Book summary: Putin's world

MISPLACED?EXPECTATIONS

The year 2014 was in many ways a watershed for the West in its relations with Russia. The annexation of Crimea and subsequent launch of a war in Southeastern Ukraine led the United States and its allies to question the basic premises of their assessments and expectations of Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

Most Western leaders had to admit that the expectations they had harbored after the Soviet collapse had been misplaced.

They had hoped a post-communist Russia would eagerly cast off the shackles of a dysfunctional twentieth-century ideology—communism—and would embrace joining the democratic, capitalist modern world. That would also mean they would eschew an assertive foreign policy directed against Western interests.

But Americans, and to some extent Europeans, failed to understand the humiliation that millions of Russians felt at suddenly losing their “inner” and “outer” empire—the post-Soviet states and Eastern Europe.

It was difficult for Russians to accept that they no longer had a natural right to dominate their neighborhood and exercise influence beyond their borders.

From the Russian point of view, there was a double humiliation: the loss of the post-Soviet states and the fact that the United States and its allies had created a global order to which they expected Russia to conform.

It was indeed a unique unipolar movement with a dominant United States and a Russia that had lost its ability to project power globally. No wonder it sought to recoup its power and influence as soon as it could.

But not everyone had the same expectations as the United States or Europe. China, India, and other countries in the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa viewed Russia through a different lens.

They were less concerned about Russia becoming a democracy than about the United?States—which they viewed with different degrees of wariness—becoming an even more dominant global power after the Soviet collapse.

This was clear when the United Nations General Assembly in March 2014 voted to condemn Russia’s annexation of Crimea. While Western countries voted in favor and only a handful of countries, including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Syria, and North Korea, voted with Russia against the resolution, many countries abstained, including China, India, Brazil, and South Africa.

These countries believe Russia has historically dominated its neighborhood and will inevitably seek to do so in the future. And they believe it is not their or anyone else’s business to foist Western democracy on a Russia that does not appear to desire it.

To understand Putin’s world, one has to start with the history and geography—and, yes, culture—that shaped it. These factors explain how Russia has been able to bind its diverse population together through the development and propagation of a compelling historical narrative that largely depicts the West as its enemy. And, indeed, how it relies on that depiction for its own legitimacy.

LOST AND?RESTORED?EMPIRES

The Soviet Union was not defeated in a war. It collapsed as a result of its own internal weakness and inability to confront the desire of its ethnic minorities for greater autonomy and independence. It has created a post-Soviet generation more inclined to believe that the USSR collapsed because of sinister outside pressures—in other words, a plot by the United States and what they call its “special services”—and that it was stabbed in the back.

Since the fifteenth century, when Russia finally threw off the three-century Mongol yoke, it has constantly alternated between territorial expansion and retreat.

With no natural borders and vulnerable to invasion from the south, east, and west, Russia could only be safe if it conquered its neighboring territories. Security for Russia meant defensive expansion.

Periodically, Russia would shrink—the result of foreign invasions?or domestic upheavals—but it would always recover and “gather in the lands” around it once again. Putin does not see himself as the twenty-first-century “gatherer” of Russian lands after Gorbachev “lost” large swaths of what had been the tsarist and Soviet empires. Nevertheless, he would like to restore Russian influence over these territories.

Vladimir Putin’s version of the past—designed to bolster Russian patriotism and support for him—has been quite effective. History informs any country’s leader and population of their role in the world.

But in Russia the past haunts the present more vividly than in many other countries, perhaps because Russia has yet to develop a national narrative to which its population can fully subscribe.

THE RUSSIAN IDEA

What does it mean to be Russian? This question for centuries has provoked controversy and never has been fully answered. Is being Russian an ethnically exclusive concept?

After seventy-four years of communist rule, and the loss of the non-Russian Soviet republics, it was not clear what Russia’s new national identity should be nor who was a Russian.

The seeming confusion about what it means to be Russian has its roots in the origins of the Russian state. Muscovy became a consolidated state at the same time as it began to expand and conquer adjacent territories in the fourteenth century.

