The West’s Approach to Russia Should Have Been Much Smarter

Grigory Yavlinsky, the Russian opposition Yabloko party’s leader, took part in the debates at Cambridge Union about the West’s Approach to Russia. The event took place on May 16, 2024. The other speakers were Dominic Grieve, the former UK Attorney General and Conservative MP, the former chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee of UK Parliament; Elisabeth Braw, the senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the columnist with Foreign Policy and Politico Europe; Mary Seery Kearney, Fine Gael Senator and the spokesperson on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. The full text transcription of the speech is below.

May 2024

Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to such a distinguished audience with such distinguished speakers.

I appreciate Dominic Grieve’s courageous and principled stance on many issues in British politics (he is Vice-President of the European Movement).

Mr Grieve once regretted that his brilliant report on Russian interference in British politics was delayed in publication for 17 months. Sadly, I think he was 17 years late, not months.

I share the fears of which Elizabeth Brough writes. I wish her concerns had been addressed not through the crosshairs but across the table with her counterparts from various countries, including Russia.

I thank Mary Siri Kearney for the work she does on behalf of women and children fleeing the atrocities of war. Mrs Kearney does this work because we politicians have failed to do our part.

I am grateful to Cambridge for being about the only platform that has challenged the mistakes of the last 30 years. Students who see the problem and have the courage to go against public opinion — that is encouraging.

As I understand it, the main topic of today’s debate formulated in the announcement is very important, but at the same time, unfortunately, rare, if not unique, for today’s world politics. And it sounds like this : This House Regrets The West ‘s Approach to Russia and the question that follows from this topic is more than serious: whether the last thirty years Western — Russian relations have been an inevitable path to their current dire state. Could these relations have been different if Western governments had reacted more decisively at an early stage or had more openly interacted with Russia before military actions?

In my opinion, the main problem is not whether the West’s relations with Russia should have been tougher or sweeter. The problem is that they should have been much more smart, wise, honest and responsible.

But before I get to the point of today’s conversation, I want to express my personal position and my party’s position on what is happening. My party and I personally consider everything that is happening to be an incredible tragedy and have been insisting on a ceasefire in all forms since day one. We are talking about this loudly and publicly throughout the country. Even according to official polls, this position is supported in one way or another by more than 30% of Russian citizens. This is in conditions of incredible uncontested propaganda and serious fear. We will return to the issue of the ceasefire later.

And one more important consideration. The world is changing — a new world disorder is coming. This is not only the situation in eastern Europe, but also the Middle East, Taiwan and the serious global fragmentation of the economy, deglobalization… This is, of course, a very big topic and I will not be able to say about all this, but I would like to note — what about the West? Why this is happening? Why the circumstances of the war between the United States and Western countries in Iraq, Afghanistan, Livia, Syria … and earlier in Vietnam and Korea were so unfortunate.

I am not bringing up the subject of Brexit. You know it better than who ever else and I hope you understand the reasons.

Therefore, I want to note that the issue of the West’s influence on the situation with Russia is also part of this context.

When discussing current developments in Eastern Europe politicians and western press tend to talk and write personally about Putin.

I am a principled and categorical political opponent of Vladimir Putin and participated in the presidential elections against him three times.

But you have to understand that appearance of Vladimir Putin as the authoritarian supreme ruler of Russia in 2000 was no accident or error. This was a choice dictated objectively by the nature and logic of the economic and political system which had been created in the country after 1991with the huge and sometimes decisive influence of the West .

Current Russia’s policy became possible and was probably an inevitable consequence of a number of key factors, including:

– The creation of an absolutely opaque, corporate , oligarchic and semi-criminal economic and political state system in Russia based on the criminal merger of state and property as a substance and result of the reforms of the 1990s;

– Russia’s refusal to conduct a public, state and legal assessment of the period of Stalinism, Bolshevism and the communist dictatorship.

The economic essence of this dangerous problem was clear back in 1995, and I spoke about it and wrote about it in Foreign Affairs in 1998. And then in the book “The Putin System” (published by Columbia University in 2020). But, unfortunately, the decision-makers in the West did not hear or understand.

And I want to note that almost all responsibility — 90% of what is happening, of course, is borne by Russia. But we are now talking about the West and its role in what Russia is like today.

1. The failure of the reforms of the 90s under the leadership of the West

The West – the USA and the European Union – has made a sizable contribution to the creation, design and consolidation of the Russian oligarchic system and also played a significant role in pushing us to the current catastrophe.

