Vladimir Putin seeks re-election on March 18 and there isn’t much doubt about the outcome. The question now is what he’ll do in his fourth term as Russian president.

Putin has put Russia at the centre of world attention. Thanks to his intervention in Syria, his invasion of Ukraine, and his hacking of the US election, he is at the eye of a raging storm of controversy that has inspired millions of words of often fevered, and occasionally deranged commentary. The Russian constitution requires that he stands down after this term: will he be a lame duck? Or can the great tactician find a way to stay in control?

The Frontline Club has gathered three of the coolest observers of the Russian political scene to dissect Putin’s past and future, and to ask what will happen now for the world’s largest country.

Chair

Oliver Bullough, host of the Frontline Club’s popular Kleptoscope series and himself a former Moscow correspondent.

Speakers

Ellen Barry reported from Moscow for the New York Times between 2008 and 2013, the last two years as bureau chief, winning a Pulitzer Prize. She is now an International Correspondent at the paper’s London bureau.

Arkady Ostrovsky is Russia and Eastern Europe editor at The Economist, which he joined in 2007 as Moscow bureau chief after a decade as a Moscow correspondent at the Financial Times. His book The Invention of Russia won the 2016 Orwell Prize.

Shaun Walker is the outgoing Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, having previously reported for The Independent from Russia. He has distilled his experiences into his newly-published The Long Hangover, which analyses how Putin has exploited the past to cement his hold on Russia’s future.

Copies of The Long Hangover will be for sale at the event.

Fogel’s investigation into doping — the art and science of evading drug tests in global athletic competitions — leads him to Dr. Grigory Rodchenkov, the scientist in charge of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory. Over a year of Skype calls and visits from Moscow, Dr. Rodchenkov orchestrates a steroid regimen for Fogel designed to game the system. When news breaks of an alleged Russian plot to cheat the Olympics, Fogel discovers that Rodchenkov is in possession of state secrets.  Within days, Rodchenkov confides to Bryan that his life is in danger, setting off a chain of events revealing a conspiracy with its roots at the heart of the Kremlin.  Rodchenkov escapes to the United States with Fogel’s help and becomes a whistleblower.

The revelations first made by Rodchenkov in the film, have since been corroborated by multiple forensic and journalistic investigations. His on-camera testimony along with the film itself was cited as critical evidence in The International Olympic Committee’s decision to ban Russia from the 2018 Winter Olympics.

Watch the trailer here.

Chair

Luke Harding is a foreign correspondent for the Guardian and was the Russia correspondent from 2007 – 2011 whereupon he was refused re-entry to the country due to his reporting. He is the author of Mafia State, which describes the political system under Putin

Speakers

Bryan Fogel (Director)

Dan Cogan (Producer)

Bill Browder is the founder and CEO of Hermitage Capital Management, which was the investment adviser to the largest foreign investment fund in Russia until 2005, when Bill was denied entry to the country and declared a “threat to national security” as a result of his battle against corporate corruption. Following his expulsion, the Russian authorities raided his offices, seized Hermitage Fund’s investment companies and used them to steal $230 million of taxes that the companies had previously paid. When Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, investigated the crime, he was arrested by the same officers he implicated, tortured for 358 days, and killed in custody at the age of 37 in November 2009. Since then, Browder has spent the last 5 years fighting for justice for Mr. Magnitsky.

“A case study of how an idea written on paper sacks in the midst of the gulag archipelago could one day be pronounced as a national idea by the heirs of the NKVD.”
– Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism

Charles Clover, the Financial Times’ former Moscow bureau chief, began the debate at the Frontline Club on Thursday 28 April by defining the idea of Eurasianism as, “essentially an artificial nationalism created in the 1920s by Russian exiles to rationalise and justify, in theoretical terms, an empire where Russia forms the core of a unique non-western civilisation.”

It was not until the collapse of the Soviet Union that these ideas were re-discovered and re-appropriated by “regime dead-enders who wanted to see a continuation of the soviet empire but on other terms,” through a different idea that would justify it.

Driven by the rhetoric coming out of the Kremlin and propagated by the media, “this is not an ethnic nationalism,” said Clover, but rather a “civilisational nationalism” with Russia at its centre.

While not a new idea, Eurasianism as part of official discourse only appeared very recently, said writer and broadcaster Mary Dejevsky.

