Even if Russia does not invade Ukraine in the coming months, Europe needs to ramp up deterrence and protections for Eastern Europe, insists American journalist and author Anne Applebaum.

In an interview with LRT, Applebaum argues that Western leaders keep misreading Russia, although there are enough voices in Europe’s big nations raising the right amount of alarm.

Let me start with the most common question that we hear nowadays. Will there be a war in Europe?

So obviously, that’s a question I can’t answer. I can’t read Putin’s brain, I can’t see into his mind. I don’t know what he’s thinking. Clearly, he’s prepared for a war, he’s thought about a war, he’s planned a war. The Americans have seen those plans. That’s why they’ve been raising the alarm over the past several weeks. And clearly, he’s mentally prepared for the idea of aerial bombardment of Ukrainian cities, he’s thought about Russian casualties and he’s willing to accept that.

Whether the West’s surprisingly good response in some ways – Americans drawing attention to this, more weapons going to Ukraine, the threat of sanctions – whether that eventually puts him off? We don’t yet know. But certainly he has planned and thought about it.

It may seem that it is perfect timing for Putin to renew threats for the West, because everybody is busy with their own problems. Germany has a new government, France will have an election, the US has its own problems. But is this the only reason why this is happening now?

It’s my belief that Putin has always wanted to control Ukraine. And it’s not just my belief, he’s said as much. He doesn’t recognise Ukrainian statehood, he doesn’t recognise the reality of Ukrainian national identity or Ukrainian independence. And so for him it’s been a question of time, when could he do it.

There have been multiple Russian efforts to take over Ukraine in other ways, through the use of pro-Russian politicians, through disinformation, through economic pressure and so on. But he may have now decided that, as you say, this is a moment when he thought the West was divided, when the United States wasn’t paying attention. He may have been inspired by the American withdrawal from Afghanistan to think that Americans were no longer interested in fighting in the world.

And so he may have decided that this is really the chance to do it, the chance to do something he’s always wanted to do. As I said, it may be that the American reaction is strong enough that he’ll change his mind. But yes, he assumed this was a good moment.

Of course, the difficulty is that even if he doesn’t choose to invade this week, or next week or the week after, this is still a part of Russian strategy. And so the possibility that this could happen at another time is something we need to always take into account.

And I would hope that Western countries as well as Ukraine’s neighbours have drawn lessons from this and understand that we need to really raise the level of deterrence in the Baltic states and Ukraine, in Central Europe but even in Western Europe. We need to think, how do we send a message to Putin saying that this can’t happen, it won’t happen. And we will fight back. I think we all need to focus on that over the next months and years, no matter what happens in Ukraine this month.

Everybody thought that the Western world learned the lesson in 2014, when Putin occupied Crimea, but eight years later some Western leaders are still surprised.

Yes, there’s a way in which everybody who’s ever elected to office in a Western country, the first thing that happens is they think, well why can’t we be friends with Russia? Emmanuel Macron did that famously, Obama did that.

The assumption is that if you look at the map, Russia should be integrated with Europe, it should trade with Europe. It has a lot in common with Europe, and historically Russia has been involved with Europe, many Russians consider themselves to be Europeans. And yet they keep coming up against this unstoppable barrier and I’m afraid that the barrier is that Putin sees Europe, the European Union, European institutions and above all European democracy and the language of European democracy as a personal threat to himself.

So even though we don’t think he’s an enemy, or we don’t want to think he’s an enemy, he thinks we’re an enemy. And that’s very hard for Western leaders to understand. They keep going to Moscow, they try to persuade him. They say this is illogical – and of course it is illogical, according to their logic.

And what they don’t understand is the degree to which Putin is afraid of the ideas of democracy. He’s afraid of democracy activism in Russia. He’s afraid of the kind of democratic revolution that we saw in Ukraine in 2014 and all over the former Soviet world in 1991 and early 1990s. And he’s afraid of that taking place at home. That’s why he’s hostile to us, that’s why he resists us. That’s why he seeks to undermine Western democracy itself.

You are one of the strongest voices in the world saying that this is what’s going on in Europe, that it’s basically democracy versus autocracy. Do you think Western leaders understand that?

