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War & peace

14 March 2023

9 min read

Moscow letter: why Russia critiques the West

Beyond condemning the invasion of Ukraine, there is also a need to understand why Russia thinks what it does, explains Malcolm Rogers, the Anglican chaplain in Moscow.

Malcolm Rogers

The Rev Canon Malcolm Rogers is Chaplain of St Andrew’s, Moscow, an Anglican church serving the international community in the Russian capital.

On 24 February 2022, Russian tanks crossed the border of Ukraine. President Putin believed that the ‘special operation’ would be swift, that Ukrainian resistance would crumble and that the Russian soldiers would be welcomed as liberators. It will go down as one of the most catastrophic failures of intelligence in history and, as a result, tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people have died, and the lives of millions of people have been devastated.

There can be no justification for the invasion of Ukraine. But if there is to be any lasting peace in the future, and if Europe is to live even in an uneasy peace with its eastern neighbour, then we need to hear the Russian critique of the West. We may well not agree with it, but unless we engage with it and try to understand where people are coming from, we are storing up yet more trouble for the future.

Sir Laurie Bristow, the former ambassador in Moscow, was often asked what Putin was thinking. His answer was simple: 'Listen to what he says’. People have mocked the long historical narratives in his speeches, but they are not to be ignored. There is no reason not to assume that Putin speaks what he believes. The conflict, certainly in his mind, is not economic but ideological.

The points below are a summary of some of the criticisms of the West that have been expressed in his speeches, in the Patriarch’s addresses and views published in Russian state-controlled mass media. It is possible that these views are now held, at least tacitly, by about 70% of the Russian population.

Putin’s defensiveness

Putin’s first criticism of the West is that NATO was planning to expand into Ukraine and place nuclear missiles there.

NATO, it is claimed, is an anti-Russian alliance, whose ultimate goal is the fragmentation of Russia. Russia, with its size, natural resources, military might and influence is too much of a threat to Western (US) hegemony.

NATO went back on an agreement given to Gorbachev in 1990 that it would not expand beyond its current borders. Since then, it has grown from 17 to 30 countries, and has steadily expanded East, incorporating the Baltic States, and offering promises – although vague – to Ukraine and Georgia that they would one day be able to join NATO.

How we tell history matters. The story deep within Russian consciousness tells of how Russia, as a nation, was held together by the Orthodox faith and by the ‘heroic’ defence of the land against invaders. In the centre of the new main Cathedral of the Armed Forces (consecrated in June 2020, and a powerful symbol of the union of army and Orthodoxy) there is an icon of Christ the Saviour. Around it are four scenes depicting the defence of Russia against the Mongols, Swedes and Poles, Napoleon and Hitler. It must not be forgotten that 26 million people from the Soviet Union died in the second world war and Hitler intended to turn the Slav peoples into a slave people.

The current conflict has become part of this narrative. Ukraine has become the Western Trojan horse. Many Russians have never thought of it as an independent country; for many Kyiv is their physical and spiritual mother. But after Maidan in 2014, which it is claimed was facilitated by western money and information, it is considered to have become a western puppet. As a result of the revolution, a democratically elected pro-Russian president (Yanukovych) was replaced by a pro-western president (Poroshenko), and it has followed an increasingly anti-Russian and pro-Western line. It was therefore only a question of time before, whether openly or in secret, nuclear weapons directed at Russia would have been placed there.

In September 2022 the Patriarch spoke of how Russia, in her history, has only engaged in defensive wars: the ‘special operations’ are perceived by the leadership as defensive. This was a conflict, it is claimed, that needed to be fought now, in order to prevent a bigger war in the future. They are necessary to secure the future of Russia against an aggressive NATO, who have always wanted to break up Russia, and are now showing their true colours by fighting a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. There is a current poster on billboards which shows a Russian soldier superimposed on the image of Alexander Nevsky, who defeated the invading Swedes (1221-1263). Underneath is the slogan, “A time for heroes.”

A cultural conflict

Putin’s second position is that Russia is standing up against an arrogant, even satanic, West which wishes to impose its economic, cultural and moral values on Russia and on other nations.

In his speech to the Federal Assembly on 21 February 2023, Putin spoke of how the West has lost touch with its moral and spiritual roots, has rejected ‘traditional spiritual and moral values’. It has replaced Christian tradition with what is called totalitarian liberal individualism. There is bemusement about gender debates (it is not illegal in Russia to practise homosexuality, but it is illegal to promote it), and a perception that in the West the rights of small minorities have come to dominate public debate and set the public agenda. Western Churches are accused of having sold out to the agenda of liberal individualism, and of losing their spiritual foundations. It is said that, having sown the wind the West will, in time, reap the whirlwind.

