Читать книгу Putin's Master Plan - Douglas E. Schoen - Страница 5

INTRODUCTION

At five in the morning on Thursday, February 27, 2014, unidentified gunmen stormed the Supreme Council of Crimea in Simferopol, the capital of Ukraine’s semiautonomous Crimea region. A local pro-Russian activist camped outside the Supreme Council told journalists that the gunmen “didn’t look like volunteers or amateurs, they were professionals. This was clearly a well-organized operation. . . . Who are they? Nobody knows. It’s about 50–60 people, fully armed.”¹ The mysterious gunmen took down the Ukrainian flag that flew over the Supreme Council and raised a Russian flag in its place. All across the Crimean peninsula, taking advantage of the early morning light, dozens of teams of unidentified, heavily armed soldiers seized key government, military, and infrastructure sites; raised Russian flags; and rebuffed all questioners.² Soon, the world had a name for these uniformed but unidentified soldiers who had materialized to take control of Crimea in a matter of hours: “Little Green Men.”

They didn’t come from Mars but from Russia, on the direct order of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Analysts who have observed Putin’s decadelong pattern of aggressive interference in Ukraine quickly recognized his hand in Crimea’s seizure. The rapid and violent escalation of Russian military and political involvement in Ukraine opened a new chapter in Putin’s bloody project to reestablish Russia as a regional and global power.

Soon, it became clear to the world that the Little Green Men were Russian Spetsnaz forces, and Putin himself would eventually admit as much.³ Putin moved quickly to consolidate control of Crimea and annex it to Russia. Within a month, Crimea had switched its clocks to Moscow time.⁴ Putin’s illegal invasion and annexation of Crimea would be followed by Russian sponsorship of a violent separatist movement in Eastern Ukraine.⁵ As of this writing, Russian-backed separatists continue to do battle with the Ukrainian military in and around Donetsk and Lugansk, costing thousands of lives and threatening to plunge Ukraine into political, economic, and social catastrophe.

While Putin’s forces were still establishing control of Crimea, before most media or politicians had fully acknowledged or grasped the seriousness of Russia’s speedy land grab, Poland’s then foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, warned prophetically that “this is how regional conflicts begin. This is a very dangerous game.”⁶

Sikorski is right. By invading Ukraine, Putin has plunged Europe into a perilous state of conflict and turmoil not witnessed since the darkest days of the Cold War. Since seizing Crimea and starting the war in eastern Ukraine, Russia has conducted cross-border raids into the Baltic States,⁷ ordered its fighters to buzz US Navy ships,⁸ and sent nuclear-capable bombers into the airspace of neighboring countries.⁹ Indeed, Putin has become so aggressive that he risks pushing Russia into a full-blown nuclear confrontation with NATO.¹⁰ During the Cold War, the world was lucky to avoid a nuclear war between America and the Soviet Union. We may need to be that fortunate again.

Putin’s ambitions are not limited to the territory of the former Soviet Union, though he has begun to question whether former Soviet states are even legally independent of Russia.¹¹ Putin has targeted countries like Bulgaria¹² and Slovakia¹³ for expanded Russian influence as well. Never one to miss an opportunity, Putin has taken advantage of the long-running feud between Greece and its European creditors to position Russia as an alternative ally and potential financial savior for the beleaguered, bitter Greeks.¹⁴ Putin’s vision extends beyond Europe, too: he has intervened in Syria to support Bashar al-Assad¹⁵ and transferred nuclear technology to Iran’s ayatollahs,¹⁶ and he has cut trade deals with North Korea’s lunatic Kim dynasty.¹⁷

To some, Putin may seem like an unpredictable tyrant, obsessed with power, violence, and conquest, who lashes out at neighboring countries impulsively and spasmodically. We believe the truth is much more subtle, and even more formidable, than either of these characterizations: Putin is a calculating master of geopolitics with a master plan to divide Europe, destroy NATO, reestablish Russian influence in the world, and, most of all, marginalize the United States and the West in order to achieve regional hegemony and global power. And his plan is working.

