Backcover

Has Vladimir Putin become the master of the game? Why and how did the Russian president decide to attack Ukraine? Has he tried to prevent Ukraine from joining Europe? Is he trying to reconstitute the USSR? Did NATO promise not to expand eastwards after 1990?

Using intelligence files and official reports, Jacques Baud reviews the events in Russia’s recent history that led to the war with Ukraine. He analyses the conflict between Russia and the West and sheds light on Putin’s role on the international scene.

His work responds to topical questions, which facilitates access to a balanced explanation of events by shedding light on them that is sometimes very different from that disseminated by the mainstream media.

Jacques Baud was a member of the Swiss strategic intelligence. A specialist in Eastern Europe and head of the UN peace operations doctrine, he was involved in negotiations with the highest Russian military and intelligence officials just after the fall of the USSR. Within NATO, he followed the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, and later participated in assistance programmes to Ukraine. He is the author of several books on intelligence, war and terrorism, in particular Governing by Fake News, The Navalny Affair and Operation Z, published by Max Milo.

Copyright

Max Milo, Paris, 2022

www.maxmilo.com

ISBN : 9782315010653

1. Introduction

The daily programme «C dans l’air» on France 5 is an inexhaustible source of inspiration. With alternating reports and commentary by a panel of French experts, it covers a variety of domestic and foreign policy issues.

On 17 October 2021, a special edition of the programme, entitled «Putin, Master of the Game», hosted by Caroline Roux, gives us an insight into the policies of «the master of the Kremlin», Vladimir Putin. It offers us the opportunity to deepen the reflection initiated by France 5 and to critically examine our image of Russia. We will follow the programme, which will serve as a framework for a more holistic reflection.

Our first objective is to provide a better understanding of the threats, risks and dangers of current relations between the West and Russia.

The second objective is to highlight the work of journalists and media outlets who work in an honest way and to put it in perspective with the reflections of France 5’s «experts».

At the end of 2021, our media are echoing the sound of boots on the Ukrainian border, heralding a possible conflict in early 2022. After a long career in conflict prevention, and with my knowledge of Russia, I thought it would be useful to explore ways to improve our relations with Russia.

The first step in this process is to question our perception of Russia, its mentality, its foreign policy and its objectives, and to check the extent to which our diplomats have a coherent image of the «enemy».

Contrary to popular opinion, strategic intelligence services, i.e. those who analyse the international situation for policy makers, work almost 95% with open sources, i.e. our media. Thus, in addition to the influence of the media on the opinions of decision-makers, there is also a structural influence of the media and ‘experts’ in political decisions that affect public life.

This is why diversity of information is a fundamental element of the exercise of power in a democracy. The purpose of this book is not to justify or excuse any particular governance, nor to take a position in favour of or against any particular government (even if its conclusions seem to do so), but to salute the media that contribute to this diversity.

1.1 Methodology

Quite logically, Western accusations are met with the opposite rhetoric in the targeted countries (in this case: Russia). As in my book Governing by Fake News, my aim is not to relay the messages of the countries that are accused. From this perspective, I have used almost exclusively Western sources, most often American or French, often traditional media, official or authoritative sources on the subject.

Unlike fact-checkers like Conspiracy Watch, who avoid defining terms like ‘conspiracy’ for the purposes of censorship and disinformation, we will use precise terminology here. Unlike them, we will use fact-checking to show that there are honest journalists who do their work diligently. From this perspective, we will analyse situations without political bias.

1.2 Terminology

The term ‘lie’ means to state something knowing it is false. We will not use this term when the ‘truth’ has been published after the report. On the other hand, in a programme that has been prepared, that contains footage that has already been debunked, we will use the term ‘lie’. In this book we will also use the term ‘disinformation’ in the same sense.

Fake news is information, which may or may not be intentionally false. It is the result of ignorance, misunderstanding, distortion of information or deliberate lying.

Propaganda’ is the highlighting of one aspect of things at the expense of other aspects. Make no mistake: it does not necessarily disseminate false information. But by emphasising one side of things, it distorts our perception. It usually leads to conspiracy.

Conspiracism’ or ‘conspiracy’ is the creation of a narrative out of partial information, assumptions or suspicions treated as fact, and assembled according to an arbitrary logic. Because it creates a story out of disparate elements, conspiracism can combine elements of propaganda with misinformation and disinformation.

For example, claiming that Russia is in the shadow of the Yellow Vests, based on tweets from Russia, is a mixture of propaganda (because there are probably also tweets from Switzerland, Belgium or Germany) and disinformation (because «Russians» are not «Russia», let alone the Russian government) assembled into a conspiracy theory. The weak point of conspiracy theories is usually the purpose they are given («for what purpose?»).