Nevertheless, it is claimed, because of its economic power, the West has been successful in exporting liberal individualism and has trampled over other cultures and value systems. Globalisation is perceived as Americanisation. Putin regularly speaks of wishing to create a multipolar world, not dominated by the hegemony of the United States and the dollar.

This is an argument which is persuasive in many parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America. It is noteworthy that of the 180 nations who were eligible to vote in the UN resolution on 23 February 2023, 141 nations demanded that Russia should immediately leave Ukrainian territory, but 39 countries either abstained or voted against the resolution, including China and India. There has been no change since a similar resolution in March 2022. About 40 countries have introduced sanctions against Russia, representing only 16% of the world’s population (Wilson Center). It is difficult to imagine, given the virtually universal opposition to the invasion in the West, that there is a deep global divide which is growing. As Russia’s doors to the West close, they are opening to the East and South. At St Andrew’s Anglican Church in Moscow, our western members have left the country, but they are being replaced by increasing numbers of people from India and Indonesia.

Meanwhile the conflict is spoken of in church circles in increasingly apocalyptic language, as Armageddon, or pre-Armageddon, a ‘war of the army of the Archangel Michael against the devil’, a Holy War for the defence of Orthodoxy and traditional values against ‘liberalism, globalism, secularism and post-humanism’ (Alexander Dugin, 27 Oct 2022). Both President Putin and Medvedev have at times used this apocalyptic language, declaring that Russia is engaged in a war against satanic forces.

Understanding Russophobia

Putin’s third criticism is the West is Russophobic, and has neglected the fate of Russians – particularly those in the Donbas, and is guilty of double standards.

In his book on the origins of the first Crimea war, 1853-6, Orlando Figes writes that the immediate cause of the conflict was a dispute between church wardens over some keys (to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem). Of such things, history is made! But he also partly blames Russophobia in both England and France for stoking the conflict. He writes of tracts and articles written at the time, “The stereotype of Russia that emerged from these fanciful writings was that of a savage power, aggressive and expansionist by nature, yet also sufficiently cunning and deceptive to plot with ‘unseen forces’ against the West and infiltrate societies”. That could have been written today. For many years, long before the current war, the stereotype of the bad guy in films has either been a Russian or eastern Slav.

Russia’s foreign policy has done nothing to counter Russophobia. There is an understandable huge fear of Russia in Eastern Europe, and Moscow has never recognised or acknowledged any of the atrocities committed in the Soviet era (although, to be fair, it has taken the UK about 100 years to begin to recognise some of the harm that the British empire inflicted on its colonies). And certainly some, at least on the surface, relish in the Russophobia. A man I met in the supermarket (this was just after the Salisbury poisonings) said to me, ‘You don’t need to be afraid of me. I’ve tied my bear up outside.’

The accusation of Russophobia is often levelled at any criticism of the Moscow regime, but among other things, Russophobia is blamed for what is perceived as the neglect of the role played by the people of the Soviet Union in defeating Nazi Germany. That may sound strange to us, but it is a huge thing in Russia. For the last ten years, on Victory Day, after the tanks have rolled through Red Square in the morning, there has been a far more significant event in the afternoon, usually neglected by western media. Up to 2 million people have gathered in Moscow, and similar numbers in other Russian cities, for the march of the ‘Immortal Regiment’, to commemorate those who died in the second world war.

Russophobia is also blamed for the fact that, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia was treated as a defeated enemy, and never given sufficient respect. It is blamed for the neglect of the fate of Russians left behind on the wrong side of the border after the collapse of the Soviet empire. That was particularly true after 2014 in Ukraine, when it is claimed that Russian majority areas such as the Donbas and Crimea were discriminated against. Kyiv refused to implement the Minsk agreement, which would have allowed elections of self-determination and which would almost certainly have been pro-Russia (Kyiv’s response is that Moscow had invaded Crimea, destabilised the Donbas and did not implement its part of the Minsk agreement). Certain incidents in which Russian speakers were targeted by Ukrainian nationalists were widely reported, as were the anti-Russian views of some of the right-wing nationalist groups in Ukraine, such as the Azov Brigade - which has led to Putin declaring that this is a war against Nazis. Putin has said that he will stand up for persecuted Russian minorities.