For the next five hundred years it expanded (and sometimes contracted) as the state grew stronger. Many “Russians” were in fact the product of mixed marriages, with a variety of roots. Indeed, one-third of the prerevolutionary Russian imperial foreign ministry was staffed by Baltic Germans, ethnic Germans who lived in the Baltic states when the Russian Empire acquired them.

Russians’ sense of their own identity was also increasingly bound up with their sense of imperial destiny, of paternalistically ruling those around them, including Ukrainians, who were known as their “little brothers.”

Over the years, the Russian Idea became a powerful cornerstone of the country’s evolving identity. Its core was “the conviction that Russia had its own independent, self-sufficient, and eminently worthy cultural and historical tradition that both sets it apart from the West and guarantees its future flourishing.”

Russian rulers early on defined themselves by how they differed from Europe, stressing their Eurasian vocation. That, rather than comparing themselves, say, to Asia, was their starting point.

EU-RUSSIA?RELATIONS?AFTER?CRIMEA

Since the annexation of Crimea, EU-Russia relations have dramatically deteriorated, although there are considerable differences between the ways individual members view the relationship.

Following the Crimean annexation, Brussels imposed sanctions on individual Russians said to be involved in the seizure, but these were modest.

So far, the EU has reaffirmed its sanctions every six months since July 2014, despite considerable opposition from Italy, Greece, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Cyprus, and business groups in many countries.

The EU has accepted that Russia does not desire to be integrated into Europe on Europe’s terms, and it remains conflicted over how to deal with Moscow.

The Ukraine crisis has unfolded during a time when the EU itself has come under increasing strain, both as a result of problems with the EU’s and Greece’s near default and as waves of migrants from Syria, other countries in the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Africa have provoked opposition in European societies and led to the rise of populist, anti-EU parties.

As time wore on, EU unity in support of sanctions began to wane. The economies of member countries experienced different degrees of economic challenges, and the business communities in many EU countries began to lobby their governments to rethink the utility of sanctions.

Despite the economic difficulties caused by the sanctions, not only has the Kremlin not modified its policy in Ukraine; it has also scapegoated the West for the Russian population’s economic hardships while rallying them to the patriotic flag of resisting pressure and beating the sanctions.

Criticism from a number of EU members has raised serious doubt about how long the sanctions regime will last, but so far it has, partly due to inertia and the continuing support of the EU’s major players, Germany and France.

“NEW” EUROPE’S?CHANGING?VIEW OF?RUSSIA

One of the more notable surprises of the past few years—at least for those in the West—is the extent to which some countries in Central Europe have become much more favorably inclined toward the Kremlin.

After all, when Germany united and communism fell in Central and Eastern Europe, the former members of the Warsaw Pact could not wait to join the West. Forty years of Soviet domination had left them deeply suspicious of Russia’s intentions even after the USSR collapsed. They hastened to embrace the West to preclude a renewed embrace by Moscow. Most also joined the EU in 2004, with Bulgaria and Romania following in 2007.

However, even as political relations were strained, economic ties between Central Europe and Russia grew, especially in the energy field. Energy supplies continued to dominate Russian exports to Eastern Europe, and these countries developed a trade deficit with Russia.

Why have Central European countries seemingly changed their attitude toward Russia and sought to have Western sanctions lifted? Their behavior can be explained less by their fading memories of the communist period than by their experiences since 1990 and their newly discovered sense of national identity.

They are much more closely tied economically to Russia than are other EU members, and therefore they have paid far higher costs for the sanctions than has Western Europe.

They also believe the EU has not accepted them as fully equal partners, and they resent the loss of sovereignty to Brussels.

Moreover, given what has happened in Ukraine, the newer members of NATO question how committed the West would be to defending them from Russian aggression.

THE?ENERGY?CARD

Russia is the most important external supplier of energy to the EU, and the energy trade has created strong interdependencies between Russia and Europe.

Of Europe’s imported gas, 37 percent comes from Russia, but some countries receive?nearly all their gas from Russia.