While many observers are now waking up to Putin’s single-minded hostility in Europe and the threat he poses to security on the continent and around the world, no one has yet documented and analyzed Putin’s far-reaching plan, why it is so dangerous, and why the United States and its allies must take decisive steps to roll back his agenda. Putin still has defenders in Europe and America, some of whom are bought and paid for by Kremlin petrodollars and others who simply don’t believe that Putin is an existential threat to the West. In this book, we intend to make it clear just how pernicious Putin’s plan is, and why he must be stopped.

American and European leaders have failed to respond adequately or forcefully to Putin’s challenge. They propose weak half-measures—like storing American tanks in Polish warehouses¹⁸—while Putin builds more nuclear missiles¹⁹ and opens military bases on conquered Ukrainian territory.²⁰ Indeed, Russia is set to double its strategic nuclear arsenal, in direct violation of the 2010 New START Treaty naïvely negotiated by the Obama administration.²¹ No less of an authority than former US national security advisor and grizzled Cold Warrior Zbigniew Brzezinski says flatly that “we are already in a Cold War” with Russia.²² Yet our politicians equivocate and explain away Russia’s blatant pattern of internationally destabilizing military aggression.

This book is the first comprehensive attempt to systematically explain Putin’s global strategy, which could lead to the breakup of the NATO alliance and potentially to war with the West. The West currently has no strategy, no plan, and no tactics to confront Putin’s offensive other than limited economic sanctions and token gestures.

We are neither alarmists nor alone in our concern over Putin’s aggression and the damage he has done to Europe’s future. Thomas Friedman, remarking on how quickly the situation in Europe has deteriorated, asks rhetorically, “Did someone restart the Cold War while I was looking the other way?”²³ The Economist goes further: “Nearly a quarter-century after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West faces a greater threat from the East than at any point during the cold war.”²⁴ Edward Lucas provides a chilling laundry list of Putin’s most egregious behavior: “The Kremlin provokes and intimidates its neighbors with aggressive espionage, corruption of political elites, propaganda onslaughts, cyberattacks, economic sanctions, coercive energy policies, surprise military exercises, and violations of airspace, territorial waters and even national borders.”²⁵

There is no shortage of evidence that Russia poses a clear and imminent threat to the West and its allies, to Western values, and to liberal democracy in general. To be sure, the Poles and Lithuanians—along with the Estonians, Latvians, Bulgarians, and Romanians—understand this threat, which is why they’re urging America to station heavy military equipment on their territory.²⁶ We can and should do much more. It can’t be reassuring that Yevgeny Lukyanov, deputy secretary to the Russian Security Council, recently made it clear that if the Baltic States voluntarily host NATO missile defense sites, “they become our targets.”²⁷ No warehoused battle tank or unused artillery piece will deter a Russian strike on these countries. Only real consequences for Russia, a more robust American presence in Eastern Europe, and clearheaded, decisive Western leadership can halt Russian aggression.

Unfortunately, Western leaders haven’t gotten the message. The European Union has shown no spine, failing to stand by its Eastern neighbors or to take on Putin. Indeed, the European Union has grown so weak that it now faces the prospect of disintegration, driven by the ongoing refugee crisis and the United Kingdom’s “Brexit” referendum to leave the EU. Both the refugee crisis and Brexit are wins for Putin that increase Russia’s power in Europe. America has little better than Europe. Walter Russell Mead is right when he observes that “the Obama administration failed to understand just how important Europe is to the United States, and it has never appreciated how important the United States is to Europe . . . not since the 1930s has America been this absent when its vital interests were this critically engaged.”²⁸ Whether by intent, ignorance, or incompetence, Western leaders have simply failed to understand or address the storm clouds gathering over Europe. Scholar Stephen Blank correctly diagnoses “a continuing Western and U.S. failure of nerve” when it comes to recognizing, confronting, and defeating Putin’s master plan.²⁹

