Since Russia’s president has chosen to live by his doctrine of enmity, Britain and her allies should recognise that he is unappeasable.

Charles Moore

Charles Moore covers politics with the wisdom and insight that come from having edited The Daily Telegraph, The Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator.

18 Feb, 2022

Our culture disapproves of sustained hatred. Partly because of our Christian inheritance and partly because we still see ourselves as top dogs, we in the West like to forgive our enemies and “move on”.

This is an admirable human trait, but it can cause trouble in international relations. We find it hard to understand that some people truly are our enemies and won’t change.

Vladimir Putin is our enemy. I do not mean that he personally nurtures burning hatred towards us (though he may do, despite parking his ill-gotten billions with us).

I mean that he believes that the West is the eternal enemy of Russia and that Russia’s best future lies in defeating us wherever possible. Our loss, Russia’s gain; and vice versa. The concept of a “win-win” situation is not one he understands.

The West has been shockingly slow to see this. We should have learned it at Munich. I am referring here not to Neville Chamberlain’s famous agreement with Hitler in 1938 (though that contains a few lessons), but to the annual Munich Security conference which is taking place this weekend.

15 years ago this month, Putin addressed that Munich gathering of world leaders and defence experts. He spoke bluntly. He attacked the “unipolar world” created by the end of the Cold War, as “pernicious”.

The expansion of Nato, he said, “represents a serious provocation”. During the Cold War he argued, peace had been “reliable enough”; now it was “not so reliable”.

Russia had an “asymmetrical answer” to the Western threat. It was “nothing personal” he said, in that way gangsters talk, “it is simply a calculation”.

With one of those menacing jokes he enjoys, Putin began that 2007 speech by warning the German chairman of the meeting not to turn on his red light when he heard his words. The chairman obeyed.

Since then, the West has repeatedly tried to make up to Russia. Two years after Putin’s Munich denunciation, Barack Obama’s new Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, announced, with fanfare, a “reset” of relations.

In 2020, hoping to hurt China, president Donald Trump tried to get Russia to rejoin the G7. After coming into office, President Joe Biden talked to Putin in Geneva, “without preconditions” in June last year, even though Russia, by its accumulation of troops, had set its own precondition – a gun held to his head.

But Putin went on making his simple calculation. As early as 2008 he was intervening militarily in Georgia. In 2014 he invaded Crimea, and holds it to this day, thus achieving the first alteration of Europe’s borders by force since the Second World War.

At the same time, his proxy forces occupied or infiltrated other bits of Ukraine. Now he feels secure enough to hold more than 130,000 troops on the border ready to invade Ukraine, or rather, re-invade it.

Because of our temperamental aversion to conflict, the West has tended to think this might be our fault. We feel guilty about the Russian accusation that the United States and its allies broke assurances to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1990, that Nato would not expand eastwards after the reunification of Germany. Putin makes this sound as bad as the grievances about the Treaty of Versailles which helped give Hitler his big break.

In fact, however, proper evidence of such assurances is hard to come by. In November 1990, at the summit in Paris attended by Margaret Thatcher, while she was suffering political assassination at home, Gorbachev committed Russia, as all the other signatories were committed, to “fully recognise the freedom of states to choose their own security arrangements”.

That, after all, was what the end of the Cold War was supposed to mean – a Europe where security was the sovereign right of each nation rather than dependent on the convenience of a great power.

This change was supposed to apply to Russia too: the newly-formed Russian federation was seen not as a rump Soviet Union, but a more modern and European nation, something the Russians seemed to want at that point.

From our unjustified sense of guilt may stem another error. We may think that the possibility that Ukraine might join Nato is what really irks Putin.

Some conclude that since it is highly unlikely to be allowed to join in the foreseeable future, it will be almost cost-free for the West to grant his wish that it won’t.

If the West did that, however, it would break the purpose of a defensive alliance, which is to deter rivals from gaining by the threat of force, and would throw away the principle of sovereignty over security.

It would also misunderstand Putin. For him, the idea of Ukraine in Nato is not the root of the matter. It is merely a symptom of something wider. What he really cannot stand is the idea that Ukraine can be a fully independent country which has its sovereign right to decide such things.

In a long historical essay published last summer, Putin proved to his own satisfaction at least, that Ukrainians and Russians (and Belorussians) are one.

Part of the evidence against his thesis is that a majority of Ukrainians have voted to reject it, and are preparing to resist his version of unity if he tries to reimpose it by force.

He finds it intolerable that a former Soviet republic should be able to build democracy on his doorstep. Then his own country might try to do the same.

Since Putin has chosen to live by his doctrine of enmity with the West, the West should recognise that he is unappeasable. The only good thing about the current crisis is that the allies seem to be becoming more aware of this problem.

They are readier to deploy intelligence to explain his tactics and his propaganda games than in the past, and to counteract the surprises he loves to spring. But even now, the British government seems to be the only one of the major Nato allies to state clearly what is at stake in this conflict.

Putin can see that the allies have not really agreed a common sticking-point. His aggression has already created room for several manoeuvres short of invasion.

How about, for example, a gradual crippling of government communications in Ukraine, or the occupation of only a part of the country – say Odessa in the South?

He probably can break Ukraine without total war. That would be greatly preferable from his point of view, because it leaves his own vulnerabilities less exposed and creates less anguish at home.

If Russia does re-invade (important to stick to that word rather than “invade”: it reminds us of how bad things already are), you do not have to be an expert on Ukraine itself to understand the dire consequences. It is much worse, from a global perspective, than the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia during the Cold War.

Rather than upholding a status quo, it regresses to an old regime which the free world thought it had defeated. It says that a great power can behave like North Korea and get away with it.

It creates – dread phrase – an axis of evil, freeing up Iran to get the bomb, and China to conquer Taiwan. And it writes a new and frightening chapter in what I fear will be a long book called “How the West was Lost”.