Eurasianism was an attempt to bring some sort of concord between the pro-western and Slavophil strands of thinking that had dominated Russian society since the turn of the 20^th century, “at a time when Russia was looking for an identity for itself… especially in terms seeking a definition of nationhood,” said Dejevsky.

“The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 left Russia with a huge identity crisis that took a long time to enter official consciousness, but that has really started to crystallise in the last two or three years.”

Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador to Russia from 1988 to 1992, said that Eurasianism is merely the “current phase of something that has gone on a very long time in Russian history.

“With a humiliating collapse, questions of identity – who we are, what we are – become vital and people produce fake answers which can then be exploited by politicians.”

Russian history, said Braithwaite, is a succession of humiliations and “the Slavophil-Eurasian idea is partly a compensatory device for the various disasters that have happened” – and a way of rationalising that with the idea of Russia as a great nation.

Clover said he would group this philosophy of Eurasianism with Russia’s changing relationship to the West as part of a multi-national nationalism designed to accomplish certain strategic objectives.

BOOK LAUNCH: @charles_clover 'Black Wind, White Snow', 27 April @YaleBooks https://t.co/kmdYY1B8GO pic.twitter.com/dJ4KSWF1iX

— Pushkin House (@Pushkin_House) April 17, 2016

At the same time confronted by a more nationalistic opposition during Putin’s third term, the Kremlin decided to equate this sense of national humiliation with the idea of a foreign conspiracy and promote a Eurasianism that “would ensure the integrity of a multi-national state and possibly expand it” said Clover.

Gabriel Gatehouse, chair of the debate and BBC Newsnight foreign correspondent, asked the panel to comment on the observation that a lot of the current official Russian discourse seems to be aimed at trying to return to a bi-polar world, reminiscent of Cold War divides.

For Dejevsky, many Russians are not looking to resurrect the old Cold War order, “but rather a multi-polar world where a smaller Russia co-exists but has an equal voice with other powers in the world.”

“There is a resort to Eurasianism, whether organised or simply as a concept, when Russia feels that is has been cold shouldered, especially by Europe, and is looking to a certain identity which has some justification, some basis, in a Russia that belongs to both Europe and Asia,” she said.

In this context, said Clover, the question of whether Putin himself believes in the idea of Eurasianism is almost irrelevant.

“We assume that Putin is a pragmatist at heart and only really cares about power. That has always and will always be true, but the context of his pragmatism has changed utterly over ten years.”

In the past, pragmatism was paying lip-service to nationalism, said Clover, but now national interests are denominated in completely different ways in terms of territory, making it pragmatic for Putin to seize Crimea and put troops into eastern Ukraine.

“The entire context of being Putin has changed. The playing field in Russia is now a totally nationalist one. So as a skilful, powerful politician, the way he plays politics has changed and as a pragmatist he must now be a nationalist.”

“It took me years to make sense of my own history, and Russian society will take a similar time.”– Vladimir Ashurkov, Russian opposition politician

In collaboration with Theatre Royal Plymouth and the Sputnik Theatre, on Thursday 14 January the Frontline Club presented a staged reading of Grandchildren: The Second Act by Alexandra Polivanova and Mikhail Kaluzhsky as part of its Power, Politics & Performance in Russia series.

Told through a series of overlapping testimonies, Grandchildren explores how people construct and ultimately justify the actions of family members who – as members of Stalin’s inner circle or of the secret police – contributed to the atrocities and purges of the Soviet era.

Chairing the subsequent debate that covered the performance itself and the question of collective memory, BBC foreign correspondent Gabriel Gatehouse began by asking the panel what parallels they saw between the period depicted in the play and contemporary Russia.

John Freedman, theatre critic and former theatre critic for The Moscow Times, said that one of the strengths of the piece was that it “points no fingers, it has no answers, it does not say somebody is guilty or innocent.”

“What it messes with is life and the reality of a life that people live. Any one of us can look back into our own pasts and find difficult moments that we rationalise.”

And it was this, said Freedman, that causes him to despair, “because I see the same thing happening now. People around me are finding the exact same answers to similar questions.”

Writer and broadcaster Oliver Bullough stressed that each nation seeks to define itself by its past, but that in the case of Russia it is far harder to simplify into didactic terms and to challenge the narrative that has already been established. “People need stories to live their live by,” he said, “in order to make sense of it.”

