“They wanted their fears to be heard by the West and put on the table the discussion of NATO expansion and so on,” she said. “The identity or the imperial aspect of the relationship with Ukraine was secondary to many in the Russian elite, but not to Putin. This is why the radical solution to the invasion came as a surprise to many in the Russian establishment.
She also pointed the finger at NATO that “it needs an enemy”.
“It is naive to think that you can relegitimize liberalism in the West by finding a new external enemy,” she argued. “Declarations about the victory of democracy, liberalism and the ‘free world’ against a Russia that embodies absolute evil are sensitive politics. First, they do not reflect the realities on the ground in our own societies. Second, if we fight to defend Ukraine, it is for its legitimate sovereignty, not because it represents democracy and liberalism against totalitarianism.”
Then there are those who cynically benefit from war, she added.
“You have a strong military-industrial complex for which war is always good on both the Russian and American sides,” she said. “So I think you have a lot of forces that are actually very happy to have a conflict.”
The war in Ukraine has likely become the bloodiest in Europe since the end of World War II, perhaps surpassing the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s in terms of death toll.
About 140,000 people died in the Yugoslav Wars. It remains unknown how many people have died so far in Ukraine, but both sides have suffered tens of thousands of deaths. Estimates put the death toll on the Russian side as high as 80,000 and on the Ukrainian side even higher.
The catastrophe in Ukraine stems from a long history of hostility between Washington and Moscow, which was sparked by Russia’s turn to communism with the Russian Revolution.
“The Russian media has specialized in American attacks for years, but we did more or less the same attack on Russia from our side,” she said. “I am surprised, for example, by the way the most respected American newspapers embrace the NATO crusade and repeat military and intelligence analysis without critical distance. Where has their critical thinking gone?”
Laruelle specializes in the study of nationalism and illiberalism, and the deteriorating state of liberal democracy in the West worries him.
“It’s not going well politically and socially in both the US and Europe,” she said. “That’s why I don’t like the kind of external enemy strike. Russia and China have very little responsibility for our affairs. I think the problem is mainly at home and we have to work in our societies to avoid illiberalism becoming our dominant culture in a few years or a few decades.”
Since Putin launched the invasion on February 24, Russia has been likened to Nazi Germany and accused of being an abominable fascist state that must be defeated and its military rendered powerless.
Increasingly, Western elites are not only talking about the need to force Putin out of power, but even to dismember Russia—”decolonize” it—by creating new states based around Russia’s far-flung ethnic minority populations in Siberia or North Caucasus. In this view, Russia, the largest nation in the world, remains from the year 19thEuropean imperialism of the century.
“The history of Russia is one of almost uninterrupted expansion and colonization, and Russia is the last European empire to have resisted even basic efforts at decolonization, such as giving the subjective population autonomy and a meaningful voice in choosing its leaders. country,” said Casey Michel, a journalist. , in a recent article in Atlantic magazine. “And as we have seen in Ukraine, Russia is willing to go to war to retake regions it sees as its rightful possessions… Once Ukraine fends off Russia’s attempt to recolonize it, the West must support complete freedom for the imperial subjects of Russia.
Laruelle said such prescriptions for dealing with problems emanating from Russia — and widely trumpeted in Poland, Ukraine and by some voices in the United States — are deeply flawed.
“It is very ideological to hope for the disintegration of Russia and it is a big political mistake,” she said.
“The idea that ethnic minorities will create stable, prosperous and happy states is more than naive. And who tells us that the majority of ethnic minorities in Russia want independence? I think that, with some exceptions, they are happy Russian citizens, they demand more cultural and linguistic rights, but not political independence,” she said. “Dreaming of the fall of Russia would not solve anything, it would simply multiply the issues for the international community for decades.”
In the big picture, she said the West’s extraordinary efforts to ensure Russia’s defeat in Ukraine are being watched closely by other rising powers in the world.
Paradoxically, these countries – among them China, India, Turkey, Brazil and others – are emerging with an unpleasant outcome for the West, she argued. Instead of integrating more into the Western-dominated economic system, they see the need to insulate their economies from Western sanctions if they are ever to be in a position similar to Russia’s.
“A lot of countries in the global south are looking at the way we’re dealing with Russia and the economic war we’re waging against Moscow, and they’re going to learn from that,” she said. “And what they’re going to learn is that they want to de-dollarize their economies: They want to make sure they can’t be sanctioned by the West like they’re doing with Russia. So, I think in the long run, it’s not going to help the West.”
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.
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