Russian President Vladimir Putin may still win the war in Ukraine with his tanks, missiles and bombs. So far, however, the warmonger in the Kremlin has failed in his anachronistic mission to restore Russia to tsarist greatness. But did Russia fail with Putin? Or is Russia, like the big banks in the financial crisis, “too big to fail”?
After all, Russia is a colossus in terms of surface area alone, stretching over two continents with more than 17 million square kilometers. It is a commodity giant with huge gas and oil reserves.
Russia is also a major military power with almost a million soldiers and the most nuclear weapons in the world, and a major geopolitical power with 144 million people and a veto in the UN Security Council. Can you just “cancel” such a superpower and isolate it forever?
Russia has become lonely at the moment: from Ikea to McDonald’s to Instagram, Western companies are fleeing from Putin’s empire or are being banned. The seven most important industrial nations no longer want to trade preferentially with Russia, which is tantamount to being kicked out of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
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Moscow’s membership of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank is to be terminated. Politically, economically, culturally, athletically and technologically, Russia is stuck in the solitary cell of the world community with occasional visits from China, Syria, Belarus and North Korea.
“Putin’s Russia is not too big to fail. But it’s too big to fail in a way that won’t shake up the rest of the world,” writes columnist Tom Friedman in The New York Times.
The Russian oligarch Vladimir Potanin considers the situation in his country to be as explosive as before the October Revolution of 1917. The British “Economist” is already warning of a new Stalinism in Russia. The West, and Europe in particular, are neither militarily nor politically prepared for this.
Whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Putin’s failure creates many unkown unknowns (unknown risks) for the rest of the world. The country already resembles a dictatorship whose aggressive revanchism is reminiscent of Germany after losing the First World War.
Will Putin succeed in turning a majority of Russians against the West with his propaganda? The more Western-oriented middle class, the hope for Russia’s modernization, is fleeing or going into internal emigration.
Our eyes and feelings are rightly on the incredible suffering of Ukrainians. In the dark shadow of Putin’s war of aggression, however, a historic tragedy is also taking place in this tragedy-ridden country.
This is one of the reasons why we Germans in particular should be very careful with judgments of collective guilt. Calls for a “Russian Stauffenberg” seem like wishful thinking given the iron grip with which the Kremlin ruler is harassing his country.
The number of security forces that Putin uses to protect his internal power is even greater than that of his soldiers. Should Putin’s empire nevertheless crack, this could also have unforeseeable consequences.
The Kremlin’s sole ruler is less in danger from the oligarchs; his former colleagues from the security apparatus could pose a threat to Putin. They sit at the nexus of power and are by no means in agreement, as the legendary session of the National Security Council recently demonstrated. A political power struggle in a country armed with nuclear weapons does not always have to end as happily for the world as the downfall of the Soviet Union, which is far less integrated into the global economy.
The West must therefore not make the same mistakes as in 1989, warns the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev and predicts: “Now Russia will change dramatically, but so will we.”
Europe will have to live with Russia, even if the West condemns Putin to the hell of world history. Geography is destiny, you can’t choose your neighbors.
More: Russian people and Kremlin propaganda: “All my friends support Putin”