Norma Percy makes the sorts of documentary series which shouldn’t work but somehow do. And, after the equally revealing Iran and the West, from 2009, and The Iraq War, from 2013, she this month presents us with Putin Vs The West, screened recently on the BBC. And which is yet another extraordinary window on to today’s geopolitical landscape.
What she does is to persuade many, and often most, of the principal players to sit down and talk to her about some of world’s most contentious trouble spots. And the remarkable fact is, that as soon as senior diplomats, civil servants and even former world leaders vacate their positions of power, they’re more than happy to spill the beans about the confidential and high level conversations they were only recently privy to.
Far from being bound by any sense of omerta, they’re all too ready to tell tales out of school. They are, it turns out, no better than the rest of us. And it makes for riveting viewing.
The most revealing of Putin Vs The West’s three remarkable episodes was the second, detailing the plight of Syria in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring. One of the first to react to the chaos that then erupted was Gaddafi, who turned on the people of Libya with a viciousness that even they were unaccustomed to.
So the West went to Russia hoping to persuade them not to veto the sanctions they wanted to impose on him, assuming that their request would be denied. But at that time, in March 2011, Medvedev was president and, to their surprise, he enthusiastically supported the idea of sanctions. So long, of course, as there were no talk of regime change. Absolutely not, the West assured him.
So Russia abstained in the UN vote, but without imposing its veto. And the sanctions were passed.
But Putin, who then held the junior post of prime minster, publicly chastised Medvedev for having foolishly taken the West at its word, and for not recognising the ‘crusade’ the West was on to destroy them. And sure enough, two months later the West declared that actually, the only thing that would save Libya was in fact regime change.
Medvedev was furious, and Putin used the West’s betrayal of him as the central platform in his bid for re-election, which, the following year, he won in a landslide.
A year later, in 2013, John Kerry travelled to Moscow in the hope of repairing relations between East and West, so that they could join forces to do something about Assad and the hell he’d been unleashing on the people of Syria.
Haven’t you learnt anything about your ruinous efforts at regime change, they replied. Look at what happened after your disastrous interventions in Libya, and in Afghanistan and Iraq before that.
But when evidence surfaced that summer that Assad had begun using chemical weapons, Obama’s famous red line had been definitively crossed. And Obama joined forces with Hollande and Cameron, the French premier and British PM, determined to intervene in Syria with air strikes.
But when Cameron put military intervention to the vote in Parliament, he lost. And similarly, Obama learnt that he would very likely lose a similar vote in congress. So when Putin, very much to everyone’s surprise, offered his word that he would undertake to force Assad to surrender his chemical weapons, if the West promised to refrain from taking military action, Obama, to everyone’s amazement, agreed.
Which, obviously, was an extremely good thing and was absolutely the right decision. But the way it was reached was, to put it mildly, murky. And, politically speaking, it was a disaster. The West had blinked. Red lines were, clearly, meaningless, and the West was mired in disunity – Hollande felt particularly left out in the cold.
A year later, in 2014, Isis took over swathes of Syria. And the following year, two days after addressing the UN assembly, and to everyone’s complete astonishment, Putin sent his air force in to bomb Syria, under the guise of attacking Isis – which of course was exactly the same excuse that the West was using for doing the same thing elsewhere. And for the first time in decades, Russian troops were deployed on foreign soil.
The West’s response? It decided to do nothing. Which, again, was absolutely the right response. But the message that it sent out to Putin couldn’t have been clearer. The West was weak, divided and spent, and Russia was back on the world stage. And in a part of the world that was vital to its strategic interests.
To the north, it had gone into eastern Ukraine in 2014, with the crucial access that gives it to the warm water ports in the Black Sea – and in response to which, again, the West had done nothing. And to the south, it now had a presence in the Mediterranean.
None of which, to be absolutely clear, in any way excuses what Putin has so unforgivably inflicted on the people of Ukraine. But it does help explain his actions, and put them in context.
We’ve very quick to marvel at how blindly people in places like Russia accept the propaganda they’re fed. But we rarely stop to question the picture we’re being given. Putin is not the insane, unpredictable, cartoon villain we’re continually presented with. He’s pursuing a clear political strategy that has its roots in the re-unification of Germany.
Thirty years ago, the West promised Russia that that re-unification would categorically not result in any expansion of NATO into the east of Europe. Since when, 14 of the 15 countries to the east of Germany have all joined NATO. All but one; Ukraine.
What this film demonstrates so well is that Russia’s attempted invasion of Ukraine is every bit as complicated as the reasons behind the second world war, which so many people like to compare it to. And is no more black and white than that was.
Painting Putin as an irrational lunatic is lazy and lets us off the hook. Because it fails to acknowledge the arrogance that we’ve displayed towards Russia since the breakup of the Soviet Union. And it conveniently ignores the chaos we’ve inflicted on numerous other countries over that same time.
None of which, finally, should in any way be read as any kind of support for those two insufferable clowns that we Irish have sent over to the European parliament.
And none of which will do anything to ease the suffering of the poor people of Ukraine.
Watch the trailer for Putin Vs The West here:
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