The West Is Only Helping Putin Consolidate Support
· Jacobin
At the “We Shall Not Be Moved” event in New York on September 21, Senator Bernie Sanders delivered a programmatic speech that attacked the United States’ staggering trillion-dollar war budget. He described the war industry draining the life out of society as a global and not just American problem. This is why, he said, progressives should oppose Donald Trump’s war in Iran, Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and the United Arab Emirates’ proxy war in Sudan. This is also why “we must rally and work with grassroots activists in Russia to put an end to Putin’s disastrous war in Ukraine,” Sanders asserted.Had he been addressing an audience of the said Russian activists, his comment would have come across as uninformed and tone-deaf. Hardly any of them are physically in Russia to begin with — and hopes of returning any time soon are dim.The war has allowed Vladimir Putin to wipe out the opposition and civil society at large, forcing the vast majority of people involved to leave the country for fear of spending the rest of their lives in torture prisons. Sanders might be envisaging a grassroots antiwar movement like the one he participated in during America’s war in Vietnam. But he didn’t face anything remotely similar to the eight-year prison sentence — handed down the day after his speech — upon Mikhail Antonovich from Tyumen in Western Siberia, who simply left some paid likes (generating tiny automatic donations) under Telegram posts by pro-Ukrainian commentators.However, the main problem is bigger. There are fundamentals at the heart of this conflict that Russian opposition activists can’t possibly change, because they’d need to change the West itself. They all ultimately boil down to that same trillion-dollar industry Sanders is fighting against and its corrupting influence on democracy, media, and policy expertise in Western countries. The West in its current rudderless, jingoistic, and trigger-happy state is Putin’s best insurance against any uprising at home.Statements about defeating or dismembering Russia delivered by senior Western politicians like the current EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas achieve little beyond solidifying Putin’s support. So do Ukrainian drones attacking Moscow and St Petersburg. Russians of all political leanings can see what the United States and its main proxy are doing to Iran and Gaza. The last thing they want is to follow the Ukrainians and swap their still relatively comfortable life for someone else’s delusional geopolitical project that ignores their interests or goes squarely against them.When, back in October 2022, members of Congress’s Progressive Caucus produced a letter urging President Joe Biden to seek a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine, Sanders said that he disagreed with the call and then praised its eventual retraction.Fall 2022 was an ideal period for Ukraine to negotiate peace and avert at least another four years of catastrophic devastation. Ukraine had just liberated swathes of the Kherson and Kharkiv regions, while the Russian army seemed inept and unprepared to face the power of Ukrainian resilience. That period is sometimes called “Milley’s window” after the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, General Mark Milley, who claimed that there was a window of opportunity to achieve peace because, despite its success, Ukraine wasn’t able to defeat Russia militarily.But the Biden administration was up in arms against the proposal because it believed in what Milley considered impossible: Russia’s military defeat. The following year showed that Milley was right: Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, planned together with the Americans and the Brits, turned out to be a massive failure. Meanwhile Russia rebuilt its forces, resuming the offensive and making a giant leap forward in terms of modernization and battlefield innovation, crucially outpacing the West in drone warfare.So how come Sanders turned out to be more bent on Russia’s defeat than America’s most senior general? Perhaps he’d bought into the discourse promoted by the same trillion-dollar war industry he is fighting against, backed by its pet think tanks and media.Spare the Oligarchs, Bash the ActivistsAt least Sanders takes a different line than the full-time warmongers on the issue of the Russian opposition. The warmongering community in the West tends to see it as a nuisance: it makes it harder to cast all Russians as Putin’s accomplices as best, or as alien monsters (derided as “orcs”) dead set on destroying Western civilization. The industry devotes its efforts to hardening polarization and erasing the zone of cohesion.Along with Ukrainian war skeptics like President Volodymyr Zelensky’s former press secretary Iuliia Mendel, anti-Putin Russians are one such zone. This explains why they sometimes appear to be bashed more readily by government-linked pro-Ukrainian and pro-NATO online mobs like the “North Atlantic Fella Organization” (or NAFO) than the Kremlin.A couple of run-of-the-mill stories in September illustrate Western attitudes to antiwar Russians and real-life practices in dealing with them. Last week, the EU decided to lift sanctions from two Russian oligarchs, Alisher Usmanov and Mikhail Fridman.The decision sparked outrage among Russian opposition figures. “It turns out that for Europe, it doesn’t really matter whether you support the war or not, whether you are friends with Putin or oppose him. In the end, what seems to matter far more is how much money you have in your bank accounts,” wrote Yulia Navalnaya, the widow of Aleksey Navalny, who died in prison when he returned to Russian after surviving a near-lethal poisoning.