We will speak of a lack of integrity, when a person treats an assumption as fact, allowing his or her prejudices to speak for themselves or authoritatively ignoring alternative explanations in order to make accusations.

2. Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy

2.1. Is Vladimir Putin seeking to reconstitute the USSR?

No. The USSR was a Marxist state, whose raison d’être was to promote the dynamics of the class struggle in the world. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is a liberal economy state, fundamentally different in its ideology and functioning.

He is repeatedly accused1 of regretting the former USSR and of having declared that «the destruction of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe in the history of the 20th century2 «. This sentence is periodically repeated in the media, such as Le Monde3, Le Figaro4 or France 245 and of course France 56 to explain his «nostalgia» for the USSR and his ambition to recover its «greatness». This is factually false and politically misleading.

The original sentence is from a speech on 25 April 2005, in which Vladimir Putin laments the chaotic way in which the transition to democracy has taken place:

Above all, we must recognise that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of this century, which became a real tragedy for the Russian nation. Tens of millions of our citizens and compatriots found themselves outside Russian territory. Moreover, the epidemic of disintegration has infected Russia itself. Everyone’s economies melted away and old ideals were destroyed. Many institutions were dissolved or brutally reformed (...)7 .

So it is not a catastrophe for humanity, but for the everyday life of the Russian population. The phrase refers to a real nostalgia among the population, 11-13% of whose electorate remained loyal to the Communist Party, the main opposition party. At no point does Putin regret the old communist system. On the contrary, he advocates a liberal economy with the West as a model. As for the reconstitution of the Russian empire, this is a very Western fantasy, which neither the Russian government nor Vladimir Putin has ever claimed.

Vladimir Putin’s task is not to reconstitute the Soviet empire, but to restore Russia’s voice on the international scene in order to defend its interests. But, contrary to popular belief, this approach has no territorial or ideological ambition. It is essentially intended to serve as a counterweight to the bulky omnipresence of the United States, which acts only in its own interests, to the detriment of those of its allies and the rest of the world. Putin has rightly noted that since 1990, the West has gone from one bad decision to another, creating conflicts that it can no longer resolve. Europe is unable to counterbalance the United States. For one simple reason: Europe is neither a member of the Security Council nor a nuclear power. That is why it accepts to trample its own values.

Although Europeans have understood that the bipolar world of the Cold War has become unipolar and dominated by the United States, they have not fully appreciated the consequences, including for themselves. The imbalance in the UN Security Council has led to a great deal of international dysfunction. These include endless wars illegally started by the United States. They have been waged with the complacency and participation of European countries, and have led to unprecedented migration phenomena and security problems ranging from organised crime to terrorism.

2.2. Is Russia seeking to expand its “zone of influence”?

2.2.1. Cold War Europe

On France 5, Jean-Dominique Giuliani, President of the Robert Schuman Foundation, claims that «Russia wants to have a zone of influence in the Baltic States or in Poland.8 « This is false, Russia has never claimed such a «zone», neither openly nor secretly. Neither the Strategic Concept of National Security 20009 nor the National Security Strategy of Russia 202110 mention this notion once.

This shows how ignorant those who are presented as «experts» are of the issues they speak about... unless they are lying.

The historical tendency towards expansion that is attributed to Russia today is fundamentally an attribute of the Marxist thinking that guided Soviet policy. In this scheme, the USSR saw itself as the spearhead of the class struggle and engaged in a permanent and systemic war with the West, which was part of a historical process. Until Stalin’s death, the USSR’s strategic military thinking was dominated by the idea that its security would only be guaranteed by a victory of socialism over capitalism and that the confrontation between the two systems was inevitable. Soviet strategists spoke of the principle of «the inevitability of war».

In response to this danger, NATO was created in 1949. Its purpose was to place Western Europe under the nuclear umbrella of the United States. This is why NATO’s military structure has been headed by an American soldier ever since.

The first 12 NATO members are all located in the western part of Europe: the Alliance was clearly defensive and articulated according to the German invasion patterns of the two world wars. It was separated from the USSR by a belt of non-member countries and by the countries of Eastern Europe. In 1952, the integration of Greece and especially Turkey pushed NATO to the border of the USSR and alarmed the Soviets. But the decisive change was the entry of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) into NATO on 8 May 1955. This led to the creation of the Warsaw Treaty Organisation (or Pact) a week later.

At first sight, the creation of the Warsaw Treaty did not seem necessary: the Eastern countries were ruled by communist parties that were often fiercer than their Soviet counterparts, and Moscow kept a tight rein on them. In Poland, for example, the Minister of Defence was USSR Marshal (who became Polish Marshal in 1949) Konstantin Rokossovki. Also a Soviet national, he had led the Red Army to victory, despite being sentenced to death in 1937, which was not lifted until 1956. Moscow’s control was such that the need for the Warsaw Treaty does not seem obvious. So there is another explanation.