After the Soviet collapse, and with questions about the reliability of Middle Eastern energy supplies and the stability of that region, it appeared that Russia was a promising alternative.

It has the world’s largest oil and gas reserves and was eager to increase sales to Europe to boost its earnings. But by 2006 there were growing concerns about the reliability of Russian gas exports.

At that point 80 percent of the exports to Europe went?through Ukraine, and Ukraine paid heavily subsidized prices for gas. But a year earlier Russia and Ukraine had been unable to agree on the price for gas—Ukraine sought a bigger discount—and negotiations dragged on for months.

Eventually, Gazprom, the Russian gas behemoth, announced that it was cutting off the gas to Ukraine on a bitterly cold New Year’s Eve. Although it warned Ukraine not to siphon off gas that should have gone to Europe, Ukraine did precisely that.

As a result, Austria, Germany, Slovakia, and Germany faced a shortfall of 33 percent of their gas supplies, and other countries were also adversely affected.

As a result of these concerns, the EU has taken steps to improve its energy security and better coordinate the individual members’ energy relations with Russia.

Despite EU concerns, the reality is that Europe will be a major consumer of Russian gas for the foreseeable future. The Dutch Groningen field, which has been the backbone of European gas supplies, is being progressively shut down.

The interconnection of the Russian and European gas pipeline systems provides flexibility. Geographical proximity and the interest of European energy companies in doing business with Russia will guarantee continued Russian gas imports.

But Europe is also wary of becoming too dependent on Russia and is determined to find alternative supplies. Europe is now equipped with a large number of LNG-receiving terminals. But they are underutilized. For now, at least, Russian gas will be far more economical than, say, imports of US LNG.

PARTNERS AND?RIVALS—THE?HISTORICAL?LEGACY

Historically, Germans played an important role in imperial Russia’s development—much more so than Russia played in Germany’s development. Russians have always admired Germany’s technological and organizational prowess.

Peter the Great first brought Germans to Russia to help in developing the economy. Catherine the Great was even more convinced than Peter that Russia needed Germans to modernize its economy.

She created a large German immigrant colony on the Volga River with?the promise of no taxation so they could help develop Russia’s agricultural sector.

There were also a significant number of aristocratic Germans who played an important role in the life of the imperial court. The house of Romanov often intermarried with the German nobility.

Germans also had a major impact on the development of nineteenth-and twentieth-century Russian political movements of the Right and the Left. Karl Marx inspired Russian radicals as they sought to overthrow the tsarist system.

He himself was skeptical about whether imperial Russia was ready for a socialist revolution—since it had barely developed a capitalist system. But in one of history’s great ironies, Bolshevik Russia was the first country to put his ideas into practice, and Lenin certainly considered himself a Marxist. On the Right, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s philosophy influenced the rise of the Slavophile movement and Russian nationalism.

The tangled history of German-Russian relations has left three main legacies whose echoes continue to resonate in the twenty-first century.

The first is a powerful one and as relevant in the nuclear age as it was in the nineteenth century. It is the legacy of geography and resources and their impact on both countries’ national identities and national interests.

The lack of natural frontiers between the two countries and the compatibility of their economies—Russian raw materials in exchange for German manufacturing—inevitably produced both cooperation and confrontation. Russians have traditionally depicted Germans as a major potential threat to their security, focusing on Germany’s invasion of the?USSR during the Great Patriotic War. Germans likewise focused on the Russian threat during the Cold War.

The second legacy is that of two kinds of cooperation between Russia and Germany.

The benign partnership—often in economic, scientific, and cultural fields—has had a positive impact on Russia and Germany and on their common neighbors in Central Europe. But there is also a malign cooperation between the two countries at the expense of their neighbors and wider Europe. The 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact enabled the USSR to stay out of World War Two for two years, and its secret protocols divided territories in Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states between the two occupying countries.