THE PLAN

By fracturing the transatlantic relationship between America and its European allies, undermining or even destroying the NATO alliance, dividing the European Union, and establishing Russian hegemony in Europe both within and beyond the former borders of the Soviet Union, Putin seeks to usher in a new world order that recalls the bipolar rivalries and tensions between political systems during the Cold War. It is an order in which America will be unable to defend or promote, either rhetorically, diplomatically, or militarily, our core Western values of human rights, liberal democracy, and free markets. If left unchecked, Putin and his network of loyalists will wield enormous power within Russia and continue to enrich themselves at the expense of the Russian people and the economies of neighboring countries; Russia will continue to collaborate with the worst authoritarians and tyrants, from Iranian theocrats, to Chinese bureaucrats, to Latin American autocrats; the global expansion of rights and commerce that followed the end of World War II and the Cold War will cease and even reverse; and America and the West, cowed into isolationism, will give up the global fight for a freer world.

Russia’s neighbors, especially Ukraine and Georgia, have been living with the reality of Putin’s master plan since at least 2008. The countries of the former Soviet Union, militarily weak and economically vulnerable, have been easy targets as well. But Putin has set his sights on larger prizes. NATO itself is under threat.³⁰ The EU is growing more wobbly by the day, with the UK’s shocking Brexit vote an ominous harbinger of future European disintegration.³¹ Western values are under constant assault by the Kremlin’s “weaponized propaganda.”³² Russian submarines slip into Swedish waters³³ as easily as Russian hackers crack into President Obama’s e-mail.³⁴ It is vitally important to connect the dots and recognize the narrative that makes Putin’s pattern of outrages and provocations a carefully crafted plan, and not just repetitiously bad behavior. A thorough accounting of Russian aggression illustrates how dangerous Putin’s regime has become. Russia has purposefully provoked a series of wars and crises in neighboring countries, including Georgia, Ukraine, those in the Baltics, and Moldova. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, in the midst of the Beijing Olympics, with Putin peeling off the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, issuing Russian passports to their residents, and beginning a soft annexation of Georgian territory into the Russian Federation.³⁵ In 2014, as previously noted, thinly disguised Russian forces seized Crimea and began an ongoing war against the Ukrainian government in the eastern Donbas region, where the breakaway people’s republics of Donetsk and Luhansk continue to fight and kill Ukrainians with Russian arms and assistance.³⁶ The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania suffer frequent interference in the form of massive cyberattacks, airspace violations, and even the 2014 cross-border abduction of an Estonian Internal Security Service official.³⁷ In Moldova, more than one thousand Russian combat troops prop up the tiny separatist state of Transnistria, which is unrecognized by any member of the United Nations.³⁸ This arrangement has not benefited Moldovans or the residents of Transnistria, who must live under effective Russian occupation. As a leading Ukrainian businessman patiently explained in a private conversation: “Putin is the sole decision maker in the Kremlin, that’s for certain. He waits, he postures, and he looks for opportunities. And when he sees weakness he acts.” Certainly, Putin’s nonstop pattern of provocations and interventions bears this out. “Make no mistake,” the Ukrainian continued, “Putin has his eye on the Baltics, north Kazakhstan, wherever Russians are living in the near abroad. He will wait as long as it takes, and he will act decisively.”³⁹ Westerners gravely underappreciate the seriousness of Putin’s regional ambitions.

Putin has also struck beyond Russia’s immediate borders, deploying the Russian military in Syria in support of his longtime ally Bashar al-Assad in October of 2015.⁴⁰ The Russian air force pounded ISIS and rebel positions, bailing out Assad’s struggling Syrian Arab Army and, as Russian state media put it, managing to “profoundly reverse the situation.”⁴¹ Putin’s sudden strike in Syria was a master class in interventionism and a stark counterpoint to failed Western efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. Russia leveraged overwhelming air power to strengthen Assad’s position, seriously weaken ISIS and al-Qaeda, and expand its own military presence in Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean.⁴² Yet Western leaders were smugly confident that Putin had acted too boldly; Obama predicted that Russia’s intervention was “just going to get them stuck in a quagmire and it won’t work.”⁴³

Just six months later, Putin defied this prediction and declared his mission in Syria accomplished as the Russian military began withdrawing forces and turning its focus to building out permanent bases in Syria.⁴⁴ America’s leaders were blindsided, and the “quagmire” narrative demolished. Obama and his advisors had been certain that Syria would turn into Putin’s Vietnam, but instead it became his Grenada: a surgically precise military action with limited goals that were accomplished swiftly, and with little loss.