Here it is: the Soviets acquired nuclear weapons in 1949 and they understand that the closer NATO is to their borders, the shorter their nuclear pre-alert times and the greater the risk of having to use nuclear weapons.

The raison d’être of the Warsaw Pact was therefore to constitute a «buffer zone», formed by the countries of the East (East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania). Its primary function was to form a glacis, not to stop an aggressor but to slow him down in order to give the Soviet Army time to get into battle order and counter-attack.

Victims of several invasion attempts in two centuries (1812, 1918-1922 and 1941-1945), not to mention the 1917 Revolution, instigated by Germany), the Russians have kept a deep distrust of the West, which always has the annoying tendency to start wars everywhere. June 1941 is still very much in the memory, and the Soviets do not want to be in the same situation again.

It was less a question of protecting the USSR than of formalising the limits of a buffer zone in order to prevent the two nuclear powers of the time, the USA and the USSR, from coming into direct contact too quickly, forcing the use of nuclear weapons.

With the death of Stalin in 1953, the idea of a systemic confrontation with the West faded. In 1956, on the initiative of Nikita Khrushchev, the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union adopted the policy of peaceful coexistence between the Communist bloc and the Western bloc with, as a corollary, the inclusion of the principle of non-invitability of war in the Soviet strategy. However, the Soviets continued to believe that socialism was going in the direction of history. Even without war, its victory is inevitable. They deduced that, to prevent it, the only option of the «capitalist» countries would be a preventive attack against the USSR.

2.2.2.The post-Cold War era

After the fall of communism, when the idea of a new security architecture on the European continent was in the air, Russia did not see the new NATO members as a threat to its security. It was the changes brought about by the Bush administration in the early 2000s that alarmed the Russians and provoked Vladimir Putin’s reaction in his 2007 Munich speech.

Jean-Dominique Giuliani is mistaken when he states on France 5 that Russia does not feel threatened by the few small NATO contingents occasionally deployed near its border11 . Nor does it feel threatened by NATO, as Radio-Télévision Suisse12 or Caroline Roux13 fallaciously assert. Russia is far from being paranoid, in the words of Pierre Servent14, an «expert» in military strategy, who has understood absolutely nothing about the problem. Vladimir Putin knows very well that it is unlikely that NATO will launch a major offensive against Russia. But the Russians realise that military action against Russian-speaking civilians near its territory could set off a chain reaction from a minor incident, much like in 1914. Due to the interplay of alliances, the situation could then evolve rapidly without Russia having sufficient warning time to defend its national soil by conventional means. The use of nuclear weapons would then become the first, if not the only option.

What Russia fears is therefore a situation similar to Ukraine in 2021-2022. This is exactly what Vladimir Putin explained during his press conference with Emmanuel Macron in February 202215 .

This risk is perfectly symmetrical for NATO, as the Ukrainian crisis crystallised in December 2021: by moving closer to the Russian border, NATO would be taking away its own early warning capability. Indeed, Russia is a nuclear power, and the closer one gets to its territory, the less space there is for a conventional conflict.

It is for this reason that in 1997, George F. Kennan, an American diplomat (and architect of the USSR’s containment strategy in the late 1940s), warned in the New York Times:

NATO enlargement would be the most fatal mistake in US policy in the post-Cold War era16 .

It is also for this reason that Russia has never claimed Ukrainian territory: it has no intention of NATO moving closer to its border, nor of moving closer to NATO. At the time of writing, the outcome of the Russian offensive is not yet known. However, it is clear that the aim of the offensive is not to conquer territory, but to impose a form of «neutralisation» on Ukraine.

How serious Volodymyr Zelensky was when he mentioned a possible nuclear rearmament of Ukraine in February 2022 at the Munich Security Conference17 is open to debate. It is likely that the Russians saw this as a potential threat, which the French foreign minister’s ranting did little to mitigate.

Nevertheless, the Americans have perceived the danger of being «at loggerheads» with Russia. This is why they are trying to reactivate the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty that Donald Trump denounced in 2019. A treaty allows for a rule according to which one can carry out diplomatic action or even adopt sanctions, but when one abolishes the rule, everything becomes permitted. Thus, the main victims of US policy are the Eastern European countries themselves: having nuclear weapons does not protect and can force their use.

However, during the Ukraine crisis, Putin has made it clear that the closer the two nuclear powers in the Euro-Atlantic area get to each other, the more likely it is that they will go nuclear. Thus, in the event of a conflict, the Russians are unlikely to have time to consider the nature of the missiles loaded into the Mk41 launchers located in Poland and Romania. Because the threat is too close, they could default to considering them a nuclear attack.