The third legacy is of Russo-German enmity, were largely confrontational. Then Willy Brandt became chancellor in 1969. He signed treaties normalizing relations with Moscow, Warsaw, Prague, and East Berlin, ushering in an era of détente that began to erode the Iron Curtain.

All subsequent German leaders have been determined never to repeat the pattern of Russo-German enmity.

THE?DECISION TO?ENLARGE?NATO—AN?EXTENSION OF?CONTAINMENT?

Was the enlargement of NATO “the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold-War era,” as George Kennan claimed?

The original architect of containment had changed his mind about Russia after the Soviet collapse, urging its inclusion in the European security order, warning that its exclusion would have unforeseen, dangerous consequences.

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe, newly liberated from Soviet control and facing daunting domestic political and economic problems, were beginning to consider the security challenges they would face in the new post-Soviet world.

Meanwhile, Russia was facing even greater domestic challenges, together with adjusting to the loss of the Soviet empire. The Russian state emerged in 1992 smaller than it had been in four centuries, and without the defense perimeter provided by the other Soviet republics and the Warsaw Pact countries; it had lost the buffer states the Kremlin believed were vital for the security and safety of the Russian state—and which protected it from NATO.

In retrospect, the United States and its allies seriously underestimated what the collapse of the USSR meant for Russia’s perception of its own vulnerability, focusing rather on the insecurities and concerns of the Central European countries.

The West was and remains unable to resolve the dilemma of creating a security architecture in Europe that adequately, and at the same time, addresses the concerns of Central Europe, Russia, and the Western post-Soviet states. What assuaged Central European countries’ fears heightened Russian concerns, so that NATO enlargement became a zero-sum issue, with countries like Ukraine and Georgia remaining in a no-man’s-land.

THE?BALKAN?WARS AND?RUSSIA’S?CONFLICT WITH?NATO

NATO next intervened in the Balkans in 1999, during the Kosovo conflict. At this point Russia’s position toward the alliance had considerably hardened, and Yeltsin himself was seriously ailing and facing growing?domestic opposition to his policies after the ruble collapsed in 1998, causing an economic meltdown.

Though Russia had been part of the solution in Bosnia, it had no intention of acceding to another NATO military operation to save beleaguered Kosovars from Serbian attacks.

The Kosovo campaign and its aftermath have been a consistent source of Russian criticism, from Yeltsin to Putin.

Kremlin leaders have argued that NATO defied international law as enshrined in the United Nations?Charter by bombing Serbia, including the inadvertent bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, which caused an outcry in Beijing.

Russians believe the subsequent history of Kosovo exemplifies the worst excesses of NATO imposing its will on Europe against Moscow’s core interests.

Kosovo unilaterally declared its independence in 2008, and the United States recognized it, as did twenty-two out of the then twenty-seven EU member states.

Russia declared the independence declaration illegitimate, with Putin warning, “This is a harmful and dangerous precedent.… You can’t observe one set of rules for Kosovo and another for Abkhazia and South Ossetia.”?

To prove his point, Russia recognized the independence of those two breakaway regions after the Russia-Georgia War in 2008. Kosovo became a touchstone for Putin.

The Kosovo precedent was the gift that kept on giving. In his speech announcing the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, Putin declared: “Our western partners created the Kosovo precedent with their own hands. In a situation absolutely the same as the one in Crimea they recognized Kosovo’s secession from Serbia as legitimate while arguing that no permission from a country’s central authority for a unilateral declaration of independence is necessary.”

He also rejected the Western argument that Kosovo’s independence was the only way to end ethnic bloodshed and that, in contrast to Russia’s actions in Crimea, nobody had annexed Kosovo and incorporated it into their own state. NATO’s actions were, therefore, a source of both criticism and legitimacy for Russia’s own actions in Georgia and Crimea.

PUTIN’S?DOCTRINE OF?LIMITED?SOVEREIGNTY

Russia’s reaction to NATO’s eventual promise of membership for Ukraine and Georgia was to use military force to ensure that neither country would remain territorially intact and that the frozen conflicts in both countries would make it difficult for their governments to function effectively.

