Guardian:

UK defence secretary Ben Wallace has warned that having failed in his main objectives, Russian President Vladimir Putin may order his troops to fortify and dig in, and become a “cancerous growth” in Ukraine.

Interviewed on Sky News in the UK, he said the UK supported pushing Russia completely out of Ukraine, and did not rule out supporting Ukraine in recapturing Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014. He said:

„It’s certainly the case that Putin, having failed in nearly all of his objectives, may seek to consolidate what he’s got. Sort of fortify and dig in as he did in 2014. And just be a sort of cancerous growth within the country of Ukraine and make it very hard for people to move them out of those fortified positions. If we want this to not happen, we have to help Ukraine try to get the limpet off the rock and keep the momentum pushing them back.

The international community believes Russia should leave Ukraine. The international community condemned Russia for its invasion of Crimea, which was illegal in 2014, [and] its invasion of Donetsk. We’ve constantly said that Russia should leave Ukraine sovereign territory, so that hasn’t changed.

There’s a long way to go before Ukraine forces are in Crimea. What I would certainly say is that we are supporting Ukraine sovereign integrity. We’ve done that all along. Now of course that includes Crimea.

Pravda:

Pravda:

Dan Sabbagh, Guardian:

While the west toughens its stance over Putin’s invasion, it is rejecting his foreign minister’s claim that Nato is in a proxy war with Russia

Step by step, the west’s war aims are expanding. What began as an effort to supply “defensive weapons” to Ukraine has evolved into an attempt to provide heavier weaponry.

…

On Monday Lloyd Austin, the US defence secretary, said the west’s goal was to “weaken Russia” to the point where it could no longer invade or threaten its neighbours.

A day later the British junior defence minister James Heappey said it would be “completely legitimate” for Ukraine to use western weapons to strike inside Russia if need be.

These are different, more specific, statements, compared with some of the broad-brush rhetoric used in the early phase of the war when Russian forces were menacing Kyiv, and Ukraine’s crisis seemed existential.

…

On Monday, Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, said that Nato was “in essence … engaged in a war with Russia through a proxy and is arming that proxy” in an interview where he also warned of the risks of a third world war and even nuclear conflict.

Nato is not at war with Russia, but it is hard not to conclude that the west is engaged in a proxy fight because of the ongoing arms supply. Nevertheless, western officials reject Lavrov’s proxy war description, because they do not want to lend legitimacy to any Russian reprisals beyond Ukraine’s territory.

BBC:

BBC:

Russia’s decision to cut off gas exports to Poland and Bulgaria is an „instrument of blackmail“, the EU says.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the move showed Russia’s „unreliability“ as a supplier.

You are a monster for refusing to sell me that which I am in the process of refusing to buy from you, you monster!

Alexey Navalny, a liberal member of the Yabloko Party, became what was to be one of the most recognizable of a new liberal-friendly brand of opposition nationalists. Following the events in Kondopoga he created a movement known as Narod (‘People’), and began attending nationalist rallies: ‘My liberal friends were in shock, they tore their shirts, “It’s fascism”, they said.’ But he, a solid member of the Moscow intelligentsia with impeccable liberal credentials, persisted with the experimental overtures to the lumpen street brigades: ‘It was clear to me that what is said at the Russian March, if you abstract from the people shouting “Sieg Heil!” reflects the real agenda and concerns of the majority,’ he told his biographer, Konstantin Voronkov.

Navalny was to be the pretty face of Russian nationalism, who made it acceptable to a liberal audience: he modelled himself as a European-style right-winger, opposed to immigration and multiculturalism, speaking in recognizable ‘dog whistles’ (like ‘ethnic crime’) but never once saying the wrong thing out loud. Nationalism, unlike appeals to liberal democracy, was capable of drawing huge crowds, but Navalny also campaigned against corruption in the regime, trying to exercise minority shareholder rights at leading state companies like Gazprom and Rosneft, and publicizing investigations into the corrupt dealings of management. It was a heady opposition cocktail, and Navalny was increasingly a force to be reckoned with.

—Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 286.

Alexander Dugin, in interview for the Federal News Agency (FAN):

– There is a feeling that something new is coming, a new world. And a start has been made by the special operation in Ukraine. But what kind of world is this, and what place does Russia have in it?

– Indeed, now there is a change in the world order. But not the one that emerged after World War II, not the Yalta peace, but the unipolar world that emerged in ’91 after the collapse of the bipolar model that emerged after 1945.

