BERLIN: Throughout the eight months of the Ukraine invasion, Russian President Vladimir Putin has stressed that his war is an existential struggle for Russia, a fight for a new world order.
Now, important Western policy thinkers appear to be coming to the same conclusion: The narrative is shifting from helping Ukraine win to shaping a postwar global order that would sideline Russia, rendering it unable to cause further trouble.
This shift challenges the conventional wisdom that the war will end with some kind of negotiated compromise – before or after the Putin regime falls.
Many in the West – and not just in Central Europe, where the belief that Russia never changes has always been widespread – will argue that Russia needs to be stripped of its oversized international role. And some will say, increasingly openly, that it must be brought to its knees, like Nazi Germany or its ally Japan, before it can be rebuilt and reintegrated into the world.
WEST SHOULDN’T BE SHY ABOUT SETTING ITS OWN WAR GOALS
French political scientist and civil servant Nicolas Tenzer eloquently laid out this argument on Substack. It was a mistake, he wrote, to try to re-engage with a post-Communist Russia based on an “illusion born of the hopes of 1991” – a mistake made by stupid and corrupt politicians.
The West, Tenzer argued, should not be shy about setting its own war goals, even if it’s not officially part of the Ukraine war. Those maximalist goals should include a Russian pullback from every country and region where the Putin regime currently has a presence. This includes not just Ukraine and Georgia, but also Syria, Belarus, Armenia, the Central Asian states and the African and Latin American nations where the Wagner Group – a private military company linked to Moscow – operates.
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