I see a lot of commentators suggest the Russian people are not to blame, and certainly there are some who have bravely protested against the war, but let us not fall into the trap once again of thinking that Russian can somehow be changed into a peaceful democratic nation. This will take generations and the best action of the west would be to keep Russia weak and simply unable to afford overseas aggression.
To help understand the issue, The New Yorker magazine has a fascinating article about Putin and Russia and how a small, isolated group are running the war. Isaac Chotiner, a NY journalist spoke by phone with Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist and an expert on the Russian state’s intelligence apparatus.
It's well worth a read but this part, towards the end, caught my attention:
IC: What are you hoping to happen here? I mean, obviously, I’m sure, for the war to end, but is there an off-ramp you see for Putin and Russia? How is Russia going to reconstitute itself?
AS: "It’s a very hard question, to be fair. We are always trying to make these comparisons with the late nineteen-eighties, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, and then we got perestroika and all of that. So maybe is it possible to repeat the same thing? I was fifteen years old, but still I remember that back then there was this cheerful mood that people were good, and it was just the system that was bad. So back then maybe I was naïve, maybe my parents were naïve and my friends were naïve, but we had this idea that it was only because of the Communist Party and the K.G.B., and if you could get rid of them everything was going to be fine. People are good. Even the people, say, in the military and in the security services. They were just pressured to be bad and to serve the system."
"These days, unfortunately, we don’t have this excuse. We do have lots of people who support the war, unfortunately. Yes, I understand that it’s about propaganda, and it’s about fear, and people are really fearful. They understand what is at stake, and these select repressions were quite successful at freezing society. But, nonetheless, there’s so many people who support the war, and, to be honest, I just don’t know the answer. I don’t know how to get them back as humans."
IC: You are talking about average citizens and people within the state itself who believe in the war in a way that they did in the Soviet system?
AS: "You have ordinary people, and people in the security services, and people in the military, and they are supportive of this war. And I don’t quite understand how we can humanize them back. I just don’t see a way. That’s my problem."
He is talking about 'humanising' the Russian people - because the vast majority support the war.
Putin has done incalculable damage to Russia's already battered reputation as a bully and a troublemaker, adding genocide and war crimes to the list of existing charges that includes cyber attacks, interference in foreign elections and propping up despotic regimes wherever they can. This is apart from the theft of billions of dollars from the Russian people.
To do that I think we need to encourage western companies to withdraw from Russia altogether. Those that remain should be boycotted until they are forced to pull out. All the toughest sanctions must remain on.
There are already moves to rapidly cut Europe's dependency on Russian oil and gas which accounts for about a quarter of the Russian economy. This will be costly to Europeans but we must do it.
We must also re-adopt the 'Star Wars' approach of Ronald Regan and spend far more on defence in Europe, forcing a weakening Russia to spend ever more of a shrinking economy on weapons.
After 1945, Germany was forced to confront Nazi crimes because it was occupied and the allies set up the Nuremberg trials which heard evidence against the perpetrators. Ordinary Germans were taken to see the inside of the concentration camps. Germany was given a new constitution and a lot of money and slowly, painfully became normalised. That is not going to happen in Russia.
No one is going to occupy Russia. They must do it for themselves. The west should maintain pressure by doing as they did in a divided Germany. Maintain a strong deterrent while simultaneously showing the growing prosperity of free societies. Ukraine must be rebuilt better, brighter and safer than before and we should all be prepared to pay a little towards it.
A 'solidarity' tax similar to the one West Germany used to rebuild the East after the fall of the Berlin wall would help to fund reconstruction costs and Russian money seized under the sanctions regime should also go to Ukraine.
No one can change Russia except the Russian people and until they do - and I think we are looking at a two or three generations - they need to be kept isolated from civilisation.