Some of them are beginning to understand that. There has been a change in the last six months in the US, in the UK, maybe less so in Germany, although even Germany is different from what it used to be. But I think the awareness that what we are now dealing with is not just China, it’s not just Russia as a regional problem, or Venezuela as a problem in Latin America – that what we’re really dealing with is autocrats who work together now in many ways, support one another, help one another overcome Western sanctions. The corrupt state companies of one autocracy can invest in the corrupt state companies of another autocracy. They share surveillance equipment, they share technology, they share tactics, they watch how the leadership in one country puts down democratic activists, how they use repression – and that’s copied in other countries.

And so they are beginning to see themselves as facing this common threat. And the threat is democracy activism, the threat is the kind of student movements we saw in Hong Kong, the demonstrations we saw in Belarus, the street demonstrations we’ve had in Venezuela and Cuba, and they all see these things as having a common source.

Of course, in a sense they’re right, people all over the world are always frustrated by injustice and unfairness by leaders who are not accountable to their people, by systems of corruption and kleptocracy. And there will always be people who want to fight against that in different ways, and using sometimes different language in different traditions. But it’s not that everybody’s American or everybody’s West European, but the awareness of injustice has always inspired activism and protest. And the leaders of these countries know it, they look to push back now against the kind of activism in those kinds of movements, wherever they are.

Talking about the people who are going to the streets because they are not satisfied with their government. We saw the example of Belarus, and Belarus is very close to Lithuania. And we are one of the countries that are speaking very loudly about that. Our political leaders say they are worried that the Russian troops are in Belarus and we don’t know whether they will go back home. What is the future of Belarus, in your opinion?

Yes, you’re right to be worried. Russia now treats Belarus as more than just a friendly neighbour. It’s not formally annexed, but it seems to be almost part of the Russian territory.

And you are right to flag this, you’re right to talk about it. You should talk about it in NATO councils, you should talk about it in Europe. Because other European countries need to be aware that this dangerous.

I do think that Putin was very shocked by the level of protests in Belarus and by how well organised they were, how articulate the leaders were, we hadn’t had a movement quite like that in Belarus ever before. And I think that he fears that, just as in Ukraine, it could be an inspiration for Russians.

And so he’s interested in doing whatever he can to put it down and to make sure that he has military and police power in place in Belarus. While I don’t think it’s a direct threat to Lithuania right now, you are right to find it a concern, you’re right to speak up about it everywhere that you can.

But going back to Ukraine, is it the same country that it was in 2014? Does Putin understand that, after eight years of war, it will not be that easy to suppress those protests?

It’s hard for me to know what Putin really thinks is happening in Ukraine. I agree with the implication of your question, which is that Ukraine is not the same, it has an army that’s been fighting in the Donbass region for the last eight years. It has a very different sense of national identity, it’s much more cohesive.

And that includes Russian speakers who now feel themselves to be Ukrainians and don’t want to be invaded by Russia. That change maybe is one of the reasons why Putin wants to invade, because 10 years from now, there won’t be any sympathy for Russia in Ukraine. And there will be fewer Russian speakers than there are now, that’s the direction that Ukraine is going.

But whether he understands that Ukrainians will resist, whether he’s taken that into account, whether he has understood how asymmetrical warfare could undermine any kind of Russian occupation of Ukraine or make an invasion more difficult than he expects – I don’t know.

You do hear different military analyses and some believe that Russian weaponry is so powerful that they’ll be in Kyiv very rapidly and there’ll be very little that the Ukrainian military can do. And there are others who say, look, there’s going to be popular resistance, there’ll be guerrilla warfare from day one, don’t count on swift victory.

I mean, anything that delays the Russian troops, anything that undermines the occupation, any of that will not only have a negative effect on the occupation, on the Russian military, it will also begin to have an echo at home in Russia. You ask whether Putin understands Ukraine, but I wonder whether Putin understands Russia.

And here I’m just speculating, but I don’t think most Russians want to be at war with Ukraine, I don’t think there’s a great desire to destroy Ukraine. I don’t think a bloody conflict will be popular in Russia. But clearly, that’s a risk Putin is maybe willing to take.

Going back to the West, do you think the reaction in the West is enough for the Ukrainian people, or could we do more?

