The Era of Political Lilliputians

After the annexation of Crimea, it is hard to defend the reasons behind Russian policy. However, Robert Stanislaw Terentiew tried to do this once, in Rzeczpospolita on May 8. The opinion he expressed is practically absent in Poland’s mainstream media. However, it constantly appears on the pages of niche websites, condemning — if we speak of the range of international opinions about Warsaw after 1989 — “swapping Moscow for Washington.”

From this point of view, the old Eastern bloc countries have emerged as victims of Western colonial conquest — mostly, of course, in terms of economics. They lost the Cold War and suffered spectacular economic disaster, so had to agree to the conditions imposed upon them by the winning side. For the Polish, Czech and Hungarians, this situation had been long expected, although of course it meant a very painful and expensive “return to Europe.”

Victim of the Satiated West

At the same time, Russia experienced — in the words of Vladimir Putin — “one of the greatest geopolitical catastrophes of the 20th century,” during which it lost a huge part of its territory and its position as a world superpower. In the 1990s, as a result of the race toward globalization, it found itself in collapse, from which it started to escape at the beginning of the 21st century.

Terentiew interprets the situation thus: “Russia felt threatened when NATO began to approach her borders, and nobody intended to respect its interests in the Balkans and Caucasia, or its subjective feeling that it was encircled by Western bases.” However, the writer notes that Moscow found itself at a disadvantage regarding states such as Ukraine, as it did not and does not have anything to offer them. He further stated: “If the old American congressman Ron Paul, who cannot be accused of pro-Russian sympathies, is right, and the adventure in Ukraine deliberately provoked Washington into co-operation with the IMF in order to entangle Vladimir Putin into a hopeless war, then that could be even more unpleasant.”

In this light, Russia appears as a victim of a satiated, and also aggressive, West. It is hard to deny that this was the case in the 1990s. But in the next decade, when Putin’s presidency began, an important change took place. There came an uptick in the sale of raw materials, thanks to which Russia’s economic situation drastically improved as it became the main exporter of oil and gas. It then began its geopolitical offensive — with the help of the puppet authorities in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, among others — to isolate these provinces from Georgia in 2008, to support the coup in Kyrgyzstan in 2010 and finally to annex Crimea.

Terentiew calls these movements a defensive game of beating up; however, Russia has really begun to recover what the Kremlin propaganda is calling Moscow’s “zone of privileged interests.” So even if there were a particle of virtue in Ron Paul’s conspiracy theories, they would still not surprise American policies — if they existed — toward the resurgent Russian power.

Contempt for the Weak

But in the past few months, the West has behaved quite cautiously in regard to the Kremlin’s actions. Yes, it has introduced sanctions in order to force Russia to stop violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity, but at the same time it has not managed to achieve this goal. There is the impression that the actions of the West have emboldened Moscow. In taking Crimea, Russia has demonstrated great self-confidence. In interviews, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has demonstrated outright contempt for Western weaklings who were stunned into submission by the determination and insolence with which the Kremlin won the tough battle for the Black Sea peninsula.

Scrutinizing what is currently happening on the eastern fringes of Ukraine — chaos, violence — we must come to the conclusion that the course of events will satisfy Russia. But Moscow’s policy toward Kiev comes down largely to discrediting the Ukrainian “Banderovite” authorities and proving to them that they are ruling — or rather, trying to rule — a “fallen state.” As Ukraine has failed to submit to the Kremlin, for instance, by not entering the Customs Union, in this situation the idea is to transform her into a grey area, perfect for shady, informal post-Soviet systems.

In this context, Terentiew rightly draws attention to the fact that modern-day Russia is not a normal European country, as it was in czarist times, but is becoming a post-Communist hybrid — in fact, being unpredictable and dangerous, it requires careful handling. According to the journalist, the result of this is the Western need to get on well with the Kremlin elite without counting on the democratization of the Russian system.

A Strong Man in Politics

However, taming the Russian establishment in this way does not always bring about the desired results. The best example of this is Poland. In 2008, Donald Tusk’s team set about improving relations with Moscow — for example, by unlocking talks on the conclusion of a partnership and cooperation agreement between the European Union and Poland — even at the price of escalating conflict with the then-President Lech Kaczynsky.

The brutal test came two years later, after the Smolensk catastrophe. The Russian authorities implemented a number of measures — including the refusal to return the wreckage of the Tupolev to Poland — which indicated that they did not follow Tusk’s line of reconciliation. They then complained that the MAK report was a tool to craft Poland’s image in the world’s public opinion.

If Robert Stanislaw Terentiew puts various accusations to the West, he is generally right. But the problem is not, as he says, the West’s confrontational course toward Russia, but quite the opposite — its relative passivity. It acts in an unconsolidated manner. It lacks decisiveness.

We can have no illusions. We live, if we are referring to the West, in an era of political Lilliputians, who could only afford to bomb Serbia or Iraq. Such policies are not even being considered for Russia. Against this background a former KGB officer has risen to become a statesman in Europe and has become the hero of an environment longing for a strong man in politics. This does not herald any further westernization in Europe, which Terentiew was counting on.