Watching the Sputnik Theatre performance at #FrontlineClub with Cameren – Power, Politics & Performance in Russia pic.twitter.com/w0iNfLAhKv

— Catie Dear (@Catie_Dear) January 14, 2016

Touching on a recurring theme that a lack of lustration – a process of reckoning akin to the Nuremberg trials – was one of the primary causes of the current situation in Russia today, Vladimir Ashurkov, a prominent opposition politician and executive director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, said this is perhaps best illustrated by the resurgence in mass support for Stalin.

Russians have a long history of authoritarianism, said Ashurkov, but key is the role that government plays. “It can take steps to bring people closer, to make sense of their history and to be in touch with reality.”

He added that, over the past 15 years, the Russian government has sought to rehabilitate the cult of Stalin as a means of inspiring and imposing a new wave of xenophobia and nationalism.

Freedman touched on the building of this Stalin brand as an increasingly powerful tool: “What I see is people using the name of Stalin, using the picture of Stalin, as a sign to say ‘this is good, this is strong, this is part of the Russia I want’ – and running towards that.”

Alexandrina Markvo, a leading figure of the Moscow art scene currently living in exile, added that this use of the Stalin-myth as a tool for propaganda was resoundingly clear when you examined the teaching of history in schools across Russia, and specifically the way in which Stalin is presented.

On the subject of complicity, one audience member reiterated the panel’s earlier argument that the historical divide between victims and perpetrators had become far harder to define in Russia, and – over the course of 70 years of Soviet rule – had frequently become interchangeable. He argued that this had made it more difficult to point fingers of guilt, and suggested instead the existence of a complex of collective guilt versus collective innocence.

Ending with the question of whether Russia had entered a period akin to that under Soviet rule, speaking from the floor, artistic director of Teatr.doc Elena Gremina said: “Of course not, because the current government is much more dangerous and, in a sense, much more anti-people, and anti-state than even the Soviet government.”

“This is not a phone conversation…”

                                                                        – Soviet saying

Introducing his new book The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries at an event at the Frontline Club on Tuesday 29 September, co-author and founder of Agentura.Ru Andrei Soldatov began by saying that to understand modern Russia you must first understand the mentality and historical relationship between citizen, state and surveillance.

“The saying – ‘this is not a phone conversation,’ used by soviet citizens – is still in use today and reflects a continuity of some habits we inherited from the soviet past.”

The impact of this soviet legacy is mirrored in the methods and the principles of the FSB’s modern communication interception systems, as well as the “strange” and complicit relationship between the state military industrial complex and the telecommunications industry in Russia.

Soldatov continued: “The most important principle for the Russian system of surveillance is the back door to all Russian communications, which provides direct access to all servers, all networks on Russia soil.” The country’s revolving door policy between state and private sector results in a “complete lack of resistance, even collusion from the industry itself.”

Furthermore, said Soldatov, the “surveillance mentality” seen today derives more from the soviet approach to control, which prioritised intimidation and self-censorship, than from the use of technology.

“Russia’s system of online surveillance is not very sophisticated. The problem is that the Russian state is extremely skilful in sending a message: ‘You might be spied on… Be careful.’ And in a country with a very recent totalitarian past one needs to be only reminded of what might happen and that is enough.”

@AndreiSoldatov @irinaborogan presenting new book the Red Web in @frontlineclub #russia #putinAtWar pic.twitter.com/jI9W7OnBq0

— Agne Dovydaityte (@AgneDovydaityte) September 29, 2015

Co-author Irina Borogan acknowledged the problems of this soviet legacy and suggested that while the strategy President Putin has tried to apply to the internet is similar to that he successfully used to suppress traditional media in the early 2000s, his basic misunderstanding of how social media works post-Arab Spring leaves room for optimism.

“Once again, the Kremlin’s approach was based more on intimidation than mass oppression or technology. Putin believes that all things exist in a hierarchical structure and if you exert pressure from the top you can rule all things. But this fails to understand the internet as a network, which we all know has no centre – everyone can participate without authorisation.”

For Privacy International researcher Edin Omanovic, from the perspective of the state it is less a problem of a soviet citizen mentality than Putin’s worldview shaped by KGB/FSB surveillance policy.