The West’s acknowledgment of the limits of its support for either country in face of Russia’s military action against them reinforced the inescapable fact that NATO had no treaty obligations to defend them.

In August 2008, after months of mutual provocations, Russian troops marched into Georgia after Georgian troops attacked the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali. Georgia’s president Mikheil Saakashvili was determined to reincorporate it into Georgia. Putin was equally determined that this would not happen, since these unrecognized statelets under Russian protection gave Moscow leverage it wanted to preserve.

During this short war, Russian and American troops came closer to?facing one another on opposite sides of an armed conflict than at any other time since the Cold War. US military personnel had been training Georgian troops who were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

During the war, the White House convened a Principals’ meeting to discuss whether the United States should respond to Russia’s invasion with military force. The participants in the meeting agreed that the US should not go to war with Russia over Georgia.

After defeating the Georgian army, which was no match for the Russian military, Moscow recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Georgia’s other unrecognized statelet. Even though only a handful of other countries recognized their independence, Georgia had now lost its territorial integrity, making eventual NATO membership even more remote.

Russia and Ukraine

Two competing banknotes begin to tell the story.

The Russian thousand-ruble note has a picture of Yaroslav the Wise (978–1054), Grand Prince of Kiev, a venerated ruler of Kievan Rus. Yaroslav stands sideways with his full beard in the tradition of Muscovite rulers, holding a scepter. The Ukrainian two-hryvna note also has a picture of Yaroslav the Wise. This Yaroslav’s face—with a Ukrainian Cossack-style mustache but no beard—looks straight ahead with no adornments.

Both Russia and Ukraine claim Yaroslav as their sovereign, the first to give them a code of law. Was Yaroslav a Russian or a Ukrainian ruler? Was Kievan Rus indeed the origin of the Russian state, as many historians have argued, or was it the cradle of the original Ukrainian nation? For centuries, both Russians and Ukrainians have claimed him as their own.

Indeed, the competition for Yaroslav has been so fierce that in 1943, with the Soviet army advancing, Ukrainian clergy removed his remains from the cathedral in Kyiv where he is buried and allegedly moved them to New York, to prevent them from being taken to Moscow

Vladimir Putin does not accept that Russia and Ukraine are two different nations. As he told the documentary filmmaker Oliver Stone, “I’m deeply convinced that the Ukrainian people and the Russian people are not simply close relatives. They are almost the same.”?Moreover, he does not believe that Ukraine is really a separate state, as he told George W. Bush in 2008.

The Kremlin views Ukraine’s international orientation as an existential question. It claims that if Ukraine were to join the West, this would represent a direct threat to Russia’s heartland. Ukraine in turn views Russia as an existential threat to its continued sovereignty and existence.

So far, no resolution to this conflict is in sight. Indeed, Russia’s recent actions have helped unify what was until recently a Ukrainian identity divided between East and West. Why has Russia essentially refused to accept Ukraine’s right to self-determination since the Soviet collapse? What is the Kremlin’s game plan for dealing with Ukraine going forward? Can Russia and Ukraine ever find a peaceful modus vivendi?

Ukraine’s domestic situation under Kuchma suited Moscow. Economic reform had stalled, oligarchic capitalism and corruption were on the rise, and the gas trade was arguably the most corrupt element in a system that united Russian and Ukrainian magnates. Eighty percent of Russia’s gas exports to Europe went through Ukraine.

Ukraine’s weak institutions, floundering economy, and corrupt political system left it vulnerable to Russian influence.

Moreover, financial and intelligence networks from the Soviet period that connected Ukrainians and Russians had survived the Soviet collapse. When Kuchma was implicated in the murder of investigative journalist Georgiy Gongadze, the United States demanded an unbiased inquiry. The Kremlin never criticized Kuchma for undemocratic practices.

But the people of Ukraine had a different view. They became increasingly frustrated with their government and its lack of accountability. In the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election, they were determined to choose a more accountable leader.

