Will Russia be the enemy forever?

There seems little appetite in the west to distinguish between leaders and people, which was the key to the peace with West Germany after 1945, writes Mary Dejevsky

And along with all this goes the demonisation not just of Putin, but of Russia and Russians (AFP via Getty Images)

On 9 May, as Vladimir Putin was presiding over Russia’s Victory Day parade in Moscow, the newly re-elected French president was in Strasbourg, setting out his ideas for the future of Europe. But it wasn’t his largely reheated blueprint for a multi-speed Europe that commanded most attention, but his call for Russia not to be humiliated in the aftermath of the Ukraine war.

There should be no repeat, he said, of the mistakes made in 1918, alluding to the long-standing argument that the harsh terms imposed on Germany then sowed the seeds for the next war only a generation later. “We will have a peace to build tomorrow, let us never forget that. We will have to do this with Ukraine and Russia around the table …  it will not be done in denial, nor in exclusion of each other, nor even in humiliation.”

If Emmanuel Macron had been hoping for applause, or even some muted support for his plea, however, he would have been disappointed. In an implicit and immediate rebuff, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen (and a German national), said that the contrast between Putin’s military parade and the “celebration of democracy” that was the European Parliament “could not be starker”. Nor was she alone.

Macron’s call met a storm of condemnation from Ukrainians and many others on social media. It also seemed to cut across the US position – as expressed last month by the defence secretary, Lloyd Austin – that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine”.

And the hostility to cutting Russia any slack at all is understandable, given that it was Russia’s unprovoked invasion that began the war, that there seems no end in sight, and that there may actually be less talking now than there was in the first weeks of the war.

A cloud of suspicion also hangs over both France and Macron, especially in the more hawkish capitals of central and eastern Europe, where France is associated with what Ukraine regards as the “unequal” Minsk accords of 2014, and Macron is seen as a self-serving peacenik, who kept channels open to Putin for too long.

In the end, though, Macron is right. One day, this war will be over and the erstwhile combatants will have to get around a table. The terms of any peace will depend on the relative positions of Russia and Ukraine when the fighting stops, but even in the event that Russia forces are driven from all Ukrainian territory, with the probable exception of Crimea, Ukraine and Russia are doomed to remain neighbours, as are Russia and Europe (however Europe’s borders are defined).

As of now, though, there seems scant recognition of this reality. Indeed, there seems less recognition of it now than there was in the early stages of the war, when Ukraine’s president appeared ready to accept that his country’s future would lie in neutrality and that Nato membership (and therefore armed protection) was not in prospect.

The steady flow of western weapons since then, and what appears to be the enforced shrinking of Russia’s territorial ambitions, is now spurring – probably unrealistic – hopes of all-out Ukrainian victory and caused anyone who now calls for talks to be branded a Munich-style “appeaser”, an “enemy of Ukraine”, a “Putin apologist”, or worse.

And along with all this goes the demonisation not just of Putin, but of Russia and Russians. It seemed to me from the first moments of the invasion that relations between Ukraine and Russia were now poisoned for at least a generation, and that Russia would become an international pariah for at least as long as Putin and anyone associated with him remained in power. How much more is that now true, with the war now well in its third month – with one qualification.

In hindsight, Russia has become an international pariah for the most part only in the western world. India and much of Africa have refrained from condemning Russia’s action, while China has carefully remained at arm’s length. To that extent, the Ukraine war may be accelerating a re-ordering of the world – north vs south, rich vs poor – that was already in train.

And if that re-ordering becomes the new normal, as it could do, the greater tragedy might be not only that Russia – which has seen itself as essentially European – now finds itself on the “other” side, but that the divide is fuelled and reinforced by so much venom.

Boris Johnson, to his credit, has at times gone out of his way to warn against automatically identifying all Russians as complicit with their ruler. But much good that has done anyone. On the one hand, his message was undermined by the pervasive belief that London Russians are all super-rich clients of Putin who shovel their money into Tory party coffers. On the other, it was already compromised by the layer of Russophobia that has long lurked beneath the surface of the Anglo-Saxon world.

So even before the Ukraine war, it was taken as read that all oligarchs (a word already with negative connotations) are Russian – even though many of those enjoying their expatriate lives are, perish the thought, Ukrainian. And so it was, too, that The Times – still seen outside the UK as the voice of the establishment – published nearly half a page of letters where every correspondent agreed wholeheartedly with an opinion writer who had argued that “casual savagery” was “seared into Russia’s soul”.

Russia had inherited from the Soviet Union, a “corruption of truth”, one said. It was a society “permanently scarred by injustice and terror”, said another. Someone else cited the apparent glee with which the driver of a street cleaning lorry scattered crowds on Red Square in the early 1980s in support of the same argument.

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The views all boiled down to the contention that Russians, whether because of their history or their nature (which comes first?) are inherently uncivilised and brutish. Imagine the outcry if Arabs or Muslims or even Chinese had been written off in this way as a group. Would there not have been even one voice raised against such destructive profiling?

And the extent to which institutional and personal ties have been severed in just a few weeks is astounding. It is not just the cancellation of this or that Russian composer’s symphony, nor even the blanket banning of artists or athletes. Practically all study exchange programmes, years abroad and the rest have been halted. As one academic put it: “Russia has been removed from the international map.”

One day, perhaps, attempts will be made to rebuild these relationships, nurtured, often in the face of many obstacles, over the years. But maybe not in my lifetime, and maybe not in yours. The UK, along with much of the west generally, has been bad enough at fathoming how Russia thinks in the better times. How much worse are the misreadings going to get?

Which leaves the question – the question Emmanuel Macron hazarded a partial answer to – what to do about Russia, once the war is over and the talking begins, as it surely must. Russia will still be there, a vast, brooding presence on the edge of Europe, and not so easy to remove from the physical map. There has to be some way of including it, listening to its fears, not humiliating it – lest the whole pernicious cycle begins again.

Alas, there seems little appetite in the west to distinguish between leaders and people, which was the key to the peace with West Germany after 1945. And Macron’s is as yet a lone voice, crying in what remains the wilderness of war.