“It is the narrative between how the horizontal approach to new technology is changing the world and being a force for liberation, versus how new technology is actually a force for oppression.”

Omanovic added that this is not merely a problem confined to Russia, but one that involves the billion-dollar private surveillance industry throughout the world, where cooperation between surveillance manufacturers and state defence contractors is often implicit.

The future of #Russia's internet: walking on the knife's edge – one kept purposefully obscure. http://t.co/LmzbEczf8m

— oDR (@opendemocracyru) September 14, 2015

For the BBC’s former Moscow correspondent and event moderator Daniel Sandford, while the KGB tactic to focus solely on dissident leaders and “well known trouble-makers” combined with often high levels of incompetence led to a certain lack of control, there is a concern that the FSB’s increasing professionalism – and a better organised and resourced state surveillance programme than existed in the 1970s and 80s – will see the state bring the internet under its control as it has done with other traditional media outlets.

Borogan, however, disputed this suggestion, claiming that what differentiates today from the soviet era is that “technology is getting cheaper and cheaper all the time and to install an all-powerful surveillance network throughout the entire country is ever more difficult.”

The widespread nature of internet networks will, in essence, beat Big Brother.

For Tonia Samsonova, foreign correspondent for Echo Moskvy, it is the actual goal of decision makers who are establishing the surveillance state that is the issue.

“One part of [these people] are actually working for the government, for the security of the regime, the others think of their job as a business. So one might ask what are the real goals of those guys? Are they to protect Putin, protect themselves as a class or to make as much money as they want?”

For Samsonova the danger lies not in the cynical surveillance measures of today, but in data departments and analytical models which can be used to predict issues and trends before they happen and to preemptively target potential trouble-makers.

In the space of just a few years, Chechnya has undergone a remarkable transformation. Gone are the minefields and piles of rubble, which have now been replaced by broad avenues, luxury boutiques and glass-fronted skyscrapers. It’s virtually impossible to see that there was ever a war.

Award-winning journalist Manon Loizeau has spent the past 20 years covering the Chechen conflict. In Chechnya, War Without Trace she returns to the places she knew well, filming undercover, to examine the lasting effects of conflict with Russia.

Behind the gleaming facade of the new Grozny, Loizeau discovers women and men seemingly more terrified now than during all the years of war and occupation. Although a fifth of the population vanished during the war, a fear of persecution has led to a collective forgetting of history.

Loizeau mixes the moving stories of those who search in vain for their loved ones with footage capturing the newly-polished surface of Chechnya, a country that remains internally traumatised and restless.

Chechnya, War Without Trace won the Grand Prize of the World Organization Against Torture (OMCT) at 2015 FIFDH (Human Rights Forum and Film Festival) in Geneva.

The film shows as part of the Witness strand on Al Jazeera on 17th June at 9pm.

Directed by Manon Loizeau
Duration: 90′
Year: 2014
More info: www.javafilms.fr

l-r: Richard Gizbert, Peter Pomerantsev, Ben Judah and Misja Pekel

Who shot down MH17? For international TV channel Russia Today (RT), whose tag line is “Question More,” the truth has many faces. But is the Kremlin-backed channel’s post-modernist approach to news threatening to undermine empirical journalism? That was the subject of a panel Q&A following the UK premiere of Misja Pekel‘s film The World According to Russia Today on Friday 13 March at the Frontline Club. RT declined to participate in the discussion, though Frontline noted that the event was organised with the expectation of having an RT representative present to offer their own perspective of the film and its claims.

The discussion, chaired by Al Jazeera English Listening Post presenter Richard Gizbert, began by exploring claims in Pekel‘s film that the channel deliberately distorts key news relating to Russia: the Ukrainian revolution; the downing of MH17; the recent murder of Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov.

“Propaganda as we’ve known it seems to have morphed,” said Gizbert. “Rather than attacking a point and coming up with one single alternative narrative, often times the idea is to throw a bunch of stuff at the Western narrative and see what sticks. They use the channel in the same way as fighter pilots use flares – to distract and confuse any incoming flak.”

Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible – a book about working in Russian media – said Russian propagandists and military strategists had long used conspiracy theories as a device to confuse their enemies.

