West Should Drop ‘Wishful Thinking’ About Regime Change in Russia, The Times Suggests

The escalation of the eight-year-old security crisis in Ukraine has sent relations between Russia and the West careening to their lowest point since the Cold War, with some observers recently warning that the conflict is even more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962.

The West will have to learn to coexist with Russia in the aftermath of the conflict in Ukraine, and realize that the Russia “problem” which the US and its allies face cannot be resolved by trying to oust Vladimir Putin, The Times Europe editor Peter Conradi argues.

In an "analysis" piece published Saturday, the columnist characterized the current crisis plaguing Ukraine as a “direct result of how the USSR collapsed,” recalling how, in his bid to overthrow Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Russian republic President Boris Yeltsin accepted a “poisonous legacy” of a breakup which left 25 million ethnic Russians living abroad overnight in 1991, 11.4 million of them in Ukraine.

Conradi also remembered how, on the eve of the Soviet Union’s disintegration, British Ambassador to the USSR Rodric Braithwaite received a message from an aide to Mikhail Gorbachev warning that a decade or two on, Russia would “reassert itself as the dominant force in this huge geographical area.”

These words “foreshadowed the increasingly assertive course of Vladimir Putin’s actions” since the year 2000, ultimately culminating in the current conflict, the observer argued.

Vladimir Putin and Boris Yeltsin at the former's inauguration ceremony.

© RIA Novosti . Vladimir Vyatkin

/

Go to the mediabank

‘Worst of Both Worlds’

The columnist suggested that the Western military bloc’s policy of incessantly expanding toward Russia’s borders, and its promise at the Bucharest NATO summit in 2008 that Kiev could one day join NATO, eliminated the possibility of a "Finlandized" Ukraine serving as a buffer zone between East and West, and simultaneously failed to provide the country with any concrete guarantees on an alliance join date.

“Ukraine was left with the worst of both worlds: it could be portrayed by the Kremlin as a NATO stooge, yet, despite growing flows of Western arms, it did not enjoy the reassurance of mutual protection guaranteed to members under Article Five of NATO’s Founding Treaty. It was as if a target had been painted on its back,” Conradi wrote.

File photo of the Romanian and the NATO flag flutter in the wind in front of the Parliament Palace, the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon, in Bucharest on April 1, 2008 on the eve of the start of the NATO summit taking place form April 2 to 4

© AFP 2023 / DIMITAR DILKOFF

‘Wishful Thinking’

The author lamented that there has been precious “little discussion of Western policy failings” in the lead-up to the current crisis, and noted that the US and its allies have “largely kept silent on how to engage with Russia now and when the conflict finally ends.”

Barring Paris, which has kept communication lines with Moscow open even amid the escalation, other major Western powers have balked at the idea of concessions to the Russians, Conradi noted.

“Policymakers in Washington and London appear inclined to hope Ukrainians will solve the problem for them on the battlefield by driving Russian forces from their country – followed shortly afterward by the departure from the Kremlin of a humiliated Putin. This looks like wishful thinking, and not only because the more likely outcome remains stalemate,” he wrote, pointing out that neither Russia’s elites, nor the population at large pose a threat to Putin, while sanctions haven’t crippled the economy to the extent hoped for by their instigators.

Given Russian security concerns, and the belief by the majority of Russians that they and Ukrainians are “one people” connected by “centuries of close cultural, historical and linguistic ties,” Conradi stressed that “it would be wrong to believe” that the West “face[s] a ‘Putin problem,’” Instead, he wrote, “history suggests this is a ‘Russia problem’ that will endure long after the current incumbent of the Kremlin finally leaves.”

The years-old crisis in Ukraine escalated into a large-scale military confrontation between Moscow and its Donbass allies on one side and Kiev and its Western sponsors on the other in February after months of escalating shelling, sabotage, and sniper attacks in the region, and fears that Kiev could start a military operation to crush the fledgling Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.

The Donbass crisis began in the spring of 2014, several months after a Western-backed coup d’etat in Kiev which overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected government and proceeded to threaten the country’s Russian speakers. The coup sparked large-scale protests across eastern and southeastern Ukraine, with the Donbass becoming a focal point of the confrontation after Kiev began a "counterterrorism operation" to bring the region to heel, leading to a bloody civil war which left over 14,000 people dead.

In 2015, Ukraine, Russia, Germany, and France hammered out the Minsk Agreements – a ceasefire and peace deal aimed at putting an end to the conflict and reintegrating Donbass back into Ukraine in exchange for constitutionally-guaranteed autonomy for the region. In the years that followed, successive governments in Kiev failed to make the necessary constitutional reforms, notwithstanding pressure from both Russia and their European sponsors to do so.