Kuchma’s chosen successor was Viktor Yanukovych, a former juvenile delinquent from the Donetsk region who represented the pro-Russian part of Ukraine and spoke Russian. His main rival was Viktor Yushchenko, former central bank governor with an American wife, whose first language was Ukrainian and who represented Ukraine’s pro-Western forces. Unlike in Russia, elections in Ukraine were not “managed” and the outcome was not predetermined. The election campaign became a contest between Russia and the West.

YANUKOVYCH’S?RETURN, CRIMEA’S?SEIZURE, AND THE?BREAK WITH THE?WEST.

But Yanukovych was not an easy client. He also continued to seek closer ties with the European Union, something the oligarchs from Eastern Ukraine—who supported him—favored because they wanted better access to European markets for their metals and industrial equipment. The Obama administration decided to scale back its involvement in?Ukraine and let its European allies focus on encouraging Ukraine to commit to a reform program.

After Yanukovych became president, he began negotiations with the EU for an Association Agreement and a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement.

The EU bureaucrats who carried out these negotiations focused on technical details, perhaps failing to comprehend the broader geopolitical impact of their actions, so there was little consideration given to how Moscow might react.

Initially, the Kremlin appeared to be indifferent to these talks. But as the negotiations neared their conclusion in 2013, the Kremlin began to focus more intensely on the content of the EU agreements.

A critical point came when it realized they were much more far-reaching than Russia had originally understood. If Ukraine signed them, it could not join the Eurasian Economic Union and its economic relationship with Russia would be disrupted.

The economies of Russia and Ukraine—especially Eastern Ukraine—are quite interdependent, and the EU was offering Ukraine a deal that involved a great deal of economic pain while reforms were implemented in return for a more prosperous economy somewhere further down the road.

Once the Kremlin understood the full implications of the EU deal, it sprung into action. Russia used a mixture of sticks—including preventing Ukrainian trucks from crossing the border to deliver goods into Russia—and carrots to dissuade Yanukovych from signing the Association Agreement. They worked.

But Putin had not reckoned with the Ukrainian street, which almost a decade earlier had mobilized to oust Yanukovych. For the next three months, the number of protestors in Maidan grew to 800,000, demanding that Yanukovych change course.

Protestors ranged from pro-Western liberals to right-wing nationalists, and as the demonstrations continued, the government’s response became more violent

US secretary of state John Kerry expressed “disgust with the decision of the Ukrainian authorities to meet the peaceful protest in Kyiv’s Maidan Square with riot police, bulldozers, and batons rather than with respect for democratic rights and human dignity.”

Things came to a head between February 18 and 20, 2014, when Ukrainian special forces and Interior Ministry snipers launched an attack on the Maidan, eventually killing one hundred people and wounding hundreds more.

A few days after Yanukovych fled, and just after the Sochi Winter Olympics had ended, President Putin ordered surprise military exercises of ground and air forces on Ukraine’s doorstep.

Suddenly hundreds of troops with no insignia (“little green men”) began appearing in Crimea. The decision to invade was made by Putin in consultation with only four advisers: his chief of staff, the head of the National Security Council, his defense minister, and the head of the Federal Security Service (FSB). Foreign Minister Lavrov was apparently not consulted.?

Ukrainian forces in Crimea, on the advice of the United States, remained in garrison and did not challenge the Russians. The Russian military soon controlled the whole peninsula.

After that, events moved very quickly. Crimea held a referendum in which 96 percent of the 82 percent of the eligible population who went to the polls voted to join Russia. On March 18, Putin walked into the Kremlin and announced, to thunderous applause, the reunification of Crimea with Russia, proclaiming, “In people’s hearts and minds, Crimea has always been an inseparable part of Russia.”

In the ensuing months, Russia poured troops, funding, ammunition, heavy arms, and other aid across the border to support the separatists, all the while denying that they were there at all.

The Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic were proclaimed early in April 2014.

RUSSIA AND CHINA

Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, Putin has energetically promoted ties with China to balance Russia’s troubled relationship with Europe and the United States.