“The main principle is to disorganise the enemy by spreading confusion and conspiracies in any form,” he said. “It’s an old theory of propaganda – you do something to get viewers, the conspiracy theorists, the far-left viewers, then you seed disinformation when you need to.”

Ben Judah, author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In And Out Of Love With Vladimir Putin, said alternative narratives such as those championed by RT had taken on a life of their own online. By tapping into audiences sceptical of the official version of events, he said, the channel had begun to erode notions of a single, objective truth.

When an audience member posed a question about RT’s high ratings in America (the station is the second most popular foreign news channel, second only to BBC World), Richard Gizbert commented on Americans’ growing dissatisfaction with popular news channels since 9/11, and RT’s unmistakable image as a young company offering an aesthetic and content altogether different from the norm.

“Russia Today is beaming out into the West, and what it’s beaming out through its programming is this idea that there is no fundamental truth, that there is no such thing as news (…) RT is entering our self-doubt and that’s why it’s effective,” said Judah.

Dutch film-maker Pekel said he had set out wanting to explore whether this approach meant RT could be considered a journalistic channel.

“What caught my eye was that when it’s about Russia you don’t see any criticism from the channel itself (…) Maybe we have to ask the question of whether Russia Today is actually a journalistic channel.”

Some audience members questioned the film’s view of Russia Today, suggesting that the issues raised by Pekel are not unique to Russian media, but are evident in news reports by American channels like Fox News and ABC. Challenged by audience members over why the film included just one current RT employee, Pekel said many had not been granted permission from the channel’s Moscow head office to talk to him on camera.

“I personally wish there were more people from RT in the film. I agree that it would have been more balanced. But if we didn’t get the possibility I still think it’s an important film to make,” he said.

Watch and listen back below:

The Term tells the unique inside story of the Russian opposition movement as Vladimir Putin settles into the Kremlin for a third term. Directors Alexey Pivovarov and Alexander Rastorguev gained exclusive access to anti-corruption blogger Aleksei Navalny and other key opposition figures, including Putin’s god-daughter, Ksenia Sobchak, and Solidarnost leader, Ilya Yashin.

Undercover footage from the front line of opposition protest rallies and intimate discussions among opposition leaders give The Term testimonial value, providing an insight into the lives of men and women for whom protest has become their raison d’être. It also provides a chilling discourse on democratic rights and freedoms in Russia, the attitude of state power toward differently thinking groups, and the tendency of the masses to seek out charismatic leaders.

Directed by Alexey Pivovarov, Alexander Rastorguev and Pavel Kostomarov
Duration: 84′
Year: 2014

Opening the debate organised by Standpoint magazine, which took place at the Frontline Club on May 1, Standpoint Editor Daniel Johnson began by restating the motion: This house believes that Britain is more interested in doing business with Russian Oligarchs than standing up to Vladimir Putin.

L-R Peter HItchens, Tony Brenton, Daniel Johnson, Ben Judah and Roger Boyes.

Ben Judah, reporter for Standpoint from Russia and Ukraine and author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In and Out of love with Vladimir Putin, asserted that, fundamentally, “British laws should not be violated.”

“The [Putin] regime functions as an asset stripping regime which rips billions and billions of dollars out of the country every year. This money is then transported out into tax havens and a vast amount ends up in Britain – under the Union Jack.”

According to Judah, of the estimated $93 billion that was laundered through Britain in 2013 only 0.26% of assets were frozen by the UK government. Although not dependent on PEPs (Putin Exposed Person), certain elite sectors of Britain’s economy are PEP-addicted: such as high-end property, commercial courts, PR agencies, London private wealth management and English public schools.

For Judah, from Blair to Osborne any attempt coming from the House of Commons to tackle shell companies, which function as offshore vehicles offering anonymity to foreign investors, has been “shot down”, demonstrating that Britain “is not interested in fighting overseas corruption”.

Tony Brenton, British Ambassador to Russia from 2004 to 2008, responded by questioning the meaning of motion and how this should affect Britain’s response to Putin.

“The line I am going to argue is that we should do business with Putin, including doing business with Oligarchs.” While acknowledging the corruption and repression within Russia, Brenton, nevertheless, argued that this should not solely dictate Britain’s response to Putin.

