Over lunch at the 12th annual Yalta European Strategy in Kyiv, two Russians at the conference sketched out the optimistic scenario for the West and Ukraine to capitalize on Russia’s current economic weakness.
Yevgenia Albats, editor-in-chief
and CEO of The New Times in Moscow, said that the situation in Russia is
going “from bad to worse” with the
two-fold decline of the ruble in the last year because of lower oil prices, Russia’s prime export.
“How are they going to sustain the
budget? It’s not clear how the Russian state is going to pay for loyalty from
population and security forces,” Albats said. If the decline in oil prices
continues, “the Russian government will be lacking funds” and may be “too concerned about
economic situation to look outside.”
Of course, Albats said, the
alternative is that Russia could continue seeing external enemies to blame –
such as the West and Ukraine. At the same time, she said, there is even less
political pluralism domestically in Russia than there was in the Soviet Union.
During Soviet
times, she said, the Communist Party and KGB shared power. In Russian President
Vladimir Putin’s Russia, only the KGB holds power. She said that the late Russian
President Boris Yeltsin missed his chance to conduct lustration and destroy the
repressive institutions such as the KGB.
Now, she said, the KGB exploits the insularity of Russians, the vast majority of whom — more than 90 percent — have never been abroad. And many of those abroad have only gone to Turkey and Egypt. “The majority of Russians don’t have experience of anything European,” Albats said.
Vladimir Inozemtsev, director of
the Center for Post-Industrial Studies in Moscow, said that – regardless of
Russia’s threatening behavior – the West has fewer reasons to fear the
Kremlin’s might.
“Do not think Russia will change
anytime soon,” Inozemtsev said. “The Russian economy is in constant decline. This
year, due to falling oil prices, Russia will fall out of top 10 global economies.”
Russia’s weakness gives the West
more options for containing Putin, he said.
“The West should be much more free
vis-a-vis Russian Federation,” Inozemtsev said. “I would not fear a more acute
confrontation with Russia. “If Mr. Putin wants another Cold War
you can allow it to happen. It will be much easier to win this
containment than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.”
The third Russian in the
discussion, Ruslan Grinberg of the Russian Academy of Sciences, took a more
pro-Kremlin line. He blamed the return of the KGB in
Russia on Russian liberal policies of the 1990s, after the collapse of the
Soviet Union.
Others on the panel, including former Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schussel, former NATO Secretary General Javier Solana and former Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said the West should do more to help Ukraine transform itself from an ex-Soviet republic to a prosperous democracy with strong institutions.
Schussel, in particular, said the West’s economic sanctions against Russia have delivered a strong blow to its economy.
Strobe Talbott, the president of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said from the audience that “Ukraine deserves much more support than it is getting from my country and Europe. Thwarting Putin’s designs on Ukraine is very important, but it’s not enough. Ukraine has to have financial, material resources to build on reforms under way today.”
