Last week I flew to Moscow, arriving at 4:30 pm on December 8th. In Moscow, it begins to get dark at this time of day, and there will be no sun until about 10 am at this time of the year – the so-called “black days” as opposed to “white nights”. Anyone who is used to living closer to the equator is disturbing. This is the first sign that you are not only in a different country, which I am used to, but also in a different habitat. However, as we drove towards the center of Moscow, which is more than an hour, traffic on the road, road works, everything looked normal. There are three airports in Moscow, and we flew to the farthest from the center, Domodedovo, the main international airport. There is a lot of renovation work going on in Moscow, and while this is holding back traffic on the roads, it indicates that prosperity continues, at least in the capital.
Our host greeted us and we quickly got to work, getting to know each other and talking about the events of the day. He had spent a lot of time in the United States and was much more familiar with the nuances of American life than I was with Russian. In that sense, he was an excellent host, translating his country into my language, always with a hint of a Russian patriot, which of course he was. We talked as we drove through Moscow, deeply penetrating into the subject of conversation.
From him, as well as from conversations with Russian specialists in most regions of the world – students of the Institute of International Relations – and a number of other people whom I consider ordinary (not serving in government agencies dealing with foreign policy and economics), I formed a sense of what problems Russia has. The problems are as expected. I could not expect the accent and order of these problems.
Russian economic expectations
I thought Russia’s economic problems should have worried people in the first place. The fall of the ruble, the decline in oil prices, the general slowdown in the economy and the impact of Western sanctions, all this, as it seems in the West, should hit the Russian economy. And yet we didn’t talk about that. The depreciation of the ruble has affected foreign travel plans, but people have only recently begun to feel the real impact of these factors, especially thanks to inflation.
However, there was another reason behind the relative calm about the financial situation, and it came not only from government officials, but also from ordinary people, and should be taken very seriously. The Russians said that economic turmoil was the norm for Russia, and prosperity was the exception. There is always an expectation that the prosperous period will end and the usual tightening of the belts of Russian poverty will return.
Russians suffered terribly in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin, but also under previous governments before the reign of the tsars. Despite this, some said they emerged victorious in wars that needed to be won in order to live a decent life. The golden age that had lasted for the previous 10 years was coming to an end. This was to be expected and will have to be lived through. Government officials have been talking about this as a warning, and I don’t think it’s a bluff. Sanctions were at the center of the conversation, and the point was to show that they would not force Russia to change its policy towards Ukraine.
The strength of the Russians is that they are able to endure what would break other nations. I was also told that they would support the government when Russia was in danger, regardless of its level of competence. Therefore, the Russians argued, sanctions, however severe, should not be expected to force Moscow to capitulate. Instead, the Russians will respond with their own sanctions, which they did not say exactly, but, as I understand it, meant seizing the assets of Western companies and curtailing agricultural imports from Europe. There was no talk of stopping natural gas supplies to Europe.
If so, the Americans and Europeans are deluding themselves about the impact of the sanctions. In general, I personally have little faith in the effect of sanctions. Having said that, the Russians gave me the opportunity to look at everything through a different lens. The sanctions reflect American and European pain thresholds. They are designed to cause pain that the people of the West cannot bear. For others, the effect may be different.
I have a feeling that the Russians were serious. That would explain why the escalation of sanctions plus the drop in oil prices, the economic downturn and so on just didn’t shatter their confidence, which one might expect. The result of telephone polls from a reliable source suggests that President Vladimir Putin is still incredibly popular. Whether he will remain popular as the deterioration deepens, and whether the elite, having suffered financially, will still be as cheerful, is another matter. But for me, the most important lesson I may have learned in Russia – “perhaps” is the operative word here – is that Russians do not respond to economic pressures in the way that Westerners do, and that the idea, made famous by the presidential campaign slogan “This is economics, silly,” may not be applicable in Russia.
Ukrainian question
There was much more resistance in Ukraine. There is acceptance that events in Ukraine have changed everything for Russia, and resentment that the Obama administration has launched what Russians call a propaganda campaign to portray Russia as the aggressor. Two questions were constantly raised. The first is that Crimea has historically been part of Russia, and that it was already dominated by the Russian military, who were there under the treaty. There was no intrusion, just an anchoring of reality. Second, it was insistently insisted that Eastern Ukraine was inhabited by Russians, and that, as in other countries, these Russians should have been given a higher degree of autonomy. One scholar has pointed to the Canadian model and Quebec to show that the West generally has no problem with regional autonomy for ethnically diverse areas, but they are shocked
What happened in Kosovo is extremely important to the Russians, both because they feel their wishes were ignored there and because it set a precedent. Years after the fall of the Serbian government, which threatened the Albanians in Kosovo, the West granted independence to Kosovo. The Russians counter that the borders were moved when there was no longer any danger to Kosovo. Russia did not want this to happen, but the West did it because it could. According to the Russians, by redrawing the map of Serbia, the West has no right to object to the redistribution of the map of Ukraine.