“Our current policy of engagement [which has been a unified western policy since 1991]… which maintains business and strengthens links has, up to a point, worked. Trade has grown, the market economy has become better established, more Russians are coming over here for good or bad reasons, and the constituency in Russia which doesn’t like the way Russia runs itself has grown steadily stronger.”

The alternative, according to Brenton, is a return to the Cold War policy of containment and the use of sanctions where, “we don’t talk to them, we don’t trade with them, we don’t let them into any organisation. We, in the words of President Obama, isolate them.”

There is a need, continued Brenton, “to look at the world from a Russia point of view,” where, since 1991, they feel that they have been “systematically neglected, humiliated and encircled”.

Roger Boyes, diplomatic editor at The Times, rejected Brenton’s belief in the need for a Russian-centric view of the current situation, instead arguing against what he believed to be the fallacy that engagement changes Russia and against the concept of Russian victimhood.

“I don’t think that Russian paranoia should be the basic principle of British foreign policy… the truth is that Putin is playing us, trying to split Europe.”

Stimulating Russia debate @StandpointMag last night with @b_judah . Notable how pro #Putinistas see Ukrainian state as irrelevant irritant

— Roger Boyes (@rogerboyes) May 2, 2014

Boyes warned of the dangers of this current situation of interdependency.

“There is too much of this ‘leaning in’ towards Putin – seeing an extraordinary interweave between Russia’s commercial interests and our own humble role as the concierge of the Oligarchs.”

“The point is… why are rich Russian’s coming to Britain? Because Russian courts are rubbish, because Russian schools are very limited. The kind of things that a Russia with money wants and wants to invest in are not there. He has been denied these things. By making it more complex for him to do that, by restricting their visa access we are saying stay where you are, invest your money at home and improve your own civic society and your own social structure. We can help the Russians in their path into the post-Putin era. It is an act that will not only recover our self respect but also help Russia find a way forward.”

Challenging this assertion, Brenton rejected Boyes’ claim. “We are not going to change the internal dynamics of Russian politics. What we can do is stand firmly critical of their appalling human rights records… but we actually make it harder if we enable Putin to stand up and look like a Patriot.”

“More important, if we want to help the Russian people, is to get out of the Ukrainian quagmire, and begin trading with them and relating to them.”

In response to this analysis, Judah reasserted the responsibly for the situation in Ukraine at Putin’s need for a quick victory to boost his own decreasing popularity. Forming a direct correlation between the stripping of Russia’s assets, the removal of money into British offshore accounts, a lack of investment in Russia and the Ukraine crisis, Judah related the means by which to combat the spread of Putinism with “stopping the moral degeneration of Britain”.

Suggesting the need to impose emergency checks on Russian cash buyers and the establishment of new regulators on high-end oversees investment, Judah stated that “you could in fact be helping by imposing tougher anti-Russian standards at home”.

Rejecting this policy as an unwarranted return to a cold war mentality of containment, Brenton concluded that the most effective way of removing Putin is rather through the process of engagement, “by developing these social links that will eventually undermine him from below”.

Ultimately, he concluded that if you are going to start closing down these links with Russia, and by extension – if you are morally consistent – with China, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria you have to realise that “we depend on these countries to give us employment and prosperity.”

“It is a big bad dirty world out there and you need to get your hands dirty if you are going to make any kind of living at all in it.”

Catch up with the video and podcast:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/140501-in-hock-to-the

As news of the build-up of Russian forces in Crimea dominated the headlines, a distinguished panel convened at the Frontline Club on 5 March for a First Wednesday event examining the current crisis in Ukraine. The insightful discussion, chaired by Paddy O’Connell of BBC 4’s Broadcasting House, largely focused on Russian motivation for intervening in Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin’s specific agenda, the extent of Western complicity, and forecasts for the political future of the state.

L-R Paddy O’Connell, Olexiy Solohubenko, Timothy Garton Ash, Richard Sakwa and Anne Applebaum

Richard Sakwa, professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent, and author of works on contemporary Russian politics, kicked off the discussion by arguing that Russian intervention in Ukraine, in the form of military presence, demonstrates a pointed and valid guarding of its interests in the region:

“Putin is responding to a long-term simmering…. The concern that Russia has had is significant… it is a major power with geopolitical concerns.”

