Paul
Goble
Staunton, April 2 – Sanctions
against Putin’s Russia and other authoritarian regimes are like those imposed
in the past against apartheid in South Africa: morally necessary but insufficient
by themselves to cause political change. And moving up forces to areas
threatened by Russia is also limited in its impact on the Kremlin leader’s
behavior, Liliya Shevtsova says.
If the West is to contain Putin, she says, it must begin by recognizing that it needs a new paradigm, one that reflects the centrality for the Putin elite of money, generally illegally obtained, the desire of that elite to keep it in safe havens abroad, and Moscow’s willingness and ability to buy support among Western elites (charter97.org/ru/news/2015/4/1/145727/).
Only
by recognizing this and taking action to expose and then limit such financial
operations, the Moscow commentator says, can the West hope to “liquidate the
cancerous tumor” within itself and establish new post-Cold War rules of the game
that the Kremlin will have an interest in not violating.
Moreover,
Shevtsova argues, Western governments and especially European ones should adopt
a similar strategy against the authoritarian regimes in “Belarus, Azerbaijan,
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and other [post-Soviet] countries lest they exploit the
openings the West has provided them by using methods that no longer affect key
elites directly.
In
an interview with Charter 97’s Natalya Radina, Shevtsova says that Europe has
undergone a stress test over the last year because of Putin’s annexation of
Crimea and invasion of the Donbas. It has shown far more unity and gumption
than many might have expected given all its internal divisions.
But
the statements it has made and the sanctions it has employed against Putin’s
Russia are “only a tactic and not a strategy,” and they are unlikely to be effective
on their own unless combined with a clearly developed range of measures
designed to “force a regime which is crossing a red line not to do something
bad.”
The
place to start for thinking about what such a strategy should look like,
Shevtsova says, is to recognize that “the Soviet Union survived on account of
its confrontation with the West. But the post-Soviet Russia of Yeltsin and now
Putin survives by integration with the West, by the formation inside it of a
source of enrichment, a ‘fifth column’ and spheres of influence.”
That
is “a completely new model of survival,” she says, and consequently, “it is
impossible to cope with the Putin Kremlin, to contain and limit his freedom of
action by applying to Russia only economic and military sanctions, by sending
five armored vehicles or tanks to Lithuania, by creating rapid deployment
forces” or something similar.
What needs to
happen, the Moscow analyst says, is for Europe and the West more generally to
investigate Russian money abroad, where it is being invested, and to whom it is
being paid, and then block the flows of money that Putin and his entourage have
illegally obtained, as is the case with much of it.
That won’t easy
for Europe to do, she says, because many in Europe are profiting from the
existence of this Russian money; but Europe will not succeed in containing
Putin if it does not focus on this issue and take decisions. “The situation is completely new, and one
must not compare it with ‘the cold war.’” A new “system of taboos” must be
developed.
Had Western
analysts been paying attention, Shevtsova says, they would have noticed that
the Kremlin well before Ukraine, indeed as early as 2007, had developed and
ultimately formally approved a new concept of its foreign relations which reflected
its new concerns with money and its placement abroad.
Before the
Crimean Anschluss, Moscow saw as the matrix of its approach integration with
Europe and the Western community on the basis of dialogue. Now, Shevtsova
argues, it sees this wealth as a means of survival, of “containing the West
inside and beyond the borders of Russia,” an approach in which Ukraine has
become “a laboratory for testing this doctrine.”
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