Putin’s Syrian success was epitomized by Assad’s recapture of Palmyra, an ancient and historically significant city that had earlier fallen to ISIS. When the Syrian Arab Army retook Palmyra, it proved that Putin had reenergized Assad, beaten ISIS, and was now a global actor of broad influence and historic importance. Putin surely didn’t mind that in rescuing Palmyra from the clutches of ISIS, he and Assad had deeply embarrassed the United States and Europe. Over the course of the Syrian campaign, Putin mortally wounded Assad’s moderate opposition; became a global leader in the fight against ISIS terror; deepened his relationship with Iran; and promoted Russia’s own military, political, and even commercial interests in the Middle East. No Western military action in the last two decades can boast anything comparable to this degree of success. It is critical to understand just how brilliantly effective Putin’s intervention in Syria has been. As one columnist starkly puts it, “Putin has attained all that he wanted.”⁴⁵

Putin’s power play in Syria has advanced his agenda in Europe as well. By arming Assad and aggressively deploying Russia’s own forces, Putin has prolonged the Syrian conflict, made it considerably bloodier, and driven millions of refugees into Europe. Europe’s struggle to deal with the social, political, and security ramifications of the mass Muslim migration has not only distracted the world from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine but also strengthened Putin’s hand against an increasingly fractured European community—and further weakened the EU as an institutional force. Indeed, the EU’s failure on Muslim migration was a direct cause of the Brexit vote, which threatens to unravel the entire European system. Independent of these developments, Western and Central Europe are learning just how expansive Putin’s plan might be, as he fans the flames of Euro-skepticism and backs radical Far-Left and Far-Right parties that have become “Putin’s fifth column in the EU.”⁴⁶ The parties he supports go from the National Front (France) and the Northern League (Italy) to the National Democratic Party (Germany) and Jobbik (Hungary). “Pro-Russian parties currently hold 76 of 751 seats in the European Parliament,” according to a report in the Ukrainian magazine Novoye Vremya.⁴⁷ A senior Western diplomat frankly admitted that “the Russians are looking for ways to break the unity of Europe, and they are targeting the weaker states.”⁴⁸ Just as worrisome as Putin’s growing political influence is the situation of Europe’s economy having proven unable to free itself from its addiction to Russian oil and gas. Indeed, Europe has inadvertently bankrolled much of Russia’s military expansion and rearmament. Separatist bullets and artillery shells in Ukraine are paid for by Germans and Italians heating their homes.

Europe has also become less committed to the fundamental premise of NATO: mutual defense. A Pew Research Center study conducted in spring of 2015 finds that “at least half of Germans, French and Italians say their country should not use military force to defend a NATO ally if attacked by Russia. . . . Americans and Canadians are the only publics where more than half think their country should use military action if Russia attacks a fellow NATO member.”⁴⁹ These public attitudes demonstrate how close the NATO alliance is to becoming a paper tiger that will crumple if Russia strikes. Indeed, Edward Lucas warns ominously that we must “fix NATO or risk WWIII.”⁵⁰

