President Jimmy Carter’s Polish-born national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski noted in the 1990s that “ without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire.” It’s a notion that was acknowledged by senior US officials already decades ago. Putin’s notion of the centrality of Ukraine for securing its place on the world stage has a long pedigree in militant Russian nationalism. For these leaders, land grabs, military threats, destabilisation, disinformation, and assassinating one’s opponents are the game’s new rules.
Putin has become a model for a class of world leaders that no longer finds it necessary to pay lip service to the rule of law. Peskov’s suggestion that “there’s a demand in the world for special, sovereign leaders, for decisive ones” spoke to the fact that Mr. Putin’s spokesman, hit the nail on the head when he recently noted that the Russian President’s autocratic domestic and foreign policies were just “the starting point.”
#Diplomacy no stupid game full#
Putin used an unrelated question posed by Kazakhstan TV to remind his audience that “Kazakhstan is a Russian-speaking country in the full sense of the word.”ĭmitry Peskov, Mr. Weeks before Russian troops intervened early this year in Kazakhstan to squash mass anti-government protests and then quickly withdrew, Mr. Putin has talked about Kazakhstan in terms of the same denial of a national history that he employs when he speaks about Ukraine. What has gone unnoticed is that since 2014 Mr. Russian recognition in 2008 of two breakaway republics in Georgia, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and fostering of secessionist insurgents in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, and the temporary-turned permanent presence of a significant number of Russian troops in Belarus prove the point. Putin and other civilisationalist leaders whose world is one in which might is right. Xi’s claims to the South China Sea or efforts to control the ethnic Chinese Diaspora. Putin’s reasoning would deny legitimacy to most states in Europe and beyond. Much like Saddam Hussein’s justification of the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Mr. Putin’s suggestion that none of the states that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union - except for Russia-were real countries and that Ukraine had no tradition of genuine statehood. The boundaries of that world are defined by the presence of Russian speakers and/or adherents to Russian culture on any given territory.
Putin’s version of history was designed to justify Russian and Russian-backed infringements on Ukrainian territory and define the civilisational borders of what he calls the Russian world. Putin was talking about when he this week, slumped in a chair with a seemingly bored expression on his face, spoke for 90 minutes, during which he announced Russian recognition of two breakaway Ukrainian republics. In doing so, they define their nation’s borders in civilisational instead of internationally recognized legal terms. Trump, is that they think in civilisational rather than national terms. Putin and Xi have in common and share with a critical mass of other world leaders, including India’s Narendra Modi, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Hungary’s Victor Orban, and former US President Donald J. Putin and the words of Financial Times columnist Gideon Rahman about “making the world safe for autocrats.” If the period since World War One was in the words of President Woodrow Wilson about “making the world safe for democracy,” today it is in the mind of Mr. Xi dangerously blurs the lines between maintaining and fundamentally altering the current world order. Xi would prefer to ensure China’s place in the existing world order, enhanced with what he would call Chinese characteristics. Putin is seeking to overthrow the current world order, at least as far Europe and the continent’s security architecture is concerned.īy contrast, Mr. In that battle, Russian President Vladimir Putin is living up to the worst expectations of Western policymakers and analysts. The battle for Ukraine is a battle for the new world order. Ukraine is about much more than the security of one sovereign nation.
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