We could do more. We should have done more already. In other words, I think preparing Ukraine for this kind of invasion is a project that should have started seven years ago, the time to start this preparation was in 2015.

It wasn’t done. The Obama administration didn’t take it seriously enough, the Trump administration was not interested in defending Ukraine. And although there has been military aid going into Ukraine, I don’t think it’s anything like the scale that was needed.

And I hope that, if nothing else, if there is no invasion this month, I hope that Western leaders and others will begin to see that we need a much higher level of deterrence, we need more preparation in the future.

Your husband, former foreign minister of Poland Radosław Sikorski, was in Kyiv in 2014, when the Maidan events took place. Do you see enough leadership in today’s Europe and maybe you can name some leaders who are representing Europe well?

Unfortunately, modern Poland is not playing the role that it played in 2014 as the most important spokesman for for Ukrainian democracy. So we don’t have the equivalent of Poland now. The current Polish leadership has cut itself off from Europe. It doesn’t have friends and good contacts in Europe. It doesn’t have good diplomats anymore. I’m very sad about that.

I think the Lithuanian government is playing a very important role in speaking out, the Estonian government is playing an important role. There are individuals in Germany and in France and in Britain who are playing a good role. Actually, the British government has also been quite good rhetorically. There are some very good British MPs, Tom Tugendhat is one, but there are others.

There are several German journalists and German politicians. Norbert Röttgen, who was the head of the Bundestag Foreign Affairs Committee, has been very vocal. And so there there are people inside most European countries who are saying positive things.

For Germany, this is very difficult, because of Germany’s dependence on gas from Russia. But Germany is changing a little bit, so I detect a change in the government. Schultz was in Washington, he did a very good interview here. He appears to have agreed to shut off the Nord Stream 2 pipeline if there’s an invasion.

So Europe is not as divided. We don’t have the equivalent of the Polish government of 2014, but we have people who are beginning to understand the situation. Some of them have made mistaken and silly trips to Moscow, the British foreign secretary had a terrible trip to Moscow. I think Macron’s trip was not so terrible, but it was a bit pointless. But there is a beginnings of an understanding, I think, and in almost every European country, at some level, there are people whose voices are being heard who speak about the importance of this situation.

Actually, we have a big discussion going on now in Lithuania about the place of our country in geopolitics – some people say that we are just a small country, we cannot achieve anything. Other people say that we should be very vocal and very loud about democracy in the world, because this is the condition for us to survive at all. How do you see this question?

I think Lithuania’s role has been really important. Of course, you should choose your battles, you may not want to be vocal on every issue. But it’s very important that you’re vocal about Russia.

I think it’s very important also that you seek to be vocal together with others, because you’re small. This may be the compromise position between those two ideas. Work with Poland, work with Romania, work with Germany, work with Britain. You have British soldiers in Lithuania, there’s actually a lot of sympathy for the Baltic states in Britain. Make sure you have friends everywhere. Think of yourselves as worthy alliance partners, make sure that your voice is heard, even in the media in, for example, the UK, or Germany, or France. That’s how you can make a big difference.

But I do think that, because the survival of Lithuania does depend on Western Europe, on NATO and on Western Europe and the United States feeling that this alliance is important and that it has to be defended – your role should be to continually remind people of this fact. And I think you’ve been doing quite well in the last couple of years.

In one of your last articles for The Atlantic, you were not very optimistic about a conflict in Europe. You said that we missed many chances to see what Russia was really becoming. Do we have any chance as democracies to make it right?

We always have a chance, there’s always a chance to relearn and better understand the situation. And I hope that whatever the Biden administration has been saying to Russia privately about sanctions, I hope that the weapons that have gone into Ukraine in the last few weeks will make a difference, I hope that they discourage Putin from invading.

Of course, I have no way of knowing his state of mind. There’s always a chance to change, nothing is ever inevitable. There’s no inevitable victory, but there’s no inevitable defeat. And everything depends on what we do today, if we want to affect what happens tomorrow.

And all countries, even small countries like yours, are in a position to make a difference by speaking, by arguing, by bringing people together, by talking to allies. This is your chance of making a change.

https://www.lrt.lt/en/news-in-english/19/1618033/anne-applebaum-we-should-have-started-preparing-ukraine-for-invasion-in-2015-interview