“Shame on you EU,” wrote Vladimir Kara-Murza, himself a survivor of a poisoning attack.There are two reasons for their outrage. The first regards these oligarchs themselves, at least Usmanov (Fridman is a more nuanced case). Opposition activists believe that Usmanov actively assisted the Kremlin in exerting control over independent media and social networks by purchasing politically sensitive media assets, such as Kommersant, a major business newspaper, and VKontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook. Its founder, Pavel Durov, was coerced into selling this asset, upon which he fled Russia and founded Telegram.Both Usmanov and Fridman have never publicly opposed Putin’s regime and war in Ukraine. Neither are they known for funding the opposition. Meanwhile, most Russian antiwar exiles feel that they are being punished more severely than any of Putin’s oligarchs, given their incomparably lower financial means and virtually absent legal support. They are subject to a whole of array of sanctions and discriminatory measures introduced by the United States, the EU, and its individual member states against Russian nationals, which appear to be driven more by xenophobia and revenge than any war-related rationale.Asked to comment on Navalnaya’s reaction, EU’s official representative Arianna Podesta lashed out at Russians at large: “It is up to the Russian people themselves whether they will have a government that supports this war or not. Therefore, if Russian citizens are feeling the consequences of this war first-hand, they have the opportunity to take action against it within their own country.”“I can’t find polite words to respond to it,” Kara-Murza tweeted in response.Senator Sanders doubtless believes Russian “grassroots activists” must be their country’s true patriots, who want a better life for the Russian people after the fall of Putin’s dictatorship. But this is definitely not the kind of Russian activists the West seeks to support in practice.On September 3, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decided to throw out 879 cases against the Russian state filed by Russian citizens, prominently including the same anti-Putin activists of which Sanders spoke. Russia was kicked out of the Council of Europe, the ECHR umbrella organization, in 2022, so the court decided that even complaints filed prior to this date aren’t worth considering.Fried OnionsEarly this year, the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe established a delegation of the Russian opposition known as the Platform for Dialogue with Russian Democratic Forces. Some of its members voiced disagreement with the decision and drafted an appeal against it. But the majority of the delegation, including figures like chess champion Garry Kasparov, didn’t support the move. To explain why, it’s worth looking into how the platform was created.Its formation was mired in scandals from the outset. For starters, it was presided over by the former Estonian intelligence chief Eerik-Niiles Kross, whose views on Russians at large were reflected in a recent tweet that shows a xenophobic advertisement from an Estonian meat producer that extolls the virtues of barbecuing “onions” (a derogatory Estonian-language expression for Russians, Kross helpfully explained).When the platform was being created, Kross made a point of excluding the only opposition force that has a real following in Russia, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK). Most members were supplied by an unofficial network associated with fugitive oligarch Leonid Nevzlin, currently an Israeli businessman and a shareholder of the daily Haaretz.Figures associated with Nevzlin’s network take a radical pro-Ukrainian stance, for instance supporting the neo-Nazi Russian Volunteer Corps that fights on Ukraine’s side under the auspices of Ukrainian military intelligence. Members of the unit run the neo-Nazi platform Wotan Jugend that circulated the Russian translation of the manifesto penned by Christchurch massacre’s perpetrator.But the problem associated with Nevzlin-backed personalities runs deeper. In 2024, the FBK published an investigation that accused Nevzlin of organizing a violent attack in Lithuanian capital Vilnius on Leonid Volkov — a senior FBK personality and longtime Navalny ally. Prior to its expulsion from Russia, FBK conducted groundbreaking corruption investigations targeting Putin and his entourage. Despite this, Kross lashed out at FBK after the publication of this investigation for duplicating the work of police in democratic countries.Alas, the Polish prosecutor’s office brought charges against Nevzlin’s legal associate who confirmed the oligarch’s involvement to investigators, although he later retracted his testimony in court.Hardly groundbreaking, these stories simply add to an already giant pile of questions to the West regarding the war in Ukraine.There are doubtless more pressing issues. What is the deeper wisdom of turning a blind eye toward Ukraine’s brutal mobilization (known as “busification”) even as videos from passersby daily offer heart-wrenching evidence of what this means for those press-ganged into the army? How is squeezing the Russian language from public use in Odesa — a city that produced a unique Jewish-influenced Russian-language culture that spans every type of art — helpful for the Ukrainian cause? What is the point in pretending that former skinheads play no role in Ukraine while they are commanding whole armies with a clearly far-right ideological slant? Why should Ukraine keep bleeding in the cause of expanding NATO, when it could have exited the war on much better conditions under the Minsk Accords or the settlement framework drafted by Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul in spring 2022? Or, indeed, during Milley’s window, when Senator Sanders chose to side with “fight-Russia-till-the-last-Ukrainian” types of the Lindsay Graham variety?The question that looms largest is whether, by helping Ukraine, the West is promoting its declared values, like democracy and human rights — or simply pursuing an imperialist geopolitical project in which members of the Russian opposition, but more importantly Ukrainians, must be satisfied with the role of useful idiots and cannon fodder while their countries are being destroyed. Does the West really see Putin and his oligarchs as its deadly enemies — or rather as partners in the lucrative and mutually beneficial business of fomenting wars?This is the question US progressives need to answer before encouraging the Russian opposition to storm the Kremlin.This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.
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