I try not to get involved in the question of who is right and who is wrong, not because I do not believe that there is a difference, but because in history questions are rarely decided according to moral principles. I understood the Russian view of Ukraine as a necessary strategic barrier, and the idea that without it they would be facing a serious threat, if not now, then later. They cited Napoleon and Hitler as examples of enemies defeated by the outback.
I tried to present a strategic American perspective. The United States has spent the past century with a single goal: to avoid the rise of any one hegemony that could take advantage of Western European technology and capital and Russian natural and human resources. The United States intervened in World War I in 1917 to block German domination, and again in World War II. The goal of the Cold War was to prevent Russian hegemony. US strategic policy has been consistent throughout the century.
The United States has reason to be wary of any rising hegemony. In this case, the fear of a resurgent Russia is a Cold War memory and not so unreasonable. As some have pointed out to me, economic weakness has rarely meant military weakness or political disunity. I agreed with them on this and said that is why the US has legitimate concerns about Russia in Ukraine. If Russia manages to restore its power in Ukraine, what will happen next? Russia has military and political forces that could start attacking Europe. Therefore, it is not irrational for the United States, and at least some European countries, to want to assert their power in Ukraine.
When I put this argument to a very important official from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he generally said that he did not understand what I was trying to say. While he is fully aware of the geopolitical attitudes that guide Russia in Ukraine, for him the age-old attitudes that guide the United States are too comprehensive to be applied to the Ukraine issue. And it’s not that he sees only his part of the question. Rather, the point is that for Russia, Ukraine is an issue that requires immediate resolution, and the picture of American strategy that I have drawn is so abstract that it does not seem to fit in with current realities. There is an automatic American response to what it sees as an aggressive rise of Russia, but the Russians are far from being aggressive and are on the defensive.
In other meetings with the leadership of the Institute of International Affairs, I used a different tactic in trying to explain that the Russians had embarrassed US President Barack Obama in Syria. Obama didn’t want to attack when poison gas was used in Syria, as it was militarily hard because if he overthrew Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, it would leave the country at the mercy of Sunni jihadists. The United States and Russia have similar interests, I argued, and Russia’s attempt to confuse the president by pretending that Putin forced him to back down set off such a US response over Ukraine. To be honest, I thought my geopolitical explanation was much more coherent than this argument, but I tried that too. The discussion took place during lunch, but I spent my time explaining and arguing, not for food. I found that I could hold my ground geopolitically, but they handled the complexities of the Obama administration in a way that I would never be able to.
The future of Russia and the West
The most important question was what would happen next. The obvious question is whether the Ukrainian crisis will spread to the Baltics, Moldova and the Caucasus. I raised it at a meeting with an official from the Foreign Ministry. He emphatically stressed several times that the crisis would not go any further. I understood it in such a way that there will be no Russian riots in the Baltics, unrest in Moldova and military operations in the Caucasus. I think he was sincere. With Russians and so it is enough. They must manage Ukraine, cope with the current sanctions, endure economic problems. The West has the resources to deal with many crises. Russia needs to contain this crisis in Ukraine.
Russia will be satisfied with some level of autonomy for Russians in the eastern regions of Ukraine. How much autonomy is unknown to me. They need a strong gesture to protect their interests and assert their own importance. Their point of view that regional autonomy exists in many countries is convincing. But history says that the strongest wins, and the West uses its power to put more pressure on Russia. However, it is obvious that there is nothing more dangerous than a wounded bear. Better to kill him, but killing Russia, as history shows, is not easy.
I left with two feelings. The first is that Putin was safer than I thought. All in all, it doesn’t mean much. Presidents come and go. However, it is a reminder that what would discredit a Western leader may not affect a Russian leader. Second, the Russians are not planning a campaign of aggression. This is where I’m more concerned – not because they want to invade somewhere, but because nations often don’t realize what can happen and they can react in ways that surprise themselves. This is the most dangerous thing in this situation. It’s not what was planned and seems perfectly benign. Such an action is dangerous if it happened unexpectedly, both for other parties and for Russia.
At the same time, my overall analysis remains unchanged. Whatever Russia could do elsewhere, Ukraine is fundamentally strategically important to it. Even if the east were given some level of autonomy, Russia would be deeply concerned about the relationship between the rest of Ukraine and the West. As difficult as it may be to measure with the Western mind, the history of Russia is the history of buffers. The state of the buffer saves Russia from an invasion from the West. Russia needs an agreement that would leave Ukraine at least neutral.
For the United States, any resurgent power in Eurasia triggers automatically a response borne by centuries of history. As difficult as it may be for Russians to understand, nearly half a century of Cold War history has made the US hypersensitive to the possible emergence of such a Russia. The United States has spent the last century blocking the unification of Europe under the banner of a unified hostile force. What Russia wants and what America fears are very different things.
The United States and Europe have a problem understanding Russia’s fears. Russia has a problem understanding America’s fears. But the fears of both are real and legitimate. This is not a matter of misunderstanding between countries, but a matter of disparate imperatives. All the goodwill in the world – and its priceless amount – is not capable of solving the problem of two powers that are forced to protect their interests, and in doing so, make others feel threatened. I learned a lot from this trip. I did not understand how to solve this problem, except that at the very least, each should understand the fears of the other, even if he cannot calm them.