Here’s what they say in Germany about the mess in Russia
Here's what analysts and historians in Germany think about the latest events in neighboring Russia.
In a Germany stingy with political reactions to the events that have been worrying Russia since last weekend, the word is left to the experts. Analysts, historians, geopolitical scholars, old and new criminologists, university professors are trying to decipher the overt and above all obscure movements within the Moscow kaleidoscope, to understand what moves within the once solid body of Putin's regime.
THE GEOGRAPHICAL LINK (AND NOT ONLY) BETWEEN GERMANY AND RUSSIA
Russia is close. Geographically: just 1,200 kilometers separate the eastern German border of Frankfurt on the Oder from the western Russian border of Zlynkovsky rajon, passable on a highway that crosses Warsaw and southern Belarus. And politically: for a long time the eastern bank of Ostpolitik, the occupying power of the eastern half of Germany in the era of the Cold War, and therefore a trading and above all energy partner until the invasion of Ukraine a year ago.
Despite this, "after 1989 there was a sort of decommissioning of the sections dealing with Russia within the various German security apparatuses, so much so that in recent years it was difficult to find people who spoke the Russian language", Stefan laments Meister, director of the Center for Order and Governance in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia of the Dgap, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Auswärtige Politik, one of the most prestigious think tanks listened to by the German government. The attention of the services had shifted to the Islamic world (without actually reaping great successes if one recalls the story of the attack on the Christmas market in Berlin in 2016), leaving the eastern flank of Europe uncovered: on the other hand, the Russia was considered such a reliable partner that it handed over the keys to Germany's energy supply.
THE WEAKNESS OF PUTIN'S REGIME
So today the many research institutes and specialized universities in Eastern Europe are struggling to frame the Muscovite events. Meister tries, speaking at a conference organized in Berlin by the foreign press. "To me the story of Evgenij Prigozhin does not seem staged, rather a sort of black swan for the Putin administration, an event that no one had foreseen and which changes some cards on the table".
What emerges, according to the Dgap expert, "is the emerging weakness of the Putin system and underlined by his first televised speech, in which the president seemed out of touch with the world, as if he did not fully understand what was happening". If what happened "probably cannot be defined as a coup d'état, but more as a challenge between private militias and the regular army", Putin's elite gave the sensation of "having lost control of the situation". Not a good sign for them.
"The system did not react", Wagner's march advanced undisturbed towards the capital, there was no intervention by the defense or interior ministries: a sensation of paralysis in which disillusionment with the failed course of the war in Ukraine that threatened solidarity with power, argues Meister.
A DICTATORSHIP IN DECLINE
From Berlin to Vienna, in the classroom of the Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Iwm), an institute founded in 1982 in neutral Austria and specialized in historical and sociological studies on Central and Eastern Europe, two exceptional guests provided an crowded in the hall and in virtual connection: the American Timothy Snyder and the Bulgarian Ivan Krastev.
"The process of decline of a dictatorship has begun, destined to continue even with less spectacular episodes than the one observed over the weekend", begins Snyder, who with his 23 lectures at Yale on the formation of modern Ukraine adapted into videos on YouTube and podcast on Spotify has become a media star. For the American historian, what we have seen recalls the dramatic moments of the fall of fascism in Italy, even for some paradoxical and surreal aspects: it is curious how Wagner's soldiers took months to advance a few kilometers to conquer Bakhmut in Ukraine and instead just a few hours to advance rapidly from Rostov to Moscow, before stopping. “And the fact that no one took to the streets in Rostov to defend Putin tells us that perhaps he is no longer as popular among Russians as believed,” he adds.
A moment will remain fixed in what happened in recent days, Snyder continues: “When Prigozhin publicly told the truth about the ridiculous reasons given to the war, he is the only one who can boast a victory on the field, if we want to call that victory of Bakhmut". And yet the epilogue of the rebellion, the agreement whose real contents are veiled in mystery as well as the fulfillment of mutual promises, is "a humiliation for all the protagonists, Putin won without having won, Prigozhin lost without having lost, Lukashenko entered the game as a third wheel, and in the end Russia was humiliated.
A triangle that Krastev pays attention to. "Since Prigozhin wanted to talk to Putin but Putin didn't want to talk to Prigozhin, so the head of the Kremlin asked for another president to talk to him." According to Krastev, what took place before the eyes of the world must be explained with the codes of criminal laws, a bit like those that dominate the telefilms on Russian state televisions of which the Bulgarian intellectual says he is a great fan. "Besides, Putin did not allow a heroic general to emerge from the narrative of the war and Prigozhin took the stage", continues Krastev, for whom basically "all conspiracies are destined to end in paranoia". Putin wasn't bluffing when he described the intervention in Ukraine in the first weeks as a special operation, but things turned out differently and there was no blitzkrieg: "Today, Putin is no longer fighting to defeat Ukraine, he understands that it is no longer possible and in the summer he changed register, saying that now the West is fighting”.
WHY THE VOTE IN THE UNITED STATES MATTERS
Looking to the future, Snyder considers the vote in the United States next year a decisive step: Biden has shown himself to be a much better president not only than what was imagined, but also than some of his predecessors, not only Donald Trump but also of Barack Obama, whose policy on the occasion of the Russian annexation of Crimea failed. Then he warns about Western fears about the nuclear threat: it is not true that nuclear powers cannot lose wars, the history of recent decades is indeed full of nuclear powers that have lost their wars, with the United States in the lead. "Rather", warns the American historian, "raising the fear of a Russian nuclear reaction serves Europeans as a diversion to avoid thinking about the atrocities that Russian troops commit day after day in the war in Ukraine, from raping women to castrating men , to the kidnapping of children, to the deportation of entire populations”. A somewhat hypocritical comfort zone.
Krastev, who in addition to being an expert political scientist in Eastern Europe directs the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, observes that the reactions of the European peoples to the Russian threat do not so much follow the positions of the respective countries during the Cold War, but those during the period of empires. Baltics and Poles are extremely sensitive because they were under the tsarist empire, while in the Balkans, for example, the positions are more relaxed because it was under the Ottoman empire. That is where fears towards Moscow are to be found.
THE TOTAL FAILURE OF THE KREMLIN
Returning to Belrino, still at Dgap, Andreas Racz, an expert on Eastern Europe, adds a further element by speaking at the morning briefing organized by the Berlin think tank to discuss developments in Russia. "The inability to react to the threat from the Russian system is the most evident element of the story", says Racz, "the Kremlin technically had all the possibilities at its disposal to stop the march of the Wagner mercenaries in the bud, but it did not done, no military unit was activated to block the rebels”. A failure of the entire internal and military security system, to which must be added the flight in those hours of many siloviki from Moscow: "The private flights that took off from the capital's airports cannot be counted and the speed with which they left Moscow is quite indicative of the moods that exist”.
However, Wagner's match is not over yet, on this point all the experts between Berlin and Vienna are in agreement. "Many of them are around and armed", concludes Racz, "some will leave in order not to end up under the orders of the Russian army, many will wait to understand if they can trust the promises made". Belarus remains unknown, while some of the mercenaries could resume activities outside Ukraine, in other regions of the world where they are still active, such as Africa.
As for the West, one thing is clear: there is no possibility to influence events in Moscow, but it is possible to decide the future of Ukraine. Now we need a clear and courageous plan to support it even more in the conflict and to give it a European perspective for the aftermath. The only way to hope to have an impact on Russian breakthroughs is to make a good policy for Kiev.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/germania-russia-parere-esperti/ on Wed, 28 Jun 2023 14:10:35 +0000.