HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

Having unleashed the war, Putin has effectively taken off the table any question about “the Russian world” [the so-called russky mir  – Tr.]. The whole concept of “the Russian world” is now simply mired in aggression. What’s more, Moscow cannot play the role of being at its heart. We have to recognise clearly and decisively the consequences of what has happened, and not hide our heads in the sand like ostriches. Putin has taken Russian culture and Russian civilisation from the global level and turned it into something merely regional. What may have seemed just like a phase is likely to prove decisive, and history won’t revise that opinion. Against this general background, a separate issue is that Russian Orthodoxy has been turned into a regional, even a local, religion, that can have no pretensions about universal moralising or being “the Third Rome”. This is the world in which we will be living, and that won’t depend on whether Putin is there or not. Even if Putin departs the scene, none of this grandeur will return.

But there are even more serious consequences. Having witnessed Putin’s aggression, very many countries – notably nearly all of Russia’s immediate neighbours – will reckon that their safety can be guaranteed only by the dismemberment of Russia. The threat of the collapse of Russia is the principal result of Putin’s war that the temporary government will have to deal with. And this government is going to have very little time at its disposal. The only way that Russia can be maintained as a single, sovereign state is for the government to be proactive in all directions. The first thing it will have to do is make peace with all sides that have been drawn into this conflict; and then carry out a programme of federalisation. Federalisation is a subject for a separate discussion; but the question of peace has to be discussed here and now.

There’s a very simplistic view of this problem that’s popular among the liberal opposition. This is merely to cancel everything that Putin’s done. So: Putin started the war in Ukraine, therefore we must stop it immediately. Putin put his medium-range missiles on high alert in violation of a treaty: they must be destroyed. Putin built military bases in Africa: so they have to be closed down and the troops sent back to Russia. And so on.

I wrote the first draft of this book before the war. In it, I considered at this point the possibility of making decisions using as an example the problem of Crimea. But the war has changed all that. Today the confrontation has so deeply pierced Russian society, and the propaganda and mobilisation have had such a profound effect upon people’s consciousness, that it’s now impossible to imagine any gradual, long-drawn-out solutions. In the present, specific case, this makes the situation very straightforward: a genuine change of regime is now possible only in the event of a military defeat. This means that the Crimea problem, just as the wider problem of ending the war, can be solved only by way of a peace treaty. For now, I find it very difficult to imagine that Ukraine would be prepared to sign such a treaty without it being granted the full restoration of its sovereignty over the territories that were within its internationally-recognised borders in 1991. Of course, anything is possible, but unless Putin’s regime suffers a military defeat, it won’t be replaced in the near future.