1991-1992

Interest of the American establishment not only in the democratisation and economic modernisation of the USSR, but also in the irreversible break-up of the Soviet Union; obstruction of the implementation of a national economic reform plan in Russia and the imposition in its place of the Washington Consensus and IMF recommendations that was entirely wrong in Russian conditions, whose main results were hyperinflation 2600% in 1992 and criminal privatisation in 1995.

1993

Unconditional support for President Boris Yeltsin from the West during the October constitutional coup and the military conflict with the Parliament of the Russian Federation; disregard of the Russian President’s refusal to enter into dialogue with Russian citizens and the use of brute force to solve the crisis

1994-1997

Mass lending to Russia by the IMF during the war in the North Caucasus and widespread military crimes committed by the Russian army in Chechnya

1996

Frank and unlimited support for Boris Yeltsin at the presidential elections, despite all the violations and falsifications and the start of the destruction of independent mass media in Russia

2. Vladimir Putin is the president of Russia with the unconditional and full support of the West.

1999-2000
Outright and unconditional support of the West for Vladimir Putin in the presidential elections – the participation of the Prime Minister of Great Britain Tony Blair in Putin’s election campaign and blatant lobbying for him; the decimation of the civil population, Russian military actions and the carpet bombing of Chechnya in 1999-2000 did not stop the IMF’s lending to Russia (to all intents and purposes, US backing)

For many years the West proactively supported Putin at a personal level: Tony Blair came to Russia to offer his support in the 2000 Putin’s election campaign and blatant lobbying for him. George Bush Junior confessed after meeting Putin in 2001: “I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. I was able to get a sense of his soul.” Putin has been praised by Berlusconi, Prodi, Sarcozy, Fillon, Kurz, Tsipras, Macron… The topic of the West’s influence on what happened to Russia is material and merits a detailed examination.

What happened? Liquidation of the private TV channels, complete nationalisation and subordination of almost all significant mass media to the administration of the President. Start of the active campaign on the depoliticisation of the population and implementation of the policy of “learned helplessness” YUKOS affair; gross falsifications of elections at all levels become the norm. In Moscow the Editor-in-Chief of the Russian version of Forbes magazine US citizen Paul Khlebnikov, who was conducting investigations into corruption in Russia and in particular in Chechnya, was murdered. Actual liquidation of local government; murder of Novaya Gazeta journalist Anna Politkovskaya, Murder of Sergey Magnitsky; law on the new procedure for appointing the Chairman of the Constitutional Court on the recommendations of the President … war with Georgia; extension of the presidential term from four to six years wide-ranging falsifications in the elections to the State DumaAdoption of a whole range of reactionary laws.

All that period of time — Putin member of G-8 and nobody In the West is ready to see the reality until 2014! But it was too late.

Russia not only was no longer a democracy, but it was rapidly moving in the opposite direction.

In these notes, I will limit myself to some of the aspects which played a key role over the past 30 years in the development of the situation today.

3. However, even in this situation there were attempts to find a common language with the West

3. 1. Rejection of new formats

The deterioration in relations between Russia and the West over the past 15 years is not only due to the much-hyped eastern expansion of NATO¹.

The key problem was that ever since the start of the 1990s the West has not developed and has not proposed a new collective security system in line with the times, which would include Russia.

This was essential and realistic. “The greatest failing of the West’s strategic choice after the end of the Cold War is, of course, the exclusion, isolation, and hostility of contemporary Russia”, noted William Hill in 2018, former counsellor of the US Embassy in Moscow.

Were there any attempts to come to a mutual understanding? There were.

However, they were not marked by conviction or persistence either on the part of Putin or that of Western partners.

I refer here, for example, to the joint anti-missile defence system for Europe (Russia, the EU and US). In 2001 Putin discussed this issue at negotiations with NATO —secretary general of NATO George Robertson during the negotiations in the Kremlin. 20.02.2001, but no further development ensued.

More than that — a Joint Declaration on New Strategic Relations between Russia and the United States — president Bush — was signed in Moscow in May 2002, but not a single practical step was taken to implement it.

3. 2. Due to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the United States refused to ratify The SALT-2 Treaty signed by Brezhnev and Carter in 1979, endured the most difficult negotiations and laid the conceptual foundations for the revolutionary START-1 in 1991. Reagan initially promised not to violate it, but in 1986 he violated it. The result is a 20-year hiatus in the strategic arms control process (1972-1991). The Afghan cause looks unjustified in hindsight after the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003 under similar pretexts.