There is also the accusation of double standards. While the West has condemned Russia’s special military operations, which Russia claims is to guarantee its security, de-nazify and de-militarise Ukraine and protect the predominantly Russian population in the Donbas, the West has embarked on its own military expeditions, most notably in Iraq, Libya and Syria, justifying them in terms of either guaranteeing its own security or extending democracy.

On the edge

Perhaps the Russian critique of the West can be best summarized by Sahid, a taxi driver from Dagestan. We’d arrived in Moscow, a couple of weeks ago, after one of our epic journeys from the UK back to Russia and were exhausted. But he was very talkative! He defended the ‘special operations’: ‘Imagine that you are a peaceful guy, wanting to live a peaceful life. You are sitting on a bench. Someone comes and sits next to you. And then they start to push you to the edge of the bench. At some point, however peaceful you are, you are going to have to do something. You are going to have to either push back or be pushed off the end of the bench’. In other words, Sahid was saying what many Russians are saying to the West, you have pushed us so far, and we are not going to take any more. The tragedy is that, once again, the Ukrainian people – the border, edge people – are paying the price.

Essay

Culture

War & peace

23 February 2024

7 min read

Swords now, ploughshares later

There’s a moral case for investing in defence capabilities right now.

Tom Simpson

Tom Simpson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford.

A religious icon is propped on the side of a trench, a soldier can be seen further down the trench.

An icon of St Michael in a Ukrainian army trench.

It is two years since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, on 24 February 2022. We are still sleep-walking, with the British public and political class yet to grasp its implications. The risks of large-scale conflict have surged, and the British military is inadequately prepared for the operations it may soon be called on for. One day, swords will be turned into plowshares. But right now, in this imperfect world, we need more swords. Even if not widely enough, some have realised that the global order has changed. But fewer still are willing to act on that realisation.

The Russian assault in February 2022 was designed to shock. Repeating the plan which the Soviet Union had used in Afghanistan in December 1979, armoured columns advanced on the capital on multiple axes, preceded by an aviation assault into an airport just outside the main capital, intended to allow invading forces to ‘decapitate’ the government. The 2022 attack was also accompanied by strikes on key targets in Kyiv itself, with Russia mimicking the ‘shock and awe’ campaign with which coalition forces had initiated the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The international situation has been parallel, with an immediate shock, galvanising intensive and often heroic action—but the resolve for which has withered with time. Some moments of demonstrated resolve among the public during the early months stand out in my memory. The students in Oxford who were fundraising not just for blankets for refugees, but for body armour, night-vision goggles and, if I remember rightly, even weapons. The stranger who bought a decrepit caravan from me for scrap saying, quietly and undemonstratively, that she would not buy fuel from Shell because it was blood oil. And, the 12-foot-tall statue in Oxford’s Broad Street of a Ukrainian soldier expressing the city’s solidarity.

This was echoed at the national level. In a welcome act of leadership, Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister, declared that Putin “must fail and must be seen to fail”. This gave the necessary direction for a series of forward-leaning policies, both economic and military, to support Ukraine.

The shock was short-lived, however, and in its place are concerning questions about both public and political resolve. The underlying issue is the significance of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. While the immediate consequences of this conflict are felt by Ukrainians, it matters more widely—to both the British and the global public. Realising these consequences, and then taking the appropriate action to address them, is now urgent. That action involves serious investment in defence industries, defence capability, and the military.

The lights on the dashboard of global security are all flashing—some amber, and some red.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine matters more widely in at least the following four ways.

First, it has incurred immediate costs on consumers globally. This sounds bland but is not. Soaring energy bills have cost lives, with the Economist estimating that the war indirectly killed more people in Europe in winter 2022 than Covid-19 did; so too do soaring food costs in countries which desperately need a steady, cheap supply of grain.

Second, the current course of the conflict in Ukraine has dramatically raised the risk of a confrontation between NATO and Russia, which may include either or both of conventional or hybrid conflict. Russia has not succeeded in turning Kyiv into a satellite state. But, unless NATO dramatically increases its supply of materiel, including high-end capabilities, the most likely outcome of the war is that Russia will successfully ‘freeze’ the conflict while controlling approximately a fifth of Ukraine, including the most economically productive part of the country in the East. Such success increases the likelihood of a revanchist Putin, seeking to establish Russian control over its claimed ‘historic’ borders and having put his economy on a war footing, attacking perhaps the Baltic states. Or Russia may simply seek to disrupt NATO countries in forms of conflict that fall short of conventional war, but risk escalation, as witness the recent Estonian arrests of ten people alleged to be part of a Russian destabilisation operation. The collective self-defence pact embodied in NATO’s Article 5 means that UK forces will be involved in any response to such aggression.

