[Horrified by the invasion, centrist elites like Dmitri Trenin
nonetheless sense the US is using the conflict to destroy their
country.]
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WHY RUSSIAN INTELLECTUALS ARE HARDENING SUPPORT FOR WAR IN UKRAINE  
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Anatol Lieven
June 6, 2022
Responsible Statecraft
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_ Horrified by the invasion, centrist elites like Dmitri Trenin
nonetheless sense the US is using the conflict to destroy their
country. _

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An article
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Trenin, entitled “How Russia must reinvent itself to defeat the
West’s ‘hybrid war’: Russia’s very existence is under
threat,” may be one of the most consequential published in Russia in
recent times — partly for what it says, and partly for who is saying
it. 

Dr. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center until the Russian
government closed it in April, was for many years one of the most
important pragmatic Russian voices in support of cooperation with the
West and the “westernization” of Russia. He was one of the few
Russian figures still to retain some of Gorbachev’s hopes for a
“common European home.” (I should say that I have known Dr Trenin
since I was a British journalist in Moscow in the 1990s, and I was his
colleague at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace between
2000 and 2004).

The significance of Trenin’s article lies in the evidence it gives
of a consolidation of the Russian intellectual elites in support of
the war effort in Ukraine. It is not in many cases out of a desire to
conquer Ukraine (many of the figures joining this new consensus were
strongly opposed to the invasion and loathe Putin), but out of an
increasingly strong feeling that the United States is trying to use
the war in Ukraine to cripple or even destroy the Russian state, and
that it is now the duty of every patriotic Russian citizen to support
the Russian government.

Trenin writes:

“[T]he US and its allies have set much more radical goals than the
relatively conservative containment and deterrence strategies used
toward the Soviet Union. They are in fact striving to exclude Russia
from world politics as an independent factor, and to completely
destroy the Russian economy. The success of this strategy would allow
the US-led West to finally resolve the “Russia question” and
create favorable prospects for victory in the confrontation with
China. Such an attitude on the part of the adversary does not imply
room for any serious dialogue, since there is practically no prospect
of a compromise, primarily between the United States and Russia, based
on a balance of interests. The new dynamic of Russian-Western
relations involves a dramatic severance of all ties, and increased
Western pressure on Russia (the state, society, economy, science and
technology, culture, and so on) on all fronts.”

He continues:

“It is Russia itself that should be at the center of Moscow’s
foreign policy strategy during this period of confrontation with the
West and rapprochement with non-Western states. The country will have
to be increasingly on its own…”Re-establishing” the Russian
Federation on a politically more sustainable, economically efficient,
socially just and morally sound basis becomes urgently necessary. We
have to understand that the strategic defeat that the West, led by the
United States, is preparing for Russia will not bring peace and a
subsequent restoration of relations. It is highly probable that the
theatre of the “hybrid war” will simply move from Ukraine further
to the east, into the borders of Russia, and its existence in its
current form will be contested…In the field of foreign policy, the
most pressing objective is clearly to strengthen the independence of
Russia as a civilization…In order to achieve this objective in the
current conditions – which are more complex and difficult than even
recently – there is a need for an effective integrated strategy –
general political, military, economic, technological, informational
and so on. The immediate and most important task of this strategy is
to achieve strategic success in Ukraine within the parameters that
have been set and explained to the public.”

This is a call for reforms, including anti-corruption measures; but
explicitly part of a strategy of strengthening Russia and Russian
society in order to resist the West and succeed in limited Russian
strategic goals in Ukraine. Particularly striking is Trenin’s call
for Russia to be strengthened as a separate “civilization” — an
idea that he would never have supported in previous years.

It would be easy to dismiss the change in Trenin (now a member of
Russia’s Foreign and Defense Policy Council) as simply a matter of
bowing to regime pressure. This would however be to ignore that he
only represents, in a more abrupt and radical form, a shift in the
Russian centrist intelligentsia that has been building up gradually
for many years.

