Comment < Columnists
Ukraine is only part of Putin's game plan
February 5, 2015 2:06 pm, Philip Stephens, Finacial Times
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e0332f12-ac59-11e4-9d32-00144feab7de.html#axzz3RCxG7396
A collapsing oil price and the impact of soctions have made him more dangerous
Erupe thinks it has a Ukraine problem. In truth, it has a Russia, or more precisely, a Vladimir Putin problem. Moscow's war against Kiev is fragment of a bigger picture. The Russian president's revachism reaches well beyond Ukraine. The begger goal is to tear up the continent's post-communist settlement.
European hesitation about confronting Russia is readily explained. Economic self-interest, history, cultural affinity, and latent anti-Amerianism have persuaded many Europeans to look at Mr.Putin as the leader they hoped for rather than the one who saw the fall of the Soviet Union as the geoplitial catastrophe of the 20th century.
There is a sductive narrative for a west chastened by bungled inteventions in the Middle East. If Mr.Putin's demands are sometimes provocative - and, as in Georgia as well as Ulraine, can turn into outright aggression - the west should be mindful of the circumstanes. Perphas Nato had indeed broken promises about admitting former Soviet satellistes ? Maybe it had bent the rules when it bombed Serbia ? As for the Iraq war, well, enough said.
The annexation of Crime and the march into Ukraine's Donbass region should have dispelled the doubts. In the case of Angela Merkel this is what seems to have happened. Not a politician to prefer confrontation over negotiation, the German chancellorhas been offered too many lies and broken promises.
The argument within Europe, though, has not ended. Much has been made of the sympathy towards Moscow shown by the Syriza government in Greece. It is not alone. Italy's prime minister Metteo Renzi has been outdoing Silvio Berlusconi in his fealty to Mr.Putin's. Hungary's Viktor Orban publicly disdains liveral democracy. Cyprus always apeaks up for Russia, while French consent to the sanctions regime is halfheatred. So no one should be suprised by the latest Russian offensive: there is no more powerful a provocation to the Kremlin than appeasement.
Mr.Putin's litany of grievances - Nato's " encirclement " of Russia, a plan to humiliate Moscow, broken intenational rules - have been heard over and over. Occasionally there is a small truth hidden in the big lie, but the essential storyline neve deviates. The west wants to destroy the power and dignity of Russia. So familiar are the charges that the implications are often discounted. Everyone has hear Mr.Putin pledge to roll back the frontiers, but few have really been listening.
The annexation of Crimea and the push into eastern Ulraine were in one dimension opportunistic. Mr.Putin had misread the Maidan protests and failed to anticipate the tall of former presidnet Viktor Yanukovich. So he grabbed what he could. Expedient as the war may have been, it fitted the game plan to restore suzerainty over much of the former Soviet empire.
Genaral Yury Baluyevsky, the fomer chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, says the confrontation with the west ia a continuation of the cold war. The methods, though, are now more sophistcated. Military force, he says, is " the final stage of the process. " Moscow has mastered the art of hybrid warfare, including " information and psychological pressure. " To paraphrase the general, Mr.Putin will divide and weaken his enemies before deploying force.
In its softest form. this means presenting rolling propaganda as rolling news with the rapid expansion of the Kemlin-controlled Russia Today news network. Then there is the fundng of populsit parties of left and right in western European capitals. Marine Le Pen's National Front in France has taken a Russian loan. Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-immigrant UK Independence party, counts himself an admirer of the Russian leader.
Further along the spectrum there are the bribes paid to politicians and business leaders and the stakes taken in vulnerable financial institutions in south eastern Europe and the Balkans. There is a none-too-subtle campaign to destabiliese pro-western in the forper Soviet space - Bulgaria is a recent victim - by exploiting their dependence on Russian energy. Add in the testing of Nato defences by Russian flghter planes, cyber attacks and kidnappings in the Baltics, and the incursions f nuclear bombers, and you can see what the general was talking about.
Ms.Merkel has recognised the danger, publicly warning about subversion in Moldova and attempts to pull Serbia back into the Russian orbit. The US has been working with the European Commission to ease some of the vulnerabilities of energy-dependent governments in southeastern Europe. But in western Europe there is widespread reluctance still to recgnize the big picture - to set the Ukraine crisis in the context of Mr.Putin's broader aims.
Mr.Putin is not the creation of western perfidy. Throughout his career, from the office of the mayor of St.Petersburg to the top job in the Kremlin, he has been remakably constant in his ambitions and in the ruthlessness he will deploy to achieve them.
A collapsing oilb price and the impact of sanctions have made him more dangerous: without oil and gas revenues, his domestic support now rests on his capacity to mobilise nationalist anger against tha alleged attempt by Nato and the EU to subjugate " mother Russia. " The west's options are limited, but the biginning of wisdom is to understand that this is not just about Ukraine.