In ’91, there was a revision of the results of the war – the transition from a bipolar world to a unipolar world, globalist one. And Russia lost its sovereignty and legally agreed to this, surrendering to the West. A defeatist regime came to power, a globalist dictatorship was established.

Unipolar world existed until the arrival of Vladimir Putin, who in 2000 began to move to revise the results of 1991. Now we cannot claim to be the second pole, so for Russia to be independent and sovereign we need to build a multipolar world, where besides us and the West there will be other poles independent of us and the West – as we see now in China.

The special military operation doesn’t start the transition to a multipolar world – it completes it. It is the last stage. The first attempts to start moving toward a multipolar world began when Putin with Schröder and Chirac tried to resist Anglo-Saxon aggression in Iraq. Then there was the famous Munich speech by the Russian president in 2007. In 2008, there was a clash with the pro-Western Georgian dictator Mikhail Saakashvili, then there was the Maidan and our reaction – reunification with Crimea and support for Donbass. And then today is the finale. The special operation is the border. Now the transition from a unipolar world to a multipolar world has become a reality, and everything depends only on our victory.

– You say that Putin was on his way to this for 22 years. Did he do it himself or was he pushed? Because he came to power aspiring to establish a dialogue with the West and even to join NATO. But the West consistently rejected this idea, which eventually led to what we have today.

– I think that the dilemma that defines the essence of the whole period of Putin’s rule is the combination of two mutually exclusive things. Vladimir Vladimirovich wanted to be part of the West, but a sovereign part of it. This formula is not solved in any way. Neither theoretically nor practically. And sooner or later there comes a choice: inclusion in the Western global model or sovereignty.

Jack F. Matlock Jr., Washington Post, March 14, 2014:

But a failure to appreciate how the Cold War ended has had a profound impact on Russian and Western attitudes — and helps explain what we are seeing now.

The common assumption that the West forced the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus won the Cold War is wrong. The fact is that the Cold War ended by negotiation to the advantage of both sides.

At the December 1989 Malta summit, Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush confirmed that the ideological basis for the war was gone, stating that the two nations no longer regarded each other as enemies. Over the next two years, we worked more closely with the Soviets than with even some of our allies. Together, we halted the arms race, banned chemical weapons and agreed to drastically reduce nuclear weapons. I also witnessed the raising of the Iron Curtain, the liberation of Eastern Europe and the voluntary abandonment of communist ideology by the Soviet leader. Without an arms race ruining the Soviet economy and perpetuating totalitarianism, Gorbachev was freed to focus on internal reforms.

Because the collapse of the Soviet Union happened so soon afterward, people often confuse it with the end of the Cold War. But they were separate events, and the former was not an inevitable outcome of the latter.

Moreover, the breakup of the U.S.S.R. into 15 separate countries was not something the United States caused or wanted. We hoped that Gorbachev would forge a voluntary union of Soviet republics, minus the three Baltic countries. Bush made this clear in August 1991 when he urged the non-Russian Soviet republics to adopt the union treaty Gorbachev had proposed and warned against “suicidal nationalism.” Russians who regret the collapse of the Soviet Union should remember that it was the elected leader of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, who conspired with his Ukrainian and Belarusian counterparts to replace the U.S.S.R. with a loose and powerless “commonwealth.”

Even after the U.S.S.R. ceased to exist, Gorbachev maintained that “the end of the Cold War is our common victory.” Yet the United States insisted on treating Russia as the loser.

“By the grace of God, America won the Cold War,” Bush said during his 1992 State of the Union address. That rhetoric would not have been particularly damaging on its own. But it was reinforced by actions taken under the next three presidents.

President Bill Clinton supported NATO’s bombing of Serbia without U.N. Security Council approval and the expansion of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact countries. Those moves seemed to violate the understanding that the United States would not take advantage of the Soviet retreat from Eastern Europe. The effect on Russians’ trust in the United States was devastating. In 1991, polls indicated that about 80 percent of Russian citizens had a favorable view of the United States; in 1999, nearly the same percentage had an unfavorable view.

Vladi­mir Putin was elected in 2000 and initially followed a pro-Western orientation. When terrorists attacked the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, he was the first foreign leader to call and offer support. He cooperated with the United States when it invaded Afghanistan, and he voluntarily removed Russian bases from Cuba and Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.

