From Mr Putin (Fiona Hill & Clifford Gaddy, 2015) p380-1
A NEW NORMAL?
With one part of the mission behind him and Crimea wrested from enemy hands, Putin’s speech in Yalta was a call to return to what he viewed as a normal condition for Russia. Russians would return to focusing on their domestic concerns; the outside world would leave Russia alone. But was that possible? Operation Ukraine had done considerable damage to Russia’s domestic development and its relations with Ukraine as well as with the United States and Europe. Putin’s actions in 2014 alienated the world outside Russia more than any other set of actions in the decades since the collapse of the USSR. They put Russia on a different and dangerous course. In contrast with the Georgia war in 2008, the United States and Europe imposed a raft of sanctions against Russia that were targeted at interests reaching deep into Putin’s one-boy network. At its summit in Wales in September 2014, NATO proposed new defensive measures against Russia that would extend close to Russia’s borders. Opinion polls in Ukraine showed deep animosity toward Putin and Russia that had not been previously observed and a heightened interest in a closer association with the EU and Western institutions.
Acts of aggression against another country, no matter what the motivation, have lasting consequences. They create resentments and new grievances that persist for decades and shape the attitudes and policies of subsequent generations. This was something Putin knew well and had reflected on. In Ot pervogo litsa, Putin was asked whether the Soviet interventions into Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 were big mistakes. Yes, they were, he replied. “And you didn’t even mention that we used force in East Germany in 1953. . . . They were all big mistakes, in my opinion. And the Russophobia that we have today in Eastern Europe, that’s the result of those mistakes.”
Ukraine was now bristling with anti-Russian sentiment fueled by the relentless barrage of propaganda launched against the country, its government, and people. Inside Russia, the domestic front of Operation Ukraine, Putin had distorted the information space by manipulating history and blatantly fomenting Russian nationalism. These were operational weapons in his and Russia’s “new warfare” arsenal. Fearsome and effective, they would, like traditional weapons, be laid aside once they were no longer needed. But this would not be so easy – as Alexander Prokhanov had told Time magazine in May 2014. Nationalist and populist ideas, along with stories and rumours, have lives of their own. For too many people the propaganda and the lie become the truth, not an expediency for temporary use. True believers and their deeply held myths cannot easily be contained, as the history of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion underscores. What the Operative in the Kremlin and abroad turned on in 2014 would not be turned off again for a long time.
In Operation Ukraine, outrageous stories and conspiracy theories proliferated and persisted in Russia. They were circulated as part of the Kremlin’s information war, which depicted the West as waging war against Russia, and Putin as trying to keep Russia out of the bloody chaos. With his propaganda onslaught in 2013-14, Putin managed to move Russia psychologically back to where he began his own professional career in the 1980s, with perceptions of threats, fears of an American attack, and alarm over a possible nuclear war that reverberated across Europe and the Atlantic. By engaging in the same sort of worst-case thinking as Yury Andropov and his other KGB mentors had done, and because of his inability to understand the mindset of Americans and Europeans and their political dynamics, Putin moved toward a Russian worldview that was far closer to that of the Soviet world of the 1980s than outside observers realized. Putin’s – Russia’s – world was now very different from the world of the West.
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