soviet system under Communist Party control, without any Soviet ideology. The old Party nomenclature had been replaced by his close circle of friends.
If you want a clue to Vladimir Putin’s thinking, you need go no further than his State of the Nation address in 2005, when he described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest tragedy of the 20th century”. Two years later, Putin shocked countless world leaders when he made it clear at the 2007 Munich Security Conference that he rejected the European security order that many in the audience had spent years trying to build. “At the end of the day this is pernicious,” he claimed. The basis for the current war in Ukraine can be traced back to these events.
Although Putin has offered up many outlandish excuses for his invasion of Ukraine, ranging from NATO expansion to imaginary Nazis, Western plots to invade Russia and even Ukrainian plans to acquire nuclear weapons, the reality is less elaborate and infinitely more chilling. He launched the largest European conflict since the Second World War simply as a first step to create a new Russian Empire. Putin has never been primarily concerned with the risk of a NATO attack on Russia. He has always been more concerned about the loss of control over Russia’s perceived sphere of influence, believing that NATO offered these countries an alternative and in many cases, a preferred path. This would create difficulties in recreating the Russian Empire, so NATO must be destabilised, or even destroyed.
Following his 2007 speech, Vladimir Putin decided that the first thing to do was to disrupt NATO’s coherence. A start was made when he began to cultivate a partnership with Victor Orban, Hungary’s right-wing president. This enabled him to block resolutions relating to Ukraine’s application for NATO membership. At the same time he turned his attention to NATO member Turkey, taking advantage of the country’s strained relationship with NATO arising from the civil war in Syria.
Turkey’s long serving president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, always keen to exploit Turkey’s pivotal position between the East and West, was persuaded to purchase Russia’s S-400 air defence system, which immediately prompted the US to sanction Turkey in 2020. Putin has repeatedly tried to drive a wedge between NATO and the US by appealing to the economic interests of Germany in developing the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. He also sought to benefit from the fact that except for Germany and France, neither the US nor any other NATO country, was party to the Minsk 2 accords and again from the Normandy Format negotiations in 2022, to drive wedges between Washington on the one hand and Paris and Berlin on the other over the West’s policy towards Russia and Ukraine.
The Kremlin would have been pleased recently when the party led by Robert Fico, a man who lavishes praise on Moscow and who models himself on Putin’s other NATO friend, Victor Orban, came first in the parliamentary elections in Slovakia.
Fico is now likely to be the next leader of the country. Until now, Slovakia has been, per capita, one of Kyiv’s staunchest backers, becoming the first NATO country to provide Ukraine with fighter jets. At a stroke, courtesy of intense Russian propaganda before the elections held two weeks ago, Slovakia could become Russia’s newest ally. According to the Centre for Democracy and Resilience, 50% of Slovaks believe the United States to be a security risk, a figure sharply up from just a few years ago, while only 40% of Slovaks believe that Russia is primarily responsible for the Ukraine war, the lowest percentage figure in Central and Eastern Europe. A massive 66% also agreed that “the US is dragging Slovakia into a war with Russia because it is profiting from it.” Russian propaganda seems alive and well! “Guess who’s back”, tweeted a happy Orban last week, expecting Slovakia now to join NATO’s awkward squad.
But not so fast. Although champagne corks would have been popping in Moscow when the results of Slovakia’s elections were announced, this small country is in no position to overturn NATO’s Ukraine policy. In any case, Putin’s crass error in invading Ukraine has already led to NATO uniting as never before with Finland also joining the club, an event which doubled NATO’s border with Russia. Soon Sweden will also be a member. Vladimir Putin is a long way from achieving his aim of destroying NATO and, of course, never will.
As for his aim of recreating the old Soviet Empire, not only will Putin’s dream never materialise, but his invasion of Ukraine could result in the nightmare of Russia itself breaking up. Two weeks ago in London and Paris, exiled activists from over 40 regions of Russia gathered for the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum. Attending were activists from the North Caucuses, from Turkic Republics of the Middle Volga, the descendants of Finnic peoples in the Russian far north, and Asian Buddhists from Southern Siberia and the Urals. The agenda for the meeting was simple: to plan for a post-imperial Russia where all their nations, as well as the regions of Central Russia itself, will be independent and free.
As Owen Matthews put it so succinctly in The Spectator recently, the idea of dismantling the Russian Federation as punishment for Putin’s imperial overreach in Ukraine carries the satisfying smack of karmic justice. Imperial hubris will be followed by post-imperial nemesis—and decolonisation of the hearts and minds of millions of Russian citizens. Maxim Kuzakhmetov, a 54-year-old native of St Petersburg who worked for Moscow’s liberal Echo Moskvy radio station before fleeing Russia with his family in March last year, agrees. Maxim was recently declared by Moscow as a “foreign agent” for speaking against the war in Ukraine. He argues that Russia will suffer a “catastrophic defeat in Ukraine and will collapse like the USSR, or like all the empires who lost the First World War” and disintegrate into its constituent regions. “Russia is an aggressor and a terrorist state”, he claims. “It’s the last European Empire in an age when no Empires exist”. Many would agree.