What did he get in return? Some meaningless praise from President George W. Bush, who then delivered the diplomatic equivalent of swift kicks to the groin: further expansion of NATO in the Baltics and the Balkans, and plans for American bases there; withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; invasion of Iraq without U.N. Security Council approval; overt participation in the “color revolutions” in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgyzstan; and then, probing some of the firmest red lines any Russian leader would draw, talk of taking Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. Americans, heritors of the Monroe Doctrine, should have understood that Russia would be hypersensitive to foreign-dominated military alliances approaching or touching its borders.

Gleb Pavlovsky, 2012:

Putin belongs to a very extensive, but politically opaque, unrepresented, unseen layer of people, who after the end of the 1980s were looking for revanche in the context of the fall of the Soviet Union. I was also one of them. My friends and I were people who couldn’t accept what had happened: who said we can’t let it continue to happen. There were hundreds, thousands of people like that in the elite, who were not communists—I, for example, was never a member of the Communist Party. They were people who just didn’t like how things had been done in 1991. This group consisted of very disparate people, with very different ideas of freedom. Putin was one of those who were passively waiting for the moment for revanche up till the end of the 90s. By revanche, I mean the resurrection of the great state in which we had lived, and to which we had become accustomed. We didn’t want another totalitarian state, of course, but we did want one that could be respected. The state of the 1990s was impossible to respect. You could think well of Yeltsin, feel sorry for him. But for me, it was important to see Yeltsin in a different light: on the one hand, it was necessary to protect him from punishment; on the other, Yeltsin was important as the last hope for the state, because it was clear that if the governors came to power they would agree another Belovezhsky Accord, after which Russia would no longer exist.

Putin is a Soviet person who did not draw lessons from the collapse of Russia. That is to say, he did learn lessons, but very pragmatic ones. He understood the coming of capitalism in a Soviet way. We were all taught that capitalism is a kingdom of demagogues, behind whom stands big money, and behind that, a military machine which aspires to control the whole world. It’s a very clear, simple picture which I think Putin had in his head—not as an official ideology, but as a form of common sense. His thinking was that in the Soviet Union, we were idiots; we had tried to build a fair society when we should have been making money. If we had made more money than the western capitalists, we could have just bought them up, or we could have created a weapon which they didn’t have. That’s all there is to it. It was a game and we lost, because we didn’t do several simple things: we didn’t create our own class of capitalists, we didn’t give the capitalist predators on our side a chance to develop and devour the capitalist predators on theirs.

I don’t think Putin’s thinking has changed significantly since then. He sees them as common sense. That’s why he feels comfortable and assured in his position; he’s not afraid of arguing his corner. He thinks: look at those people in the West, here’s what they say, and here’s what they do in reality. There is a wonderful system with two parties, one passes power to the other, and behind them stands one and the same thing: capital. Now it’s one fraction of capital, now another. And with this money they’ve bought up all the intelligentsia and they organize whatever politics they need. Let’s do the same! Putin is a Soviet person who set himself the task of revanche, not in a stupid, military sense, but in a historical sense. He set it for himself in Soviet language, in the language of geopolitics, that of a harsh pragmatism that was close to cynicism, but was not ultimately cynical. Putin is not a cynic. He thinks that man is a sinful being, that it is pointless to try to improve him. He believes the Bolsheviks who tried to create fair, right-thinking people were simply idiots, and we should not have done that. We wasted a lot of money and energy on it, and at the same time tried to free other nations. Why do that? We don’t need to.

Ω Ω Ω

The idea of a presidential power that stands higher than the other three powers is in our constitution. The President has a special kind of power which does not relate to executive power: executive power ends with the Prime Minister. The President is above them all, like a tsar. For Putin that is dogma. He thinks that in old societies and states there is a sense of order—people don’t aspire to destroy their opponent when they are victorious at the elections—and we don’t have that sense of order. He also thinks that all forms of power in Russia so far have been unperfected: he wants to build a strong, durable form of government.

Ω Ω Ω

Yes, we are talking about managed democracy, but maybe you in the West have forgotten that this concept was widespread in the 1950s in European countries where there had been fascism. In Germany, for example, there was the same idea: Germans have a tendency to totalitarianism so they must not be allowed near politics. They should have the possibility to vote freely, but the people who control real politics must stay the same, they must not yield. A strict system of control has to be created. Everything in Russia—the high vote barrier to get into the State Duma, the one-and-a-half party system—is taken from the German experience. It’s just that in Russia it hasn’t been completely successful, with the breaking up of finance and politics. Is it cynical from the point of view of the theory of democracy? Probably, yes, but here it doesn’t look like cynicism.