In the first days after Vladimir Putin’s invasion, Europe’s response was astonishing. Without prompting or global leadership, crowds protested across the continent, and governments offered to send weapons and receive Ukrainian refugees. Putin seems to have made a catastrophic mistake, uniting the free world against himself and inviting the broadest sanctions regime in his memory. But that picture is changing now – and fast.
This week’s European Union summit looks like a classic in the genre: full of warm words about Vladimir Zelensky and a proposal for “accession candidate” status for his country. But behind the scenes there is a huge disagreement. To the rage of the new EU members, it seems that a clause will be introduced according to which Ukraine will not join until other countries are ready to assimilate its people. The accession process takes a decade or more. As a Kremlin official recently pointed out, Ukraine may not exist for up to two years.
The divisions do not stop there. For example: is Putin a partner or a pariah? Emmanuel Macron continues to call him on the phone and occasionally warns the rest of Europe that Russia cannot be “humiliated” or seen as “losing face.” The Prime Minister of Estonia answered directly. “Putin can save his face by returning to Russia,” she said during a recent trip to London. “I don’t see the point in really talking to him if we want to know he’s isolated. The Polish president is even more rude and asks if anyone is worried about saving Hitler’s face.
Then comes Germany. Olaf Scholz, his new chancellor, initially spoke of a difficult game – he promised to spend another 100 billion euros on defense, buy an American F-35 and abandon the newly built Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Russia. But the weapons Germany promised were coming slowly. Seven PzH 2000 howitzers, promised in early May, were delivered this week. But there is still no sign of the promised missile artillery and anti-aircraft tanks, and Germany has vetoed attempts by Estonia and Spain to send their own German-made kit to Ukraine.
There is growing suspicion in Berlin that Scholz is trying to play both sides in seeking a more compatible solution to the crisis with Putin. One of his senior advisers said this week that we need to think as much about post-conflict relations with Moscow as we do about arms supplies to Ukraine.
In a major political speech this week, Scholz said Putin should be thwarted, but did not wish Ukraine victory. Perhaps part of him feels that Zelensky is doomed, which raises the question: why prolong the agony? Why continue with this merry charade? And why spend Germany in the winter of avoidable misery?
Not only is Ukraine struggling on the battlefield, losing up to a thousand troops a day. The economic war may be about to turn, and Putin will eventually go on the offensive. The rise in energy prices means an unexpected income for the Kremlin, with Germany allocating 20 billion euros (17 billion British pounds) in the first four months alone.
At first, this was a shortcoming in the sanctions plan. If Germany has no alternative to Russian oil and gas, it will always continue to buy – financing Putin’s military machine as it goes. But at much higher prices.
These prices would be lower (and the Kremlin much poorer) if the Saudis played ball, pumping more oil to keep world prices down, as they did in the 1980s. But Mohammed bin Salman, the heir to the throne, did not choose a country. He has apparently failed to condemn the invasion of Ukraine and has a Macron-style habit of picking up Putin’s phone. When the Saudi energy minister went to an economic summit in St. Petersburg last week, he said his country’s relations with Russia were “as warm as the weather in Riyadh.”
By the way, the keynote speaker at Putin’s video conference was Xi Jinping, now much closer to Moscow than he seemed immediately after the invasion. President Si turned 69 last week and celebrated by calling on Putin to reassure him that Sino-Russian relations have maintained “momentum” in the face of – um – “global turbulence and transformation.”
Russia has now replaced Saudi Arabia as China’s main oil supplier. As for India, it buys 25 times more Russian oil than before. In total, Russia needs to make $ 320 billion (£ 260 billion) in energy sales this year, up 35 per cent from last year.
So much for Putin’s starving military machine. If Germany had stopped buying Russian gas, the sanctions could have been exhausting. But they were not. Now Putin has found new customers and new ways to get to most of the other things he needs. Sanctions will cause great pain: Russian inflation is high and its economy will decline, comparable to the collapse in 2008. But with huge money reserves and most of the Russian army in Ukraine, it is not difficult to see a situation in which Putin eventually wins.
He is already preparing, inviting Europe to imagine a winter in which he controls – and closing gas taps in Europe. He has made small cuts in his supplies to Europe over the past few days to see who is screaming. He was not disappointed. Robert Habeck, Germany’s deputy prime minister and energy minister, said yesterday that “the blockage of gas supplies is an economic attack.” It does not sound like a country ready to break away from Russian gas soon.
So this brings us back to the division of Europe. The post-Soviet countries, many of which joined the EU just to protect themselves from Russia, see this as an existential threat. If Putin succeeds in Ukraine, he will tear apart the old rule-based world order that protects small countries from large ones. China will swallow Taiwan. Putin will start thinking about cutting a land corridor to Kaliningrad, the Russian exclave on the other side of Lithuania.
Meanwhile, France and Germany are talking about realpolitik: the need to be firm with Russia, but to deal with it in the long run. Let’s offer EU membership, but not soon. To offer support to Ukraine, but not to go so far as to actually save it. All of this would be in line with Putin’s initial promise: that a debt-ridden, exhausted West can no longer defend democracy and has no stomach for a long battle. There may not be much time left to prove him wrong.
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