The current avalanche-like collapse of the arms control system was initiated by the United States. Filled with a sense of omnipotence and permissiveness based on the experience of the 1990s and early 2000s and on the emotional wave of shock from the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the Republican administration of George W. Bush (Jr.) denounced the abrogated Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) under the pretext of the need to protect against missiles from «rogue states».

Also, the United States, unlike Russia, Great Britain and France, refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) under the pretext of unreliability of the control system. The Trump administration continued this line in other international conditions and in 2018 withdrew from the nuclear deal with Iran (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action – ICPA), causing severe damage to the regime of the Treaty on the Non–Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons — NPT (Non–Proliferation Treaty — NPT). Amid rising tensions with Russia and China in 2019, Washington denounced (denounced, withdrawn from) The Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty –INF Treaty), and in 2020 the same fate befell the Open Skies Treaty. «At the end» of his reign, Trump refused to extend the START-3 Treaty (The New START) and threatened to withdraw from the CTBT.

In the end, in February 2023, Russia made its historic move — it suspended the START-3 Treaty due to the US policy of «strategic defeat» of Russia and for a number of other reasons. Following this, the Russian Federation denounced (withdraw from) The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty), participation in which has been suspended since 2015 due to the expansion of NATO to the east. At the beginning of 2023, Russia withdrew its ratification of the CTBT, but has not yet withdrawn from it.

4. A dangerous road in different directions

4.1. The lack of initiatives of Russian-European integration in security is attributable, first and foremost, to the lack of understanding of the significance of this process. When the European Union was created, its main strategy was to prevent a new war in Europe. However, as the years have passed, the European Union has been transformed into a bureaucratic structure which delineated its borders and started focusing on internal problems. The strategy of a Greater Europe and Russia’s European integration was not actually discussed seriously. As a result, instead of the strategically vital path of the rapprochement of Russia and Europe, an anti-European political agenda was formed in the Kremlin.

4. 2. Entropy

However, the past one and a half decades became a time of loss and degradation, and this concerns not only relations with our country. Loathe to delve into developments in Russia, Western politicians and mass media started to back the national imperialist wing of Russia’s opposition, which has albeit acute differences with Putin, but these are only differences regarding the internal system. This is yet another painful manifestation of global political entropy, attesting to political feeblemindedness. Donald Trump’s politics and the storm of the Washington Capitol on 6 January 2021 are due to the same range of symptoms.

Incidentally, for thirty years the West has also failed to notice in Ukraine the prospects for a Greater Europe. Even after the annexation of Crimea and the start of the war in the Donbass in 2014 nothing was created for Ukraine akin to the “Marshall Plan” – no timely and real steps were taken for Ukraine’s integration into the European Union. Putin’s “special operation” was required for the West to start to consider seriously the issue of Ukraine’s membership of the European Union.

5. The inability to live without each other

It is very indicative of the constant publications in FT, Economist, Politico, etc. with incredible surprise that sanctions do not work. Here is another proof of frivolity and incompetence.

In the early 90s, they sincerely wanted to help reform the Russian post-Soviet economy, but due to incompetence, they led to a 36% drop in GDP and hyperinflation.

Now they wanted to slow down the Russian economy with the help of sanctions, and again the opposite happened. Russia’s GDP grew by 3.6% last year, according to the IMF, higher than all G7 countries.

Why?

Because politicians in the West do not understand the specifics of the Russian economy — Russia is an essential raw material part of the global economy. The world cannot exist without Russian resources . And the West, Europe cannot do without Russia.

According to data from Eurostat and the EU Joint Research Center, in the period from March 2022 to July 2023, Europe alone imported 13.7 billion euros worth of essential raw materials from Russia. This is a doubling of purchases of nuclear fuel, as well as an increase in purchases of nuclear technologies, nickel (90% of some types of nickel used in Europe come from Russian suppliers), titanium, aerospace giant Airbus from March 2022 to March 2023 imported titanium from Russia worth four times more dollars in value and tons compared to compared to the previous 13 months. The Russian company Norilsk Nickel, the world leader in the production of palladium and high-quality nickel, exported $7.6 billion worth of nickel and copper to the EU through Finnish and Swiss subsidiaries from March 2022 to July 2023. The company also shipped palladium, platinum and rhodium worth more than $3 billion to Zurich Airport.

In the 16 months since February 2022, Rusal trading houses based in Jersey and Switzerland have delivered at least $2.6 billion worth of aluminum to the European Union. In August 2023, Rusal announced that a third of its revenue still came from Europe.