The victims of Putin’s aggression understand just how underprepared the West is to respond to Russian aggression. In a private conversation, a Ukrainian industrialist explained: “There’s a simple way to analyze this that you Westerners don’t understand. Putin is ready for war and nobody else is. And he’s not going to stop until he is rebuffed. So far no one and nothing is standing in his way.”⁵¹ Another highly positioned Ukrainian agreed that Putin was ready for war, and that unless “the West comes to grips with that reality, it will never be able to develop a workable plan to stop him.”⁵² It’s astonishing that Putin has gotten away with such flagrant disregard for international norms and the sovereignty of neighboring countries. But save for the outright invasion and annexation of Crimea, Putin has gone to great lengths to avoid directly implicating the Kremlin, thereby maintaining at least a veneer of deniability when it comes to conducting plainly Russian acts of interference and violence. He has only recently conceded that Russian intelligence operatives are in Ukraine, but he continues to deny the full extent of Russian military intervention in eastern Ukraine, and he has signed an order “making the deaths of Russian troops lost during ‘special operations’ a secret.”⁵³ Instead of overt military aggression, Russia unleashes an asymmetric arsenal of separatists, cyberwarfare, espionage, and special forces to disrupt and destabilize his neighbors. Some analysts have called this approach “hybrid warfare,” in which traditional hard power is married to misinformation, propaganda, and cybercampaigns that overwhelm not only a target country’s military capabilities but also its media, politics, and social cohesion.⁵⁴ Chatham House’s James Sherr describes Russia’s hybrid wars as “a model of warfare designed to slip under NATO’s threshold of perception and reaction.”⁵⁵ It worked in Georgia, and it’s working in Ukraine. Unless the West learns how to respond, it will continue to work the next time that Putin chooses to expand his growing empire.

At the same time that Putin targets his neighbors with hybrid warfare, he uses a deep and often-underappreciated soft power arsenal to keep the rest of Europe at bay. Putin- and Kremlin-loyal oligarchs leverage Russian oil, gas, and corporate assets to neutralize European opposition to Russia’s strategic goals, while giving European elites motive to accept absurd Russian denials of responsibility for events bearing clear Kremlin imprimatur. Much of Central, Northern, and Eastern Europe depends heavily on Russian energy to heat homes and power industry, a critical vulnerability that Putin keenly understands.⁵⁶ Putin has shut off energy supplies to entire countries before, most notably to Ukraine in the mid-2000s, and no one doubts that he would do so again. Europe’s shaky economy would be crippled by even a weeklong shutoff of Russian energy to the Netherlands or Poland—let alone to Germany, Italy, or France. One shudders to think what would happen if Greece lost access to the 40 percent of the energy supply that Russia provides it for even a day or two.⁵⁷ Putin understands the advantage Russia’s energy resources provide, and his bare-knuckle brand of petropolitics has dissuaded or co-opted more than a few European critics of Russian aggression.

Putin remains fixated on his ultimate goal: Russian hegemony in Europe, but not in the old Cold War sense. He doesn’t seek a Soviet-style, Moscow-centered megastate on the European continent, or even a Warsaw Pact–like formalization of Russian supremacy. Rather, Putin aims to neuter Europe politically, to make it concerned only with commerce and comfort, so that muscularly enforced Russian interests will dominate the political fate of the continent. By way of analogy, during the Cold War, Finland was compelled by its location between NATO countries and the USSR to remain neutral in the conflict and deferential to both sides, officially uninterested in the outcome, and at least in theory comfortable with either Soviet or Western victory. Today, Russia aims to “Finlandize” all of Europe to the point where it is simply uninterested in saying no to Putin—and where no Kremlin act of domestic oppression or international provocation would merit a European response. In Putin’s plan, European leaders will shake their heads, shrug, and sign another round of Russian energy–import deals. America, an ocean away, will watch dejectedly, its objections meaningless without committed European allies.

PROSPECTS

This frightening future is no longer as far away as it once appeared. Putin has proven that he is determined to get there and is willing to expend Russian blood and treasure on the effort. This is no pipe dream, no revanchist delusion. This is real. It is no longer such a stretch to imagine Russians dashing across open fields in Lithuania or shelling towns in Poland—instead of in Ukraine.

There’s just one problem with that scenario. Poland and Lithuania, unlike Ukraine, are NATO members. That means that under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, an attack on Poland or Lithuania is considered an attack on every NATO country, from America to Germany to Greece. Indeed, it was Article 5 that allowed America to rally European allies to its side in the aftermath of 9/11 and mount a joint effort against the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the event of a Russian attack on a Baltic state or on Poland, we should expect our allies to make a similar demand of us.