For a time, from the fall of the Soviet Union to the mid-1990s, the
attitude of most of the Russian intelligentsia to the West was one of
blind adulation, and the change from this went through a whole series
of stages. The shift began with the decision to expand NATO, generally
seen in Russia as a betrayal. Fear of NATO expansion grew with
NATO’s attack on Serbia during the Kosovo War. The U.S. invasion of
Iraq in 2003 was widely seen as proof that the United States wished to
impose rules on others that it had no intention of keeping itself.

A key turning point came with the offer of future NATO membership to
Ukraine and Georgia in 2008, followed by the Georgian attack on
Russian positions in South Ossetia,
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the West’s misrepresentation of this as a Russian attack on Georgia.
Western support for the Ukrainian revolution of 2014, generally seen
in Russia as a nationalist coup against an elected president, finally
doomed genuine rapprochement between Russian centrist intellectuals
and their Western counterparts.

However, Russian hopes for some form of limited compromise either with
America or Europe lingered on for many years. Realists to the core
themselves, members of the Russian establishment found it hard to
understand why America, faced with intractable problems in the Middle
East and the rise of a powerful China, did not seek to reduce tensions
with the far less dangerous Russia. Similarly, they were bewildered by
what they have seen as a European failure to understand that with
Russia as a friend, they would face no military threat on their own
continent.

Three developments in particular kept these hopes alive. First, the
French and German brokerage of the “Minsk II” peace agreement
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the Donbas in 2015 allowed the Russians to believe in the possibility
of an agreement with Paris and Berlin over Ukraine — though this
hope faded as the French and Germans did nothing to get Ukraine
actually to implement the agreement. Then the election of Donald Trump
in 2016 gave hope of a friendlier America, a split between Europe and
America, or both. And finally, the Biden administration’s
prioritization of China as a threat revived hopes of diminished U.S.
hostility to Russia.

Russian hopes for co-operation with France and Germany could revive if
these governments seek a compromise peace in Ukraine — with or
without the United States. Failing that, however, Trenin’s article
indicates that not just Putin’s inner circle, but much of the wider
Russian establishment, will approach the war in Ukraine in a spirit of
grim determination, at least until there is a possibility of a peace
agreement that meets basic Russian conditions.

Now the determination of a Moscow policy analyst of course is a
different and less demanding thing than the determination demanded of
a Russian soldier fighting Ukraine. Nonetheless, it is potentially an
important counterpoint to the hope in many Western capitals for an
early collapse of the Russian collective will to fight, or an elite
coup against Putin. 

There seems to be a growing belief in the Russian elites — including
many who were horrified by the invasion itself — that the vital
interests, and even perhaps the survival, of the Russian state are now
at stake in Ukraine. Unlike the Russian masses, these well-informed
figures have not been brainwashed by Putin’s propaganda. Most of
them see quite clearly the appalling mess in which Russia has landed
itself in Ukraine and the terrible suffering inflicted on ordinary
Ukrainians. But the only way they seem to see out of it is through
something that can at least be presented as a victory. 

_Anatol Lieven is senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.  He was formerly a
professor at Georgetown University in Qatar  and in the War Studies
Department of King’s College London. He is a member of the advisory
committee of the South Asia Department of the British Foreign and
Commonwealth Office. He holds a BA and PhD from Cambridge University
in England._

_Lieven is author of several books on Russia and its neighbors
including “The Baltic Revolutions: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and
the Path to Independence” and “Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal
Rivalry.” His book “Pakistan: A Hard Country” is on the official
reading lists for U.S. and British diplomats serving in that country.
His latest book, “Climate Change and the Nation State,” was
published in March 2020 by Penguin in the UK and Oxford University
Press in the USA, and is to appear in an updated paperback edition in
Fall 2021._

_Responsible Statecraft is the online magazine of the Quincy Institute
for Responsible Statecraft. It publishes outside contributors and
reporters as well as staff  analysis, opinion, and news to promote a
positive, non-partisan vision of U.S. foreign policy and critique the
ideologies and interests that have mired the United States in
counterproductive and endless wars and made the world less secure._

_The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not
necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates._

* Russia
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* Ukraine war
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* NATO
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* Putin
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