![Vladimir Putin: 'Instead of Finlandising Ukraine, Putin has Nato-ised Finland and Sweden,' Gratchev says. 'He woke up Sleepy Joe [Biden] and created a genuine Ukrainian nation-state.' Photograph: Pavel Bednyakov/Sputnik/AFP via Getty Images](https://www.irishtimes.com/resizer/v2/X4QOKNPWCPDW73WLTKH5N4Q3WY.jpg?auth=8765ee63e1fa6500acd65e7a8b44afcf799b66d8e515b76764ba850c28b44b66&smart=true&width=1024&height=659)
When the Russian historian Andrei Gratchev published Towards a New War? From Hyperpowers to Hyperpoker, in Paris, critics accused Gratchev, who had been Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev’s last spokesman, of being overpessimistic.
Gratchev’s pessimism has grown in the intervening six years.
“This would be a good nuclear bunker,” he says, only half joking, on arriving for lunch with European journalists in the cellar of a Paris restaurant. No one wants to start a third World War, he says, “but the problem is that no one is in control of events. Everyone is skating on very thin ice”.
The most optimistic scenario, Gratchev says, “is a temporary solution similar to the end of the Korean war, and I have less and less confidence that is possible. Ukraine would be de facto partitioned like Korea, with an armistice and borders that are not defined and not recognised”.
Russian president Vladimir Putin’s words from a speech at the Munich security conference in 2007 resound now like a premonition. Regarding the eastward enlargement of Nato, Putin said then for the first time: “We have the legitimate right to ask against whom this enlargement is undertaken”.
“Everyone thought Putin was a lame duck,” Gratchev writes in The World Will Never Be the Same Again, a collective work just published in Paris.
“Few participants understood that day that Putin spoke not as a man nostalgic for a bygone era, but as a new Putin threatening new wars.”
Russia invaded Georgia the following year.
What went on in Putin’s mind in the run-up to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine?
“He saw trouble all around him,” Gratchev says. “Protests against Lukashenko in Belarus. Azerbaijan retook Nagorno-Karabakh from [Russia’s ally] Armenia, with the help of [Nato-member] Turkey. Putin feared it would inspire Georgia to take back Abkhazia and Ossetia, and Ukraine to retake Donbas. Kazakhstan asked Putin to send Russian paratroopers to quell unrest there.
“Russia’s economic model was far too dependent on hydrocarbons,” Gratchev continues. “Most of all, he sees the western sphere of influence advancing; parts of the former Soviet Union breaking off like icebergs. His greatest fear was not a military attack by Nato, but the example of democracy. Russia needed to protect itself in the new world, to maintain its status as a great power.”
Putin miscalculated because his career as a KGB agent taught him the efficacy of special operations.
“He had fond memories of Russia ‘liberating’ Crimea. He thought the only ‘strong man’ in Europe, Angela Merkel, was gone, and Biden was weakened by the rout in Afghanistan.
“Putin repeated his predecessors’ errors,” Gratchev says, citing Czar Nicolas II in the first World War, Leonid Brezhnev in Afghanistan and the KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov who precipitated the fall of the Soviet Union when he overthrew Gorbachev.
“Instead of Finlandising Ukraine, Putin has Nato-ised Finland and Sweden,” Gratchev says. “He woke up Sleepy Joe [Biden] and created a genuine Ukrainian nation-state. Even Russian-speaking Ukrainians, who in Putin’s mind were a potential fifth column, have been transformed into patriots. Now Putin risks losing the only thing he could be proud of – the annexation of Crimea.”
Gratchev does not exclude the possibility of Putin’s demise.
“Traditionally, Soviets and Russians do not wait for the natural death of a leader. There is a scenario that would eliminate Putin.”
The imprisoned opposition leader Alexei Navalny has the stature of Andrei Sakharov or Nelson Mandela, Gratchev says. “So there is zero chance of him coming out of prison while Putin is in power.”
Rather than reconstitute the gulag, the Stalinist era network of forced labour camps, “Putin prefers to let opponents leave the country, which undermines post-Putin Russia”.
Russia’s relations with the West were good during Dmitry Medvedev’s 2008-2012 term as president. Medvedev is now virulent in his criticism of Ukraine and the West.
“If Medvedev is suspected of being the West’s chosen candidate, it’s a death sentence for him,” says Gratchev.
The West shares some blame for the war, Gratchev says, for its actions during the 2014 Maidan protests and its conduct of the Minsk negotiations. But he blames Putin most of all. He wants to see the Russian leader on trial, in Moscow, not The Hague.
