Off to Budapest tomorrow for a debate at the Danube Institute: Do Russia’s Ukraine policies threaten European stability?

You might think that that falls into the QTWTAIY category fairly easily. That’s the side I’m arguing, ably assisted by James Sherr.

But two hardy souls will be opposing this proposition. Vlad Sobell, “the world’s leading expert on post-Communist transitions in Russia and Eastern Europe“. And Timothy Less, a former FCO official with Balkans experience turned academic.

How might one frame the argument that Russia’s Ukraine policies do NOT threaten European security, one ponders, when it is blindingly obvious that they do?

Maybe assert that Ukraine/Russia is not a European issue at all. It’s just a local tussle between closely related Slavs who are tidying up some loose ends arising from the collapse of the USSR. As a matter of fact and/or principle, Moscow will be happy to make its point, then stop. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. And don’t get overexcited in the process.

This line of argument amounts to redefining the issues so that the troublesome premise dissolves away.

Or assert that even if V Putin’s are posing problems for wider European security, they are a ‘natural’ or ‘inevitable’ response to Western bungling over the past 25 years or so. Why all that nasty NATO ‘expansion’? Why did the West carve away Kosovo from Serbia? Why did the West offer Ukraine so many blandishments towards NATO or EU membership? Anything Moscow has done now to ‘respond’ to these provocations has been proportionate and indeed utterly justified! Even wise!

This latter line of argument boils down to “Yes, he’s bad. But we’re worse! So he’s not really so bad! And it’s our fault. Nah!” It takes us straight into Animal, Vegetable or Mineral? territory. Thus:

Do we treat Russia’s ‘fear of encirclement’, ‘insecurities’ and ‘anxieties’ as, so to speak, inanimate facts of life over which we (and they) have no control other than to top-toe widely round them?

Or are they simple genetically coded facts of life which do respond in a predictable but insensate way to what we do?

Or are they animate/sensate facts of life, where we need keener judgement to get the response we want?

Or are they human, even reasonable fears?

What if they are human but basically unreasonable paranoid fears?

The gushing Western punditry on Russia contains confusing contradictory elements of all these ideas.

Some people appear to suggest that Russia for reasons of obvious history/geography/Tsars/Communism/vodka has no choice but to behave the way it does. Safest is to adopt a Finlandish stance to avoid risking trouble.

Others argue that Russia of course does have choices, hence all the more reason to behave in a subtle respectful way: keep that bear calm and happy, even if he eats some of your rabbits now and again.

And then there are those who say that Russia of course makes its own decisions, but we have to strive to set a robust context in which they know that bad decisions have bad consequences for them. Eventually they will come to see that they have no more reason to fear ‘encirclement’ by democratic NATO states than eg Switzerland does.

No doubt it will be a lively evening. Even if there are no Hungarians as lead debaters this time. What does Hungary make of Ukraine? The Orban government infamously flirts with the idea of establishing some sort of Putin-Lite ‘illiberal democracy’ and recently welcomed the Russian leader to Budapest.

Plus there will be some in Hungary who wonder if one dramatic day openings will emerge to gather under one national roof all the Hungarian minorities in neighbouring countries. Perhaps Putin’s Ukraine policies add a randomising factor that makes such a convulsion a tad more likely?

Others will fear that a wider disarray in Europe caused by the Ukraine crisis will do no-one any good.

As usual, it’s easy enough to analyse what’s going wrong in Ukraine and maybe even to agree (more or less) on some of the underlying reasons for the problem. There’s enough stupidity to slosh around fairly. But I suspect that Monday’s debate will show that views are firmly divided on how best to respond.

If you can’t make it to this fixture, try this trenchant article by George Weigel on Vladimir Putin and his methods:

As for the lies, Putin’s regime has now reached such a level of automatic and refined mendacity that the immediate response to the Nemtsov murder in the Russian mass media, and from Putin’s epigones in the Russian government, was to suggest that this was a “provocation” staged by NATO, or Ukraine, or NATO-and-Ukraine, in order to destabilize the Russian regime.

That Russian agitprop merchants still feel compelled to try such a rhetorical stunt, at a moment when NATO is virtually supine in the face of Russian aggression, suggests just how deeply the culture and (if you will pardon the term) the ethic of mendacity has sunk in, in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

And then there is the matter of hierarchy. Putin is a true autocrat. The Russian cabinet means nothing. The Russian parliament means nothing. Lenin laid out the theory; Stalin perfected the model; but Putin has given it a 21st-century makeover, jettisoning Marxist economics, appealing to “traditional values” against Western decadence, and posing as the man who has restored the nation’s pride after the disaster of 1991…

Putin is like a shark: He has to keep moving in order to stay alive, meaning to legitimate his rule. The Maidan Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine threatened to halt Putin’s forward progress by posing an alternative, and potentially attractive, model of 21st-century social and political life among the eastern Slavs: not simply, or even primarily, because it promised access to the cornucopia of Western consumer goods, but because it promised a public life cleansed of corruption, violence, lies, and authoritarianism.

Thus, from Putin’s point of view, Ukraine would have to be destabilized, perhaps even rendered a “failed state,” by a combination of annexation (Crimea) and invasion (the Donbass), amplified by a barrage of disinformation and lies, all wrapped in the mantle of a mythic, spiritually defined “Russian world” for which Moscow had a special, historic responsibility…

The idea of a new European war seemed inconceivable as recently as two years ago. It is no longer inconceivable; it would be an unmitigated disaster; and that is why Putin must be stopped now, by sequestering his regime as the first, necessary step toward regime change in Russia.

One would like to think that there was some other way out. But there does not seem to be, for the new “plague bacillus” has spread and dramatic measures are required to stop its further progress, reverse course, and vindicate the victory of freedom in the Cold War.

Are today’s bickering EU leaders and the enigmatic golfist in the White House really up to thinking in these strategic terms? And if not, what?