Warren Buffet said of the financial crash of 2008, which he had spotted in advance: “I violated the Noah rule; predicting rain doesn’t count, building an ark does.” And now the invasion of Ukraine has shocked us all. If we knew in the abstract that great power conflict might return, we failed to take action and prepare for it. We too violated the Noah rule—and a bonfire of our complacency has left us stunned and horrified.
How on earth did we get to the situation in the third decade of the 21st century, where we are watching on TV a modern European state attack another modern European state, using the medieval technique of besieging citizens with long-range artillery bombardment?
Vladimir Putin, the man from Leningrad, seems to have learned nothing from what happened to his home city from 1941 to 1944: 872 days of siege and no victory for Hitler. But that one man from Leningrad controls this war.
His almost messianic mission to incorporate Ukraine into Russia, even if he reduces it to rubble, overrides any voice of sanity or reason. Keeping Ukraine out of the European Union and Nato—and away from aspirations to democracy or the rule of law—has taken him into the realms of Stalin.
I wonder at this transformation of the man I met nine times as Nato secretary general—and did good, cordial business with; the man who personally signed the Rome declaration at the Nato-Russia summit in May 2002. That declaration specifically endorsed the Nato-Russia Founding Act, which included the principle of “respect for sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all states and their inherent right to choose the means to ensure their own security.”
Putin now claims that Mikhail Gorbachev was duped on Nato enlargement, and that Yeltsin too must have been fooled in the documents he put his name to—even though it is Putin’s signature that is on the Rome declaration. This is also the same man who said at the subsequent press conference that “Ukraine is an independent, sovereign state and it will choose its own path to peace and security.”
Putin joked with the other 19 leaders that sunny day in 2002, suggesting a new name for Nato headquarters: the “House of Councils” (“Soviets” is the translation). He told me of his visit to Prestonpans in Scotland, where he went to a local pie shop. He sent a personal emissary to Brussels to persuade me not to stand down from my Nato post in 2003 because he didn’t like change. He asked me when we would invite Russia to join the alliance.
Yet, this is the same man who now orders the death and destruction of thousands of Slavic Ukrainian civilians and calls for the extinction of their nation state. The man who is violating international law, the United Nations Charter, the Helsinki accords, the Budapest memorandum, the Geneva conventions and the accepted morality of war. The man who suppresses all knowledge of his war in Russia, locks up those who mention it and, through his personal criminality, makes his proud countrymen and women suffer the agonies of international sanctions.
Maybe Putin had a Grand Strategy. Most megalomaniacs do. But now, like Mariupol, it lies in ruin.
That Grand Strategy must have included stopping the onward march of countries applying to join Nato—but now Finland and Sweden can see what happens to nations outside the Article 5 collective security guarantee. This strategy would surely also have included breaking the ties between the US and Europe, already fractured by Donald Trump—but instead the US has been reminded of the value of having so many permanent allies on the other side of the Atlantic. It must have been motivated by stopping the democracy-driving European Union from encroaching on his authoritarian model and getting closer and closer to home, but now the thirst for freedom in the rest of Europe will know no bounds.
And, of course, his Grand Strategy would also have included subduing and absorbing a rebel Ukraine into Mother Russia.
Well, even if he prevails with that—and that is in real doubt—he will inherit a smoking desert with an Afghanistan-type resistance on Russia’s borders for generations to come. Along with it, he will have a ruined Russian domestic economy and a reputation not as an equal to America, but as an equivalent to the pariah North Korea.
Putin’s Grand Strategy has over the years been increasingly predicated on disrupting what he sees as a morally degenerate west. He has done so by attacking its soft underbelly with corruption, election meddling, disinformation and cyberattacks. But now the west has awakened. Where we were for a time our own worst enemy, we are now Putin’s worst nightmare.
Germany has finally thrown off the guilt complex it has had for 60 years. Japan is reflecting on the nuclear deterrent. Even Ireland, conscious of Russian submarines at play off its coast, is looking to step up defence spending.
Nato, 73 years old, is now 30-nations strong, covering almost a billion people and spending a trillion dollars a year on defence; it is a remarkable strategic success story. Free, like-minded people, collectively secure and threatening no one. But while Nato has been at the centre of the conversation in recent weeks, that success is not what keeps Putin awake at night.
What rang the alarm bells in the Kremlin loudly and clearly was when Ukraine was offered an association agreement with the European Union. The EU changes countries fundamentally. The accession process, stage by stage, converts command economies to mixed economies, fake parliaments to elected ones, the rule of the state to the rule of law, the power of the party to the power of the people. That is the prospect that has long haunted Putin, and will have played on his mind as he was squirrelled away in his dacha protecting himself from the virus. If Ukraine went in that direction, would the democratic virus reach into Moscow too?
Maybe Putin had a Grand Strategy. Most megalomaniacs do. But now, like Mariupol, it lies in ruin
But after decades of propaganda, Nato is perceived as the real threat—the fraudulent frightener. The lies involved in sustaining all this are big, the liar ever-more desperate.
And what about the west’s strategy for the future of Russia? It will all, of course, depend on the bloody facts on the ground. In the short term, we have to supply the military equipment to those defending free Ukraine. That struggle will go on for a while, and we need to stick with the Ukrainians. Putin has underestimated the resolve and the determination of the Ukrainian people, just as he has overestimated the adequacy of his own forces. He also failed to anticipate just how much outrage would ripple across the world, and the actions that would be taken to isolate his country.
The situation on the ground will assuredly get worse—and then much worse. Putin is unlikely to declare defeat for some time. In the interim, he will visit on cities in Ukraine what he visited on Grozny and Aleppo. It will not be pretty. But the longer term also needs to be considered, for the world will not look the same again, whatever happens in Ukraine.
Russia will remain a challenge to all of its neighbours, including China. The threats and challenges we so optimistically laid out for joint action in the Rome declaration will also still be there and will have to be tackled. There is climate change, with much of Russia’s permafrost (which covers two-thirds of its total landmass) now melting; there is terrorism, financial fragility, nuclear proliferation, arms control and crisis management, and a lot more too—all issues unresolvable by any one nation, or one group of nations. Humanity calls for co-operation. Survival may be impossible without it.
The declaration signed that day in Rome in 2002 said this: “We, the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the Russian Federation are today opening a new page in our relations, aimed at enhancing our ability to work together in areas of common interest and to stand together against common threats and risks to our security.”
That aspiration was not built on the naivety or wishful thinking we have subsequently been accused of. There was a plan put in process and there were at that time grown-up, hard-headed realists on both sides capable of pursuing mutual self-interest. Russia eventually chose another path, and it is the poorer for abandoning the promise of Rome.
But at the press conference ending the summit in 2002, Putin used these words: “Russia has always had a crucial role in world affairs. The problem for our country has been, however, that over a very long period of time, a situation arose in which Russia was on one side and the other side was practically the whole of the rest of the world… Nothing good came of that confrontation between us and the rest of the world. We certainly gained nothing by it.”
His words were right then, and they are right today. Putin needs reminding of it, before it’s too late for Russia and its people.
