Crouching Leopard, Hidden Bear

Both critics and admirers tend to harp on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s illiberal proclivities, pointing to his unfettered contempt for civil society, slow but steady eradication of the free-press, and his history in the KGB as examples of his authoritarian disposition. Taken aback at this mischaracterization, he recently accused a group of German journalists of bias against him, and it’s true; Western media all-too-frequently omits that Putin does in fact have a soft-side: animals. Snow leopards, to be specific. The former spook established mammal as a mascot for the Sochi Olympics

and established a nature preserve just outside the city. Before the ceremony, he braved a cage with one of the carnivorous felines, stroking its head and affirming to touched observers, “We like each other.” A Russian Deputy Prime Minister, Dmitriy Rogozin, even took the opportunity to tweet an illuminating photo comparison: on the right, Obama holding a small poodle, on the left, Putin lounging with the apex predator. Rogozin, a former Ambassador to NATO, captioned the photo simply, “We have different values and allies.”

With a September 5th ceasefire in eastern Ukraine all but dead, Western leaders have levied a fresh set of “sanctions” on Mr. Putin; but this underwhelming round resembles a schoolyard argument more than it does international power-dealing. With his tail between his legs, Russia’s President departed early from the G20 summit of international leaders this week after an icy reception from the likes of Canadian PM Stephen Harper and President Obama. Assembled global officials reportedly even made Putin eat alone at breakfast. The snub is part diplomacy-as-usual (Canada has 1.2 million Ukrainian diaspora descendants), but may also point to a broader trend emerging in the West’s posture towards Slavic revanchism. Until recently, there have been two prevailing theories as to how Russia would integrate into a post-Soviet world; one model suggest assimilation, the other, conflict. In each model, there are two distinct Western policy reactions. The latter model demands Soviet-style containment, the former posits institutional embrace and societal integration.

Headline-grabbing Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi summed up his vision for assimilation in 2008, “I consider Russia to be a Western country and my plan is for the Russian Federation to be able to become a member of the European Union in the coming years.” Men like Russian President Boris Yeltsin foresaw integration as an inevitability and sought to marginalize entrenched self-interests ahead of its arrival, shocking the economy into repeated failures. In the cautious optimism that followed the collapse of the Wall, the EU and US signed a series of trade agreements with Moscow that demonstrated a desire to manage a rising, but peaceful Russia. Even NATO, conceived to counter communist spread, formed the NATO-Russia Council in 2002, a diplomatic forum for resolving joint security issues. This vision of peaceful integration, its unlikeliness matched only by its unrealized potential, is now dead. Instead, the West and Russia have diverged over the crisis in Ukraine and resulting shoot-down of MH-17. The result is an accelerating trend of global Russian isolation  that threatens to return the West to a combative, rather than cooperative approach to Moscow (throwing twenty years of progress to the wind in the process).

A fundamental shift should have taken place in 2008. Russia invaded neighboring Georgia for contemplating NATO ascension and EU integration, freezing two ethnically Russian-dominated regions in a perpetual insurgency. The EU’s reaction was to spurn an impending Association Agreement, a punishment Putin scoffed at (ring any bells?).This rebalance would have moved the West away from an overdependence on soft-power programs as tools of Russian containment, towards more rigid strategies, like those now in place. Instead, Europe has leaned on third party groups like the Organization for Cooperation and Security in Europe (OSCE), designed to counter and contain small-scale ethnic and nationalistic conflicts on the continent. While the OSCE’s list of accomplishments is impressive, it is woefully unsuited for the kind of war Russia is fighting in Ukraine. The OSCE’s capacity to complete its primary mission, broadly defined as peacekeeping, is based on its perception as a neutral arbiter. In 2002, Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov wrote that the OSCE was a Western instrument of, “forced democratization,” and Moscow’s stance has been consistent. OSCE drones can’t even fly over the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine, they’re just shot down by the rebels. Other efforts at democracy promotion through USAID, State and related groups are being actively countered by Russian propaganda at a massive scale. If European and American leaders are convinced that soft-power initiatives are failing, a return to Cold War era relations appears inevitable. But a reversion to containment, initially developed by George Kennan’s, The Sources of Soviet Conduct in 1947 and developed over four decades of miscommunication and bitterness, reflects only a piece of the best path forward as the West rebalances its stance towards Russia.

It is important to remember that while yes, Russia is a Great Power, she does not represent the same scale, or even type of threat posed by the Soviet Union in 1947. Kennan’s policy of containment reflected the real and imminent threat posed by the ideological spread of socialism, as well as the hard-power realities that existed in the post-War, bi-polar system. Today, Russia’s military is weak; it has embraced market capitalism, and its capacity to install friendly governments in far-away lands has been more or less eliminated. However reminiscent of Prague 1968 or Budapest 1956 the current conflict in Ukraine appears to be, the West’s response must be measured against the actual, not imagined threat Russia now represents. The Motherland suffers from “superpower phantom pains,” but her degraded swagger on the world-stage has not shifted her leaders’ historic tendency towards maintaining a sphere of influence in the near-abroad (whatever his or her reason is). Carnegie Europe analyst Ulrich Speck sums up the dilemma neatly, highlighting two principles, “[Russia] must accept that the global order rests on the notion of territorial integrity and sovereignty and that smaller countries have fundamental rights as well. The alternative to integrating into this order is permanent conflict, which would damage Russia much more than it can damage the West.” Putin just needs to be convinced that history has already proven Mr. Speck right.