Standing against Putin’s imperialist project

In a major speech at a special session of the Bundestag convened on Sunday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a “turning point in Europe”. “Putin is not just seeking to wipe an independent country off the map. He is demolishing the European security order that had prevailed for almost half a century”, Scholz said. Scholz has outlined a five-pronged response — military solidarity with Ukraine, punitive measures against Putin’s Russia, vigorous commitment to European collective defence through NATO, German rearmament, and a reduction in Germany’s energy and economic interdependence with Russia. These are a radical set of new policies that profoundly alter the geopolitical orientation of Germany as well as Europe.

Germany has long provided the European parallel to India’s political warmth towards and strategic dependence on Russia. As Germany and Europe rise up against Putin’s aggression, Delhi too will have to come to terms, sooner than later, with the impact of Putin’s reckless course on India’s long-term interests.

As a nuclear power, Delhi can’t view with any detachment Putin’s decision to throw the nuclear card into the Ukraine battlefield. If Putin persists with his messianic attempt to reconstruct the Russian empire, Delhi has no reason to be seen as supporting the Kremlin’s imperial project in Europe.

In India and beyond in the global South, Russia’s traditional image was that of a natural ally against Western imperialism. Today, many developing countries will join the West in the United Nations General Assembly in voting against Putin’s attempt to destroy another nation.

Although it did not get much notice in India, in one of his recent speeches, Putin denounced the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, for emphasising the importance of autonomy for various nationalities in revolutionary Russia. Lenin, who saw Czarist Russia as a “prison house of nationalities”, insisted that the Soviet Union must be a federation of national republics rather than simply a communist version of the Russian empire.

Putin, who believes that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest tragedy of the 20th century”, is not trying to resurrect the USSR. He is trying to revive Czarist Russia. This would involve making Ukraine and Belarus satellite states and constructing a sphere of influence beyond Central Europe.

Putin’s overweening ambition — rooted in the “Great Russian chauvinism” that Lenin sought to root out — is already running into trouble. Putin’s claim that Ukraine was never a nation and that it “can be sovereign only in association with Russia” is of course challenged by the nationalist narrative in Ukraine. But that is beside the point. Whether Ukraine was ever a nation or not, it is being forged into one today by the resistance of its people against the Russian invasion. Putin has long sought to bring back Belarus into a union with Russia. He might succeed with the current regime in Minsk that survives with Putin’s support against the will of its people.

Russian adventurism in faraway lands might not have stirred Russia’s European neighbours. But the attempt to wipe out the sovereignty of a European nation has produced a sweeping backlash in the continent.

If the Kremlin had bet that Europe would be deeply divided in dealing with the Russian attack on Ukraine, the European response has been swift and hard. The EU has agreed on sweeping financial sanctions against Russia, many European countries have closed their airspace to Russia, and are isolating Moscow on multiple fronts, including football — a sacred ritual in Europe. Many political formations in Europe that have warmed to Russia – whether it is the progressive constituencies on the left or the nationalist ones on the right — are beginning to distance themselves from Putin’s war.

Some European countries have begun to supply arms to Ukraine; many offering significant economic and humanitarian assistance. The EU plans to buy $550 million worth of arms for Ukraine. Obsessed with dividing Europe and distancing it from the US, Putin’s Ukraine aggression has united Europe and consolidated the Western alliance.

Even as Scholz chose to devote Germany’s massive resources to defeating Putin, he has left the door open for diplomacy with Russia. He also made it clear that Germany and Europe have no quarrel with the Russian people and that the problem is with Putin’s messianic agenda.

Few European countries have been as empathetic to Russia as Germany. Despite Germany being a critical member of NATO, the country’s elites have nurtured deep political, cultural, and economic links with their Russian counterparts. German trade last year with Russia was close to $66 billion (compared to the paltry $10 bn between Delhi and Moscow). India, of course, is tied to Russian military supplies in a manner that Germany is not.

Those who are critical of Delhi’s abstention at the UN on the Ukraine crisis are perhaps unaware of the deep interconnections between Indian nationalism and Russia. The issues at hand are not just about weapon supplies and the regional balance of power where the interests of India and Russia have tended to converge in the last many decades. For a century, Indian progressives of all hues saw Russia as a natural ally in building modern India; they brought Russian literature and culture as well as political and economic ideas into mainstream Indian thinking. After independence, Moscow was for long seen as a positive factor in India’s geopolitical and security calculus.

Yet, the Indian political class needs to separate its enormous goodwill for Russia from Putin’s self-destructive imperial project in Europe. Like Germany and France, Delhi too would like Russia to take its rightful place in the European and global order. That now appears impossible under President Putin.

Unless Putin reverses course quickly, Russia will pay a heavy price for his unseemly ambition. Delhi has no reason to go down with Putin on this disastrous path. It must recognise that Putin and Russia are not the same. India must hope that a great nation like Russia will endure and is not a prolonged hostage to a strong man’s delusions and terrible miscalculations.

The writer is a senior fellow with the Asia Society Policy Institute in Delhi and contributing editor on international affairs for The Indian Express