There have been important developments after new widespread pro-democracy protests in Russia on April 21 stole the thunder from Vladimir Putin’s annual state of the nation address.
While passing over in silence the reasons for his deployment of Russian forces on Ukraine’s eastern border and the growing ferment he faces at home, he nevertheless shot back angrily at the West. Russia alone will decide where and when red lines are to be drawn as to acceptable and unacceptable behavior.
Ominously, though hardly surprisingly, he also reaffirmed support for his vassal in next-door Belarus, Aleksandr Lukashenko. The Belarusian dictator continues to cling to power through the use of crude repression and terror, but his junta is only sustainable for as long as the czar in the Kremlin is prepared to back him.
And that support comes at a great price. The gradual or accelerated de facto integration of Belarus into Russia.
On April 22 Lukashenko was back in Moscow desperate for Putin’s continued backing, political and financial.
But the main news is that the Russian strong man, confronted with firm support for Ukraine being expressed by its European and North American friends, and President Volodymyr Zelensky standing his ground, appears to have blinked.
The Kremlin has announced that Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s border will be withdrawn now that a purported military exercise to test battle readiness “has been completed”.
If this is not a ploy, then of course it is good news. But it does not mean Putin’s unilateral menacing behavior is to be forgotten, or that he will not repeat it again. Small wonder that the US has said it will monitor if indeed the withdrawal is carried out.
The Russian would-be macho may be ready to retreat from his crude intimidating display of force but clearly is still not prepared to budge a centimeter on fundamental issues, namely Russia’s continuing aggression against Ukraine.
He has finally responded to Zelensky’s proposal that they meet on the front line in eastern Ukraine to discuss the tense situation. But in a typically condescending manner – expecting the Ukrainian leader to crawl on his knees before him like Lukashenko.
Come to Moscow and discuss with me on my own ground and terms how Ukraine can repair the damage it has done to Russian-Ukrainian relations, he has the audacity to tell the Ukrainian leader.
They can’t meet in the Donbas because that requires prior approval from Putin’s puppets there, which he still brazenly insists are legitimate representatives of the local regions, and that Russia is not a party to the war that it has prolonged for seven years.
And a groveling Lukashenko simply plays up to Putin and accuses Ukraine of not really wanting peace in the Donbas. The cruel political boor has the effrontery to even accuse Zelensky of lacking diplomatic finesse.
While the Kremlin reported that further progress was achieved in Russia’s scarcely masked creeping absorption of Belarus, the meeting of the two political thugs, from what was seen from the exchanges in the presence of the media, boiled down to a Ukraine-bashing exercise.
In other words, Moscow remains intent on continuing its mendacious posturing and bullying and expects Kyiv and its Western friends to come to terms with it, “or else!”
Lukashenko is firmly reined in and Russia will treat Belarus as it sees fit, presumably to be an accomplice later in seeking to intimidate Ukraine, and perhaps the Baltic countries and Poland, too. The establishment of a major Russian military base there, deployment of “defensive” strategic arsenals?
Time for all who have agreed to play along in this game, whether willingly or under duress, to say: “No! Enough!” Not only that “The Minsk accords are a sham!” but that the very future of Europe is in peril.
It’s time for Moscow to hear a different tune from Ukraine and the West, not the one that it has composed to suit it its own rapacious purposes and which it assumes will continue to blur our perceptions and responses.
President Biden had the courage recently to acknowledge publicly that Putin is a killer. It is time for Berlin and France, mediators in the Normandy Four arrangement between Ukraine and Russia, and for that matter the lame OSCE too, to drop the self-serving, but self-defeating, “diplomatic?” politeness and acceptance of the fraud being perpetrated by Moscow.
To discard their tame approach towards Russia allowing it to ridicule everyone by pretending it has not violated international norms, intervened with military force, occupied parts of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea, and is waging war on the Ukrainians. Moldova and Georgia also know very well what not standing up to Moscow results in.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron recently acknowledged that the time for naivety with Russia is over. Hence, Putin’s angry retort about the red lines. But Berlin nevertheless refuses to set an example and abandon Nord Stream 2, something that would make Putin sit up and realize that the West is serious.
We still don’t know if Berlin and France will support Ukraine’s existential quest for security by joining NATO and help overcome the doubts of others.
Let’s hope that Russia’s most recent display of anti-Western belligerence has forced open the eyes of those who in, Berlin and Paris, and Brussels too, have not wanted to accept realities for what they are.
It is not a question of not blinking, but of correcting faulty eyesight that results in the distortion of reality, seeing things as one wishes, and not how they really are.
Washington, London, Ottawa, Warsaw, Prague, Vilnius, Tallinn, Riga, and probably others in Romania, Moldova, Turkey, and even among the beleaguered Belarusian and perhaps Russian democratic movements, await more resolute, concerted, responses, worthy of democracies.
It’s time to close ranks and put Putin firmly in his place with the sort of tough sectoral and financial sanctions that Kyiv, and some of its eastern European allies, have been calling for.
As Putin knows only too well, war can be fought by many other means. And he makes full use of all the devious subversive means at his disposal.
The West needs to regain the initiative, come off the defensive and, using bolder and smarter tactics, remind Putin that beating his chest and behaving as Tarzan is fine in a jungle, but not acceptable in a civilized world.
And it should thereby also let Russians and Belarusian know, that if it were not for the likes of him and Lukashenko, they would also be welcome and feel at home in it.
In the meantime, the litmus tests of Western maturity and long-term thinking remain Nord Stream 2, Ukraine’s integration into Euro-Atlantic structures, support for the Belarusian democracy movement, and calling things by their real name, not the euphemisms concocted by the Kremlin.