According to an analysis by the International Energy Agency, Russia will continue to be the dominant oil exporter in 2023, despite global sanctions, maintaining annual exports at about 7.5 million barrels per day.

With the withdrawal from the EU, UK and US markets, Russia switched to India, China, Turkey and the Middle East, retaining its position as the world’s second largest oil exporter after the United States in 2023.

6. World disorder and our landmarks

As a whole, the West’s policy over the past three decades has been bereft of understanding and lacked a political strategy on the future that mankind could have sought to achieve. Indeed, Western elites have been handling current policies atrociously, there are more than enough examples: the flight from Afghanistan в 2021 году, the dangerous and growing hostile confrontation in the United States between Republicans and Democrats, which holds out prospects of anything but normal pre-election clashes in American society, Britain’s Brexit and conflicts with the ruling parties in Poland and Hungary in the European Union. It goes without saying that the economic and political model of the European Union is for Russia (and Ukraine) the absolute strategic benchmark. However, given the low quality of contemporary practical politics in the West and as a result its own problems, in the current situation we will have to rely only on ourselves and above all seek on our own a way to extricate ourselves from the catastrophe.

7. Where is the understanding of the West?

The leaders talk a lot every day about a ceasefire in the Middle East and don’t say anything like that about the situation in eastern Europe. Here they constantly talk about the continuation of the military conflict for years to come. Developments in this direction will inevitably lead to a clash between NATO and Russia and then quickly and inevitably escalate into a nuclear apocalypse. In such a war, no one will win. This is clear to all true experts in military matters. But not to politicians. Politicians prefer to ignore experts, in fact transferring the situation in Europe to the pre-war stage. They are doing everything possible to intensify the confrontation, without making any attempts to find diplomatic solutions. Once ”Sleepwalkers» (Christopher Clark) led to the First World War, and the Second World War grew out of it

It is a mistake to assume that there is no alternative to “victory on the battlefield”. A ceasefire is the only possible prospect in such a confrontation.

Talking about justice, retribution and the continuation of the war to some success does not take into account the price of everything that is happening. It lies in the fact that people are dying every hour and the future is dying. There is no prospect of abandoning diplomacy and ceasefire negotiations. Remember these words: there will still be talks about stopping the fire, but in a much worse situation for everyone. The result of what is happening can only be a bad or very bad situation — there is no other choice.

Endless talk about military successes and refusal to negotiate a ceasefire, for example, until 2025, is naive and does not take into account how many people will die and be maimed during this time, and the situation will only get worse than it is now.

Thus, it is obvious that global policy today should focus primarily on preventing the outbreak of a major war that could engulf Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

A quick reset of the entire European policy is needed and the immediate signing of a ceasefire agreement between Russia and Ukraine (possibly with the participation of the United States and China).

It should be recognized here that the diplomatic dialogue will have to begin against the background of total distrust. The purpose of such a dialogue at this stage should be to achieve a minimum common understanding between the parties on security issues. This is about stopping the loss of life and the destruction of infrastructure that provides basic necessities.

This is a crucial step towards preventing a major war. We cannot allow humanity to fall asleep at the wheel and allow an irreparable catastrophe.

The main thing is that the international order today is in such a state that it can collapse with great speed. There is no point in discussing the consequences of this collapse, in other words, what will remain after a major war. This will not be a problem for our children and grandchildren. There will be nothing left. It only makes sense to say how this can be prevented, which is my ultimate goal.

As a result, what can be said about The West’s Approach to Russia and The motion This House Regrets the West’s Approach to Russia. I agree.

One more example. There have been many surprising and sad things in Western politics in the last 10-15 years. They are familiar to us in Russia: laws that declare black to be white and white to be black, like the latest Rwanda Act in UK. An executive that declares dissenters ‘enemies of the people’ and attacks the press. Some of the parallels are chilling. Perhaps the issue of post-imperial pain in different countries will be a topic for research.

Both before and even now, an honest, deep, exclusively professional approach is needed, aimed not at income, not at money, not at ambitions and influences, but at preserving human life, human dignity and freedom. If you do it professionally, it will be a success. Unfortunately, there are no professional deep and intelligent politicians like Winston Churchill right now.

Summarizing, it must be said that the disorder taking place in the world today is largely a consequence of the failure of Western policy. And that’s the crux of the matter. And the truth of it is. And “The truth is irrefutable . Panic may be outraged by this. Ignorance can make fun of it. Malicious intent can distort it. But here it is.» W. Churchill.