Russian direct action against NATO looms on the horizon as Putin ratchets up his provocations in the Baltic States. Putin is betting that even if he were to attack Poland or a Baltic country, NATO and Europe would fail to respond, just as they failed to respond to the attacks on Georgia and Ukraine—even though in the case of Ukraine, the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 guaranteed the country’s territorial integrity.⁵⁸ NATO members, especially the United States, must ask themselves the following questions: Are we willing to risk the lives of our sons and daughters to protect far-flung European countries that border Russia? Will Peoria really fight for Poland? Putin is determined to test the limits of the NATO alliance and push the partnership past its breaking point, leaving Europe defenseless against a re-armed Russia. Eventually, a miscalculated Russian attack on a NATO country could provoke a major European war—or even a world war.⁵⁹

American and European leaders have been blindsided by Putin’s ruthless pursuit of power and influence. There has been an across-the-board leadership failure in the West. Sanctions against Russia have not gone nearly far enough and have not forced Putin to change course in Ukraine or warned him off from future aggression.⁶⁰ Putin has provided separatists in Ukraine with a seemingly unending supply of tanks and heavy weapons, but President Obama prevaricated for months before offering Kiev nonlethal military assistance and a handful of advisors.⁶¹ Our European NATO allies, who have never carried the full burden of their own defense, have little to offer the Ukrainians in the way of hardware. What Europe can offer is financial relief and assistance as Ukraine’s economy continues to collapse, but so far, “the sums on offer from the outside world have been pitifully small,” as the Economist accurately notes.⁶² Meanwhile, sanction-strapped Russia has managed to direct millions of rubles to prop up the separatists.

Western leaders have demonstrated a near-total lack of political courage in the face of Putin’s rampage across what the Kremlin disparagingly calls its “near abroad.” Even the cold-blooded murder by Russian-backed separatists of 298 civilians, including 211 EU citizens, aboard Malaysian Airlines flight 17, or MH17, using a Russian-made missile system was not enough to rally Europe.⁶³ The Netherlands, which lost 198 of its citizens aboard MH17, continues to receive 34 percent of its energy supplies from Russia.⁶⁴ No wonder Putin feels emboldened: American and European leaders never give him reason to fear serious consequences for his behavior.

The West and the United States need to do much better. In this book, we will outline a set of policies to protect America and Europe, roll back Putin’s aggression, and promote the free development and integration of Eastern Europe into European and global institutions.

Putin’s single-minded bid for regional hegemony, global influence, and a dramatic reorganization of the world order threatens Russia’s neighbors as well as the security of the Western world and the survival of Western values. Putin is pushing us toward the disturbing prospect of a new global struggle for power—with the locus of the struggle once again centered in Europe. The war in Ukraine is Russia’s latest and boldest assault on European stability. While Putin may no longer be aiming to establish full Russian control over Ukraine, his actions show a consistent logic and strategic coherence. Putin seeks to foment low-level conflict to undermine stability and ultimately promote expanded Russian influence, either directly or through proxies. This approach has worked in Georgia; it appears to be having great success in Ukraine; and there is every reason to believe, as we will show, that it could work in Moldova, the Baltic States, and anywhere else that Putin sets his sights.

We in America and Europe must directly confront the stark truth of open Russian aggression toward the West and the real threat that it could lead to a major war in Europe. We must understand what the West stands to lose if Putin gets his way: a legacy of peace and prosperity; our values of liberty and human rights; and centuries-old democratic and civil institutions. From overt annexations of territory to covert support for separatists and radicals, Russia is actively undermining the stability of Europe in ways not seen since the fall of the Soviet Union. It is abundantly clear that Vladimir Putin is determined to undo the hard-won peace and triumph of liberal democratic values in Europe and to remake the continent in Russia’s image. We in the West must be equally as determined to preserve our security, defend our values, and put a stop to Putin’s dark, bloody vision for Europe’s future. To do that, we will have to reaffirm and reinvigorate the transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe—the partnership that won the Cold War and that stands even now as the main obstacle to the fulfillment of Putin’s vision.