Third, the current inability for the US and Europe to act decisively, due to domestic political irresolution and polarisation, in the face of a clearly deteriorating security environment, emboldens potential adversaries. This is evident daily at the moment, with Republican politicians refusing to approve the $60 billion support package for Ukraine proposed by the Biden administration; as a result, the Ukrainian army has just withdrawn from Avdiivka, because it lacks the artillery shells to defend it. In a post-2016 timeline, and from an external perspective, the West now looks decadent.

Fourth, that Russia is likely to succeed in its war aims (unless something changes on the battlefield) further undermines the norms of non-aggression which are central to our currentrules-based international order. The domestic political trajectories of Russia, China, and Iran are not presently encouraging. All have stated goals which would see change in who controls relevant territories, and none rule out the use of force in achieving their goals.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, then, is an inflection point. The lights on the dashboard of global security are all flashing—some amber, and some red.

But Javelins do not descend ex nihilo from the clouds: they need to be manufactured by advanced industries.

In the face of such a deteriorating security environment, the urgent task for a responsible government is to ensure that it has the required military capability. This capability must be at minimum sufficient to defend its own citizens. It must also be sufficient to protect more widely those whom it has undertaken treaty commitments to defend. And, as a contribution to the wider public good, it is desirable that that capability should be sufficient to defend other innocent parties globally, subject to appropriate authorisation. Central to this capability is having a defence industry which will develop and manufacture the arms required.

The defence industry has frequently attracted criticism and controversy, with the most damaging charge being that it sells weapons to authoritarian regimes in corrupt deals. Exporting arms to regimes that will use them repressively, through corrupt contracts, is plainly wrong. But responding to this criticism does not require banning or otherwise abolishing the defence industry. Rather, the correct response is to reform it and then regulate it effectively, on the grounds that if war itself can sometimes be just, then the production of the tools required for war must itself be just.

If the state is, as St Paul had it, commissioned to punish the wrongdoer, ‘not bearing the sword in vain’, someone must make the swords.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was a paradigm of wrongful aggression; if war is ever justified as, I think, an imperfect world forces us to accept, it is in such circumstances. Those who would contest such aggression, in defence of innocent lives and sovereign states, need the weapons to be able to do so, and they need the best weapons that are available. One of the immediate actions that Ben Wallace, then UK Secretary of State for Defence, took in response to the invasion was to surge Britain’s stocks of man-portable anti-tank weapons to Ukraine. One of these, the Javelin weapon, literally gained iconic status, in the meme of ‘St Javelin’, styled as an Orthodox saint. But Javelins do not descend ex nihilo from the clouds: they need to be manufactured by advanced industries.

The defence industry, then, may certainly play a valuable role in a country’s economy. But more than that, in a world of predatory and repressive states, and violent non-state actors, it is a moral necessity. Isaiah foresaw, prophetically, a time when swords will be turned into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks. But this side of that new reality, we need states that protect the innocent, and without a defence industry to equip the state to do so, the innocent lie vulnerable. If the state is, as St Paul had it, commissioned to punish the wrongdoer, ‘not bearing the sword in vain’, someone must make the swords. The peace dividend at the end of the US-Soviet Cold War has been spent, and we are in ‘the foothills’ of a new one, as the late Henry Kissinger described it. Ploughshares later; it must be swords now.

How long have we got? It is a basic principle of military planning that, while you should structure your own operations around the enemy’s most likely course of action, you should also, and crucially, have contingencies for the enemy’s worst-case course of action. That worst-case may be with us sooner that we think. In the lead-up to the recent Munich Security Conference, the Estonian intelligence chief estimated that Russia is preparing for confrontation with the West ‘within the next decade’; the chair of Germany’s Bundestag defence committee indicated five to eight years; and the Danish defence minister suggested three to five years.

With procurement timelines for advanced equipment—such as main battle tanks, frigates, and next generation fighter aircraft—typically taking over a decade, the urgent priority is for defence investment now. The UK’s Armed Forces are in a parlous state, as the recent cross-party report by the House of Commons Defence Committee makes clear. This investment in defence will not be cheap, and the difficult political task is deciding what spending to cut to allow for this uplift. But this debate cannot wait, and politicians must lead the country now in the required mind-set shift. Poland is the only NATO country to have convincingly demonstrated that it understands the times we live in, by investing seriously in its army. The UK government certainly wills the end, of ensuring the country’s security. The present question is whether it wills the means.

The St Javelin icon meme