In 2015, Western leaders snubbed the annual May 9 World War Two Victory Day Parade in Moscow because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Xi Jinping was one of the few world leaders who did attend, and Putin reciprocated by participating in China’s ceremonies to mark seventy years since the end of World War Two in Asia in September 2015.

The two leaders’ strong ties are based on a mutual interest in challenging a world order led by the United States, and in maintaining domestic stability and preventing “color” revolutions at home. Putin and Xi share a conviction that their countries were unfairly treated in the past, and they are critical of the current Western-dominated international political and economic order.

It was not always this harmonious. Indeed, Russia and China have experienced several centuries of conflicts and confrontations over borders. From the north and west, an expansionist Russian Empire sought to pry loose China’s vast hinterland and incorporate it into Siberia.

The contrast between armed hostilities and ideological saber rattling a half century ago and today’s “strategic partnership” between Russia and China is quite remarkable.

For much of the Cold War period, Beijing and Moscow were at loggerheads not only over borders but also as competitors for influence in the developing world. Each claimed to be the true standard-bearer of Marxism-Leninism and communism and denigrated the other. Now they support each other on major international questions.

SINO-RUSSIAN?RELATIONS?UNDER?VLADIMIR?PUTIN: A CAUTIOUS?EMBRACE

Both sides reject Western criticisms of their human rights records and support each other’s domestic policies. Russia supports the Chinese positions on Taiwan and Tibet. The relationship also has an important multilateral agenda, including regulation of relations in Central Asia via the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and coordination at the United Nations Security Council over issues such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea.

Strikingly, there are no major international issues on which Russia and China disagree, unlike Russia’s vexed relationship with the West. For their first foreign trips as president, both current Chinese president Xi and his predecessor Hu Jintao (2002–2012) chose Moscow.

Putin visited China early on in his first presidency.?He likewise went to China soon after his 2012 reelection,?after cancelling a planned trip to Washington for the G-8 summit a month earlier, saying he was “too busy.”

Nevertheless, the relative asymmetry between the “elder” and “younger” brother has noticeably grown over the past fifteen years. China’s GDP is $14 trillion, whereas Russia’s is $1.28 trillion. Russia has a population of 142 million, China has a population of 1.3 billion.

China?is a dynamic, rising power, its economy projected to overtake that of the United States by 2030. Russia is not a rising power. Its economy is in decline, as is its population, particularly in the Far East region bordering China.

Unless Russia modernizes its economy, it will remain a raw materials and weapons supplier for China’s advanced industrial economy.

A POST-UKRAINE?PIVOT TO?CHINA?

China has become the focus of Russia’s post-Ukraine, anti-Western policy.

This partnership is designed to reinforce Russia’s role as an independent center of global power, one of Putin’s key foreign policy goals.

It is also intended to confer success by association from a rising China to a Russia experiencing serious economic problems. China’s support for Russia has served to legitimize Moscow’s actions in Ukraine and Syria.

China also offers a geo-economic alternative to Europe both as a trading partner and an energy consumer.

The two leaders appear to enjoy a close working relationship, enhanced by a mutual aversion to domestic dissent and to Western attempts to promote democracy and human rights, which could undermine their rule.

But Russia’s strategic dependence on China is much greater than China’s is on Russia, and although they both reject the current global order, they do not agree on what a future world order should look like.

Russia is a useful partner for China because it supports China on all major foreign policy issues and does not interfere in China’s domestic affairs. In return, Russia has not commented publicly on China’s activities in the South China Sea, although these actions have irked Russia’s other Asian partners, such as Vietnam.

Ultimately, while the Kremlin seeks to overturn the US-led global order and promote a tripolar world order, Beijing prefers to reform the existing order to suit China’s economic and geostrategic interests, and it regards the United States as its only true global counterpart.

Nevertheless, China’s support for Russia has enabled Moscow to avoid the international isolation that the United States and Europe sought to impose on it after the Crimean annexation.

Despite potential Sino-Russian rivalries in Central Asia or the Arctic, a shared normative approach toward the international arena and suspicion of US intentions and policies will continue to bind the two countries together for the foreseeable future.