The countries of the «new Europe» have joined NATO without realising that, in the event of war, they are destined to become the nuclear battlefields of a possible confrontation with Russia, whereas, outside an alliance, they would remain (at least longer) under conventional threat. This is the risk faced by countries like Sweden and Finland, which have decided to join NATO.

The nuclear capability that the US gives to NATO is both its strength and its weakness. It is its strength, to act as a deterrent against an aggressor tempted to use nuclear weapons; this becomes likely when attacking a sanctuary territory (e.g. Russia). On the other hand, it is a weakness because it prevents it from intervening in an apparently less serious situation where one of the adversaries has nuclear weapons. For example, the Ukrainian crisis would have taken a very different turn if Europe had had an autonomous defence capability. In this particular case, the influence of the United States would probably have been less pernicious and would have allowed a negotiation to avoid hostilities. This is why the United States is doing its utmost to prevent the emergence of a European defence capability.

The Russian project is therefore not to «extend its zone of influence», but rather to ensure that the countries around it are free of any influence. Some experts have therefore raised the possibility of a neutral Ukraine. In this scheme, Ukraine would be in a situation somewhat comparable to that of Switzerland since 1815 or Austria since 1955, whose neutralities were imposed on them by Europeans (unlike Belgian neutrality in the 20th century, which was decreed by itself, but which, having been recognised by no one, was violated by all). Neutrality recognised by everyone is robust because it is for the benefit of all. This is the substance of the demands transmitted by Vladimir Putin to the Biden administration as an element of negotiation. This vision is also shared in the United States18 . Such a configuration would also be to NATO’s advantage, as it would give the Alliance back a strategic early warning capability.

It should be noted that the term «Finlandisation» used at the press conference of Emmanuel Macron and Volodymyr Zelensky was inappropriate at the time. The term «Finlandisation» is not synonymous with «neutralisation», but refers to Finland’s situation during the Cold War, when it had a policy of neutrality resulting from an agreement with the USSR at the end of the Second World War. This agreement was made for Russia to give up its territorial claims on Finland. Ultimately, the West’s failure to resolve the Donbass conflict through the Minsk Agreements could lead to a «Finlandisation» of Ukraine, whereas Russia would have been satisfied with a «neutralisation».

Russia’s concern is symmetrical to that of the United States, which seeks to prevent external interference in the American continent. This is the «Monroe Doctrine», which aims to prohibit any alliance or coalition that could directly threaten its borders. Adopted in the 19th century in response to European colonial interventions in the Americas, this doctrine was applied against Cuba in 1962. The Soviets had deployed missiles there in response to the installation of Jupiter missiles in Turkey. The «missile crisis» was resolved by the withdrawal of missiles from both sides.

It was probably to emphasise this symmetry that Vladimir Putin phoned his Venezuelan counterpart on 20 January 202219 and the Cuban president four days later20 .

In fact, when the countries of the «new Europe» joined NATO, they most likely did not have in mind the risk of confrontation with Russia. Today, their membership in the Alliance should oblige them to maintain normal relations with their eastern neighbour, as their foreign policy has an impact on the whole Alliance. However, this is not the case - on the contrary, NATO membership has boosted their anti-Russian sentiments.

In these countries, the rise of militant and nationalistic conservatism has been accompanied by contempt for their Russian-speaking minorities, increasing interference in Russian affairs with official support for cross-border militant activities (contrary to the UN Charter), and the dissemination of false information that is the ‘bread and butter’ of Western conspiracy theorists.

An example of the childish activism of this ‘new Europe’ is the Intermarium project that Poland has been trying to revive since 201521 :

We are now witnessing interesting developments in Europe where Poland no longer has to worry about a military threat to its European backyard and can now focus on countering Russian geopolitical intentions. Moreover, the US is also interested in supporting the Poles, creating exceptionally good conditions for the success of the Intermarium.

The Intermarium is a kind of politico-military alliance that would bring together the countries from the Baltic to the Black Sea, with the aim of isolating Russia. Conceived in the 1930s by Marshal Pilsudski - a personal friend of Adolf Hitler - it is supported by Poland and Lithuania. It is also supported by the Ukrainian neo-Nazi movement Azov, supported by Western countries, as stated by the British website Bellingcat22 .

Efforts to create a «zone of influence» in the region of the former East European countries seem to come from Europe, with the support of the United States. There is an American desire to isolate Russia, clearly supported by the European Union. These efforts have been apparent since Vladimir Putin began to react to this encirclement and to assert Russia’s geostrategic role.