Vladimir putin

Russian is losing influence in a region it once dominated: Eastern Europe. Highlighting this newfound weakness are Ukraine and Belarus, two states that were once solidly in Russia’s sphere of influence and are now on the verge of completely falling away. In 2018, Ukraine enshrined in its constitution the goal of NATO membership and last year Belarus experienced massive pro-democracy protests; both of these events are in Russia’s eyes akin to westernization. The American foreign policy establishment acts as if Russia will ultimately accept being surrounded by Western-allied states. Instead, history shows that losing influence will cause Russia to lash out. If Ukraine moves toward NATO membership, it will incur a Russian invasion.

I can still hear the battlefields of eastern Ukraine. Just a mile or so from us, thousands of Russian troops were dug in; shells landed nearby. It was so cold my phone kept switching off. Seven years later, Ukraine is heading into another sub-zero winter. And the Russian troops have returned. Moscow has now massed more than 90,000 troops on Ukraine’s eastern border. Washington is briefing that intelligence suggests an invasion. Moscow says this is ‘alarmist’ and — as usual — accuses Nato of inflaming things. How did we get here? In truth the conflict never ended, it just froze. But it’s also true that the relationship between Kiev and Moscow has tanked this year.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia is hardly known for its free and fair elections. But a purge of the field ahead of this September’s parliamentary vote has led to protests even from politicians who benefit from his system. And it has brought the woman on whom the whole democratic façade relies close to a breakdown. Ella Pamfilova, the head of Russia’s Central Election Commission, had just wrapped up a meeting in which her officials disbarred the popular Communist party candidate Pavel Grudinin when she was approached by Nikolai Bondarenko, Grudinin’s ally and a popular YouTuber. ‘This is a disgrace to the whole country. You’re trampling democracy,’ he told Pamfilova in a video he posted to his channel.

You might not think that Geoff Norcott, the self-proclaimed conservative comedian, has something to contribute to western relations with Russia, but you’d be wrong. And it’s a shame that President Biden doesn’t seem to have read Where Did I Go Right? (Norcott’s account of his estrangement from his leftist roots), because time and time again, he illuminates the way that progressives’ enthusiasm for demonising their opponents only entrenches them. Take Remainers characterising Brexiteers as racist xenophobes or gullible victims of obvious lies or Hillary Clinton’s claim that half of Donald Trump’s supporters were ‘deplorables… racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it’?

Armed soldiers guard the barbed-wire compound. Helicopters buzz around the parameter, drifting above families on tandem bicycles. Groups of giggling bridal parties flirt with camouflaged guards. They watch on, careful to spot the light-fingered. This is Mezhyhirya, the former playground of exiled Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. The estate has been open to the public since the former communist fled to Russia in 2014 after a pro-western revolution. Adverts peddle the autocrat's theme park as a pleasant family day out: a museum, wedding venue, water park and zoo. It's as though a group of terrified architects asked Yanukovych, 'What style would you like? Classical? Alpine? Baroque?' and the reply had simply been, 'Yes' Top of the bill is the main house, a bizarre building.

As US and British forces pull out of Afghanistan, further victims of the ‘grave of empires’, Russia is experiencing a mix of satisfaction, exasperation and trepidation. It has its own bitter memories of the country, after all. In 1979, as a friendly regime was falling back in the face of a mounting Islamic fundamentalist insurgency, Soviet forces rolled into Afghanistan. The idea was that by installing a new leader and mounting a brief show of force, the rebels would be intimidated back into line. Six months, the old men in the Kremlin told themselves, that is all it would take. And so began a vicious ten-year war that saw the deaths of 15,000 Soviets and hundreds of thousands of Afghans.

On Sunday, Russia released its new National Security Strategy. In many ways, it picked up from where the 2015 version left off — on a crusade to politicise and polarise every aspect of Russian culture. This is not a strategy for the country’s security but for the government: the document sets out to mobilise the Russian nation, even Russian identity itself, against western bogeymen at home and abroad. Apart from some more sober references to ecology and partnership with China, most of the strategy reads as a paranoid diatribe against Russia’s oft-cited ‘internal and external enemies’. They loom large on nearly every page, lurking within discussions of national interest, societal cohesion, economics and strategic stability.

In May 2017, TIME magazine published a cover showing the White House being infected and taken over by Russian onion domes. The image meant to suggest that Donald Trump was a sleeper agent on behalf of Vladimir Putin. This sort of thinking was the driving force behind four years of media hysterics and seemingly endless cable news segments portraying Trump as a Russian puppet. ​With Joe Biden, naturally, the media has adopted a distinctly different tone — especially when it comes to the President’s relations with Russia: this despite six months of Team Biden’s complacency towards Russia, bad actors and even Putin himself. Gone are the accusations of ransom and pee tapes, or treachery — even as Russia makes aggressive moves on the world stage and towards the United States.

There was a time when summit meetings between the presidents of Russia and the US were world-historical events on which the balance of world peace rested. Today — not so much. Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin didn’t even manage to fill the five hours allotted for their talks in Geneva today in large part because they simply didn’t have much to talk about. Russia today threatens no US vital interests, commands no alliances or strategic resources and remains a world power in only two areas, both inherited from the Cold War — its large nuclear arsenal and its UN Security Council veto.

An ‘act of aviation piracy’ was how Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary described the forcible grounding of one of his planes in Minsk by Belarusian authorities in order to arrest a dissident who was on board. ‘A shocking assault on civil aviation and an assault on international law,’ said the UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. The Taoiseach Micheál Martin, en route to Brussels for an emergency meeting, called for EU heads of state to deliver a ‘very firm and strong response’ to Belarus’s President Alexander Lukashenko. But what response can the West actually make that will put an end to lawless behaviour by Lukashenko — and, more importantly, by his on-and-off ally Vladimir Putin? Where to hit where it really hurts?

Does Joe Biden think that Putin is a killer? asked ABC host George Stephanopoulos. ‘Mmm-hmm, I do,’ answered the President. Once, that would have been fighting talk. Today? Biden can insult Putin with impunity because he believes that Russia is, quite simply, no longer important or dangerous. Once a deadly serious enemy whose rivalry threatened to destroy life on the planet, Russia’s diminished status means that, these days, there’s little left to the grand old conflict except mere mudslinging. ‘We no longer think in Cold War terms, for several reasons. One, no one is our equal. No one is close,’ Biden told Ukrainian lawmakers in Kiev in 2014.

In 2001, US President George W. Bush stared into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and said he saw his soul. Joe Biden, on the other hand, famously claimed to have told the Russian leader, 'I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.' Now the new incumbent of the Oval Office might have a second chance to check again in the flesh. On Tuesday, Biden held a rare and, by all accounts cordial, telephone call with his counterpart in Moscow to discuss the increasingly tense situation on the border with Ukraine. For months, Kiev's forces in the Donbass region have clashed with troops loyal to two Russian-backed breakaway republics, with numerous reports of drone strikes and civilian casualties.