But it will remain a relationship dominated by official contacts, with far less interaction between entrepreneurs and civil society than is the case for Russia and Europe.

In 2017, there were upward of 350,000 Chinese university students in the United States, a fivefold increase in a decade, pouring $9 billion into the US economy. By contrast, there are 25,000 Chinese university students in all of Russia.?Even fewer Russian students go to?China—15,000—while 100,000 US students go to China and 900 go to Moscow.

This shows clearly that the Chinese are highly pragmatic about where they can secure the best education for their children without this changing moderating political attitudes toward the US.

WHAT KIND OF ENGAGEMENT WITH RUSSIA?

In a new era of strongmen, Vladimir Putin stands out as one of the strongest. During his time in power, Russia has reasserted itself on the world stage, a remarkable feat for a country that experienced such rapid decline in the 1990s, only to accomplish an unexpected resurgence after Putin entered the Kremlin. He has made it his mission to relitigate the end of the Cold War and renegotiate its terms.

This is no longer a bipolar world, for China has emerged as the key rising power that holds many big global cards. And there is another difference. During the Cold War, the USSR and the West engaged each other through established political and military government-to-government channels with rules of the game that they both accepted.

At a major defense and security conference in Moscow, the Chinese defense minister jolted his audience when he vowed that China would come to Russia’s assistance were it to be attacked by the West.

As the West wrestles over how to deal with Putin, it is important to remember that in many parts of the world Russia is viewed as a large authoritarian country ruled by a successful leader who is pursuing his country’s legitimate national interests as he defines them.

Moreover, much of the world’s view of Russia is colored by how the world regards the United States. In the unpredictable age of Donald Trump, Russia’s attractiveness has grown for some countries. As this book has shown, going back to 2014, China has upgraded Russia as a partner, taking advantage of the West’s attempts to isolate Putin, and has sought to recruit Russia to its version of a post-West global order.

But these were nearly all NATO or EU members, plus Australia and Ukraine, and even some EU members, such as Austria and Slovakia, refused to follow suit. Under Putin, some of Russia’s former allies in the Warsaw Pact, notably Hungary, Slovakia, Bulgaria, and the Czech Republic, have moved closer to Moscow.

THE?CHALLENGE TO THE?WEST

The West should begin by reviewing its flawed assumptions about what Russians wanted after 1991 and how economic integration would affect political ties.

Without revisiting a discussion of what are catalogued as Western and Russian mistakes during the?1990s, suffice it to say that by the time Putin took over in 2000, many Russians believed these Western policies and programs had led to chaos, the impoverishment of many, and the enrichment of a few, and that the West had not made good on its earlier promises of meaningful financial aid.

Yet, as Putin consolidated his rule, it became clear to much of the world that a main reason for Russians’ rejection of Western-style economic and political programs was because they are Russians, not because they were communists.

Putin represents traditional, collectivist, authoritarian Russian political culture and appeals to a sense of Russian exceptionalism, which defines itself in opposition to the West.

Russians’ understanding of their own unique history and of the drivers of global politics is very different from that of the West. That does not mean America and Europe cannot work with Russia, but it does suggest the West has to recognize what Russia is—and not what it would like Russia to be.

Another misapprehension was the assumption that Russia’s economic integration with the West would have a moderating effect on its political?behavior.

The West initially hoped Russia would become a responsible stakeholder in a post–Cold War, rules-based liberal international order it had created. But the Kremlin viewed this as an attempt by the United States, supported by its allies, to impose an agenda on Russia in which it had no agency and which was inimical to Russia’s real interests.

Putin is more interested in power and scale than in rules. The West may see the 1990s as a time of promise in Russia, of greater pluralism and the move toward a market society.

Most Russians today, led by Putin, see it very differently—as a time of poverty, upheaval, chaos, combined with rising economic inequality and humiliation by the West. Putin frequently repeats this historical catalogue of complaints to his Western interlocutors.