Putin’s cash and gas silence Western lambs

By Edward Lucas

Date: 12/01/06

If anyone had said 25 years ago that an independent, capitalist, more-or-less democratic Russia would be heading the G7 (as it was then), I and my fellow cold-warriors would have been popping champagne corks. So why does Russia's turn as president of the top table of international politics now seem so unwelcome?

It was much easier when the Kremlin represented an ideology that was as alien as it was impractical. It was really quite hard to imagine a People's Republic of Britain, with one-party rule and a planned economy. Only the swivel-eyed lunatics of the far-Left truly believed that the Soviet Union was a peace-loving paradise for workers. Russia's modern political system is much more subversive: it combines ruthless state-capitalism with authoritarian and chauvinistic rule at home and sinister meddling abroad.

The resignation on 27 December of Andrei Illarionov, the only member of Vladimir Putin's team with real democratic credentials, underlines the domestic trend towards a bullying and greedy style of government. But foreign policy is just as bad, as the latest gas blackmail against Ukraine illustrates.

The silence of the lambs in Western Europe is scary. The BBC reported calmly this week that the EU was not coming to Ukraine's defence for fear of jeopardising energy supplies from Russia. Whether that's explicit policy, or just a reporter's inference, the Kremlin is hearing a dangerous message: rich Europe sees the new democracies of the East as the continent's second-class citizens. Cheap gas trumps every other consideration, whether moral or strategic. A Baltic official told me recently: "We think we are doing OK because we are in the EU and NATO. But what we have to understand is that the war for the Baltics is being fought in Brussels, Berlin and Paris-and on those battlefields we are out-gunned and outmanoeuvred.

It's not lost yet. Despite Russia's wealth, there is a clear practical advantage to life in Western-orientated post-Communist countries, against the waste, brutality and backwardness of similar bits of Russia (try comparing Estonia with Pskov). But the more important moral struggle is handicapped by the way Russia has adopted the West's own greatest faults.

The problem is that Jacques Chirac in France, like Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, understands Putin all too well. Russia's grubby political milieu, where politicians, tycoons, bureaucrats, gangsters and spooks rub shoulders (and blur roles) is only a more exaggerated version of the sleaziest side of the old democracies. Compared to Berlusconi's monopoly of Italian television, for example, the Russian state's policy on broadcast media looks positively pluralistic.

Russia's G8 presidency will be a long waffle about 'energy security' while the Kremlin uses its gas transit monopoly to wreak revenge on countries (not just Ukraine, but Moldova and Georgia too) that dare to challenge its post-imperial hegemony. Does anyone remember that nice feeling that the cold war in Europe was a struggle between good and evil? As at the end of George Orwell's Animal Farm, pigs and humans now look pretty much the same. At the photo of this July's G8 summit in St Petersburg, look at the smug faces of Berlusconi, Putin and Chirac, and ask yourself: is this the free world that the captive nations of the evil empire longed to join, and for which we in the west struggled to liberate them?

Like a political Chernobyl, the Kremlin is contaminating the neighbourhood with its unquenchable mischief-making and meddling. Meanwhile the West is financing a restored Soviet-style empire, albeit one based on money and pipelines, rather than tanks and the Gulag. Happy New Year.

• Edward Lucas is Central and Eastern Europe correspondent for The Economist.

Analysis of Russia's internal and external political situation as the country takes over the Presidency of the G8 from January 2006

• Primary Source

BBC News: Russia takes over G8 leadership, 1.1.06 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4573388.stm

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