Two weeks into Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the outcome of Vladimir Putin’s war remains in the balance, remarkably so. Uncertainty on this scale was not predicted on either side or by outside observers, all of whom expected a quicker, more decisive conflict. Putin’s miscalculations have instead catalysed new and dynamic factors that are still vigorously playing out – among them more effective Ukrainian resistance and stronger western unity – while exposing significant Russian incompetence.
One factor, though, is as old and indestructible as the continent itself. When the dust of the Ukraine war settles in some way, and it will, the other nations of Europe will need to find an appropriate new form of relationship with Russia. This war, after all, is in large part the result of the failure of the old relationships that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. So it is not too soon to begin to consider what can be put in its place that, at the very least, makes a sustainable European peace between Russia and the liberal democracies more likely than another terrible war.
What exactly should replace the now failed version of western policy towards Russia? Much depends on how the war ends. But not everything. The war will clearly be followed by a period of very deep mistrust. But a return to the status quo as it existed before 24 February is also highly improbable. Russia, Ukraine and western Europe are all now reshaping, as are the relationships between them.
Solidarity with Ukraine is rightly the absolute priority while the war continues. It is also, it has to be admitted, the relatively straightforward bit for western policymakers and observers. For that reason alone, governments and even commentators also need to try to think in a larger frame than Ukraine’s suffering and heroism. Russia will survive the war in a different form. However, prewar assumptions about globalisation, national defence, the climate crisis, international order and even progress itself are now going to emerge looking different, too.
This is Russia’s war. Nevertheless, other European states have not been merely passive players. These states, including Britain, also made wrong choices that helped feed Putin’s recklessness. Germany’s sudden policy switches on defence spending and gas are a dramatic illustration that the prewar years were marked with mistaken assumptions and policy failure. Britain’s hasty recent actions, imperfect though they may be, on Russian wealth, energy security and sporting contact make the same point.
The need for a tougher, more pragmatic approach to Russia applies at the state level above all. The European Union and its main member states were not alone in letting their guards drop. Britain did so, too. In spite of many redactions to the published text, the parliamentary intelligence and security committee’s Russia report of 2019-20 charts with chilling clarity how the UK’s security services took their eye off hostile state activity, particularly from Russia, until the middle of the last decade.
The larger reformulation of relationships with Russia will not be simple. The invasion of Ukraine is not the only reason. The roots lie deeper. Russia has very little extended tradition of democratic governance or the rule of law. Its institutions, other than the church, are relatively fragile. It has no western European partner that it trusts, or that trusts it, in the same way that, say, France and Italy trust one another, neither of them interfering in the other’s affairs. But Russians are not inhabitants of another planet.
For large tracts of the past two centuries and more, however, it has been as though they were. In the 19th century, western liberals saw tsarist Russia as the embodiment of reaction and autocracy. For Britain, Russia was an imperial enemy, too, threatening control of the Indian subcontinent. Extreme Russophobes accused a British prime minister, Lord Palmerston, of being a Russian agent. In the 1850s none other than Karl Marx even argued that, from the time of Peter the Great in the early 18th century, Russia had become dedicated to global conquest.
In the 20th century the traditional suspicions – which were often mutual – took on a different face after the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. For more than 70 years, authoritarian Russia was largely cut off from the west, after 1945 by the cold war’s iron curtain. When the Soviet Union collapsed, in 1991, all this was replaced, almost overnight, by a system in which there were almost no effective rules at all, as money and wealth poured westwards, the European Union built up big investments with the Kremlin, and security forces became preoccupied with jihadi terrorism.
The naivety of the past 30 years has been discredited now, not before time. The west is scrambling to work out a new approach and, in time, a new relationship. Call it a third way between globalisation and the cold war, if you wish – but it is urgent and serious work. There is a danger, especially in this country and particularly under a meretricious prime minister like Boris Johnson, of the pendulum swinging too far towards a complete rupture and an entirely arm’s-length relationship, with little of what was often the very carefully calibrated reciprocity of the cold war.
In his recently published book on the last 200 years of British-Russian relations – a book at once remarkably topical and yet suddenly also, since 24 February, substantially out of date – the former Labour foreign secretary David Owen makes a case for engagement. Writing in late 2021, Owen insisted that a more nuanced relationship was possible. He attacked Britain for disengaging from serious policymaking over Ukraine after the war of 2014. He also pointed out that Russia and Britain are in reality much more like one another than either of them likes to admit. Not least, both are 19th- and 20th-century imperial powers that are struggling to adjust to their relative eclipse.
Read right now, Owen’s book will seem naively Russophile. But it addresses a question that matters: can the west agree about anything with Russia? That question has been swept to one side by the events of the last two weeks and by Ukraine’s stirring resistance. But neither Russia nor the question will go away.
Echoing the French diplomat Talleyrand, the intelligence and security committee report observes that Russia is simultaneously always both too strong and too weak. Relations with such a nation will never be perfect. Yet the case for trying to make agreements applies to issues stretching from nuclear weapons to the rights of Ukrainians. If it was easy to answer the Russian question, there would be less to worry about. The answer is complex, which is exactly why the question remains such a live issue.
Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist
