West Needs a New Containment Policy to Ensure Defeat of Putin’s System, Three Prominent Russian Scholars Say

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Feb. 13 – Regardless of how Putin’s war in Ukraine ends, the West must adopt a new containment strategy in response not only to the Kremlin leader’s aggression up to now but to prevent more such attacks and to ensure that the West rather than Russia defines the outlines of a new world order, according to three opposition Russian scholars.
    Dmitry Gudov, Vladislav Inozemtsev, and Dmitry Nekrasov suggest that while comparisons with Hitler in 1940 are popular, they ignore two things – Putin has nuclear weapons which Hitler did not, and the Russian people after Ukraine are more like the Russian people in 1945 who didn’t want another war than the Germans of 1939 who believed they could win one.
    Their arguments are presented in a 26-page pamphlet that was prepared for distribution at the just-completed Munich Security Conference (case-center.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/NEW-CONTAINMENT-case-6-250210-en.pdf in English; and istories.media/opinions/2025/02/14/kak-sderzhat-rossiyu/ in Russian).
    The three say that the West must adopt modified versions of three principles that it applied during its containment of the Soviet Union: first, it must “ramp up the West’s military and technological capabilities and ensure its strategic unity; second, it must work to drain the Russian world of its financial and human capital by welcoming investment and defectors; and third, it must ensure that other countries do not follow Russia by making clear that they will not have the advantages of being part of the Western world if they do.
    “Just like the Cold War antecedent,” the three write, “the updated containment strategy envisions two goals: avoiding an escalation and biding the time that will foil the Putin regime int eh longer term.” There are good reasons to think that these goals are achievable if the West takes these three steps.
    On the one hand, “the technological gap” between Russia and the West “is growing, and a future energy transition will depreciate Putin’s resource and sow dissatisfaction among the Russians.” And on the other, unlike the Soviet regime, Putin’s is a personalist dictatorship – and history shows that such dictatorships have a shorter lifespan.  
    This new containment doctrine will represent a clear shift from the West’s “steady yet fruitless advances of the 1990s and 2000s to a strategic defense against Russia, China and other forces targeting the erosion of the world order,” thereby overcoming the “critical” error the West made earlier “by helping to modernize both” without either” giving real assurances “they were not going to challenge the existing global order.”