Timothy Garton Ash, historian, political writer, and professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, denounced Russian efforts to “protect their interests”, recalling an earlier meeting with Putin in which he had declared Russia’s “right and duty” to protect all Russian speakers regardless of their citizenship. Garton Ash disputed this logic:

“All international order and respect for sovereignty would break down if the mother country had a right to protect all language speakers in other countries.”

Anne Applebaum, columnist for the Washington Post and Slate and the director of the Transitions Forum at the Legatum Institute in London, commented on Putin’s central role in manoeuvring the crisis:

“Putin has put himself very much at the centre of this in the last couple of days…and one of the things that has emerged from what he said is that this is very much a domestic issue in Russia. Russia sees the West as some kind of opposite… and feels the need to create an ideology which is anti-Western…. What he really fears is not so much the events in Kiev, but the kind of language we heard in Kiev – ‘anti-corruption, ‘democracy’, ‘rule of law’, ‘freedom of speech’.”

Olexiy Solohubenko, news and deployments editor at BBC Global News and former head and of the Ukrainian Service, agreed, adding that “Putin…in his mentality, doesn’t really accept Ukraine as a state”, and that his actions should be understood within the context of his view of Ukraine as an “artificial construct”. Solohubenko then dismissed tendencies to overcomplicate Putin’s motivations in the region:

“He wanted to pull Ukraine away from Europe – it is not going to happen. He wanted to stem nationalism in Ukraine – he is achieving the opposite. He is radicalising a lot of Russian public opinion.”

The question of Western involvement, and possible complicity, in the current situation in Ukraine was raised. Applebaum responded:

“There has been a stream of efforts to have a good relationship with Russia, that go back twenty years… (which) has almost always ended in disaster… Russia is unable to recognise the countries on its borders… as sovereign and independent states.”

Garton Ash remarked on the West’s cavalier attitude with regard to intervening in other countries without proper international legitimacy, which he admitted could be seen as a contributing factor, but ultimately denied that Europe should shoulder the blame for the crisis:

“The last place in which this crisis was manufactured is the West. Because the problem with the West is that it has done so pathetically little in, and for, Ukraine ever since its independence.”

An audience member commented in agreement with regards to the West’s past failure to act to a sufficient extent in Ukraine. O’Connell enquired as to how the West could positively aid Ukraine in the future; Applebaum responded:

“The most positive thing the West could do is to help Ukraine get out of this cycle of corruption, of cronyism, of poor rule of law, of a weak court system, of bad policing… the best the Ukrainians can do for themselves right now is to fix their economy… and construct institutions that will give the country a more positive future.”

Garton Ash agreed that the Ukrainian government must shoulder the majority of the responsibility for the resolution of the crisis, suggesting that it clearly verbalise its absolute commitment towards all Ukrainian citizens, namely Russian speakers and Crimean tartars. He added that, on the condition of Ukraine adhering to certain democratic principles, the West should welcome the state into its “union of sovereign, democratic countries.”

An audience member, originally from Ukraine, commented on the overshadowing in the Western media of the “popular revolution” in Ukraine by the Russian military invasion.

Applebaum offered a response:

“That was the purpose… to distract attention, to undermine the situation, to change the story… it is now up to Ukrainians to use the energy of that revolution to rebuild their political institutions… The role of the West is assistance, aid, conversation, but not dictation on how to rule.”

Sakwa was in agreement, yet stressed the importance of Russian involvement in the resolution process:

“Ukraine has to have a civilised relationship with its Eastern neighbour… Putin in many ways does reflect the complexity, the angst, the identity issues, of Russia itself… That’s why we need to bring Russia in, and Putin in. Not as a problem, but as the solution.”

The final parts of the discussion saw a focus on Ukraine’s future, with Solohubenko emphasising the mass disillusionment of Ukrainians with their current leaders, and pointing towards two opposition leaders with the potential to command popular support – Vitali Klitschko and Petro Poroshenko.

Solohubenko closed the discussion by highlighting the threat of bloodshed in Ukraine at the hands of Russian military, after which “de-escalation will be almost impossible.”

Garton Ash echoed this sentiment, and commented that if bloodshed is avoided:

“There is a real chance that future history books will see this as a decisive moment in consolidating the independence of Ukraine… one day Putin will go and Russia will think better of where it wants to be. Part of that conversion will be who lost Ukraine. Part of the answer will be Vladimir Putin.”

Watch and listen to the full discussion below: