Vladimir’s Version

In his call-in show with the Russian people on Thursday, Vladimir Putin sounded rather benevolent and conciliatory, his tone a sharp contrast with the rage and hatred of the state-controlled media, official rhetoric, and even some of his own earlier statements. But, whether his language is pugnacious or appeasing, Putin remains the master of the situation, his future moves unknown to either Ukraine or the West. Ukraine is unable to defend itself, and the West does not seem to have a way of restraining Russia’s expansionism.

For months, the government-controlled media referred to the interim government in Kiev and its supporters as “Fascists” and “neo-Nazi”; the crisis in Ukraine was portrayed as a “Fascist coup,” abetted by the West, and “ours” in Ukraine (ethnic Russians, Russian speakers, compatriots) as the target of the same ugly forces. In the introduction to Putin’s televised Q. & A. yesterday, one of the hosts said that “a true genocide” was unleashed against southeastern Ukraine.

But, in his four-hour “direct line,” Putin did not call anybody “Fascist” and did not focus on the mayhem in Kiev (he referred to those events as “the known unrest”). He even defended Ukraine against those whose questions sounded too hostile: “I can’t agree that Ukraine is a damned land, and I ask you not to use such expressions with regard to Ukraine,” he said. “Ukraine is a long-suffering land; it is a complicated community, which suffered a lot.” He called for a dialogue, a “need to understand each other” and to search for compromise. In a rare question from a liberal concerned about the persecution of Russians who dare to disagree with the official line, Putin said, “We should by no means throw mud at people for their position.” He even made a vague promise to protect the liberal TV network TVRain, which has been the target of what is broadly seen as Kremlin pressure.

Suddenly, in Putin’s answers, the West was not characterized as the force of evil. “We are all different, but we have the same ingrained values,” Putin said. He dismissed the policy of the Iron Curtain as a thing of the Soviet past, and said, “We’re not going to close our country, our people, our society from anyone.” He warned against “dividing Europe, the European values and the European nations.” But as recently as last September, in a meeting with foreign experts and journalists, Putin lectured the West for “denying moral principles and all traditional identities—national, cultural, religious, and even sexual—[and] implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.” He condemned those in the West who “are aggressively trying to export this model all over the world.” He said, “I am convinced that this opens a direct path to degradation and primitivism, resulting in a profound demographic and moral crisis.” Later last year, he denounced the Western concept of tolerance as “neutered and barren.”

The new, conservative shift toward “traditional values” that Russia stands to defend against the decadent and immoral West has since deeply affected the Russian political and public sphere. The rejection of Western values has become a new pledge of allegiance among broad circles of loyalists. Just this month, the Ministry of Culture issued a document that condemned tolerance and multiculturalism as unacceptable, and flatly proclaimed that Russia is not Europe. In yesterday’s call-in show, however, Putin mentioned “Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok” twice, spoke about the need to come together, and said that he hoped “our partners in Europe will hear and understand us.”

He responded in good humor to an “expansionist” question from a retired woman who wished that he would annex Alaska. “Why do you need Alaska?” Putin said. “It’s cold out there.… Let’s not get worked up about it, all right?” (He made a bizarrely sarcastic joke about another woman: his fifty-six-year-old former wife. Asked when the country will see its new First Lady, Putin said, “I need to marry off my ex-wife Lyudmila first, and then I’ll think about myself.”)

In what sounded like a striking discrepancy with his earlier statements, Putin admitted to the presence of the Russian military in Crimea when the peninsula was taken over by Russia in March. At a press conference held at the time, Putin was asked point-blank whether the armed men wearing Russian uniforms without insignia were Russian soldiers. His answer: “They were local forces of self-defense.” “Have we participated in the training of the forces of the Crimea self-defense?” a journalist asked.

“No, we did not,” Putin said, adding, “One can buy any uniform in our stores.” The Russian defense minister promptly dismissed the idea of a Russian military presence in Crimea as “sheer nonsense.” But yesterday Putin said, “Of course the Russian servicemen did back the Crimean self-defense forces. They acted in a civil but a decisive and professional manner.”

This obvious contradiction should not be seen as an embarrassment. In Russia, only a very small crowd of journalists and liberal intellectuals may pay attention, but this constituency is irrelevant at best, and is often decried as the “fifth column” or “national traitors.” Meanwhile, a majority of Russians don’t seem to mind if the government is untruthful. In a national poll conducted in March, more than seventy per cent of Russians said they did not mind if, in some cases, information is withheld in pursuit of the government’s interests, and more than fifty per cent said they saw nothing wrong if, in order to meet the government’s goals, information is intentionally distorted.

As for his credibility in the West, Putin appears not to care. In his Q. & A., he repeated Russia’s earlier denials that there are currently no Russian forces in eastern Ukraine. “This is nonsense. There are no Russian units, special services, or instructors,” he said. His defense minister echoed the sentiment, calling any suggestion of a Russian presence in the Ukrainian east “paranoia.” Such denials have been called into doubt in the West, and the distrust will become even deeper now that Putin has admitted that what he stated earlier about Crimea was not true. But Putin pursues his policy in Ukraine regardless of what the West thinks or says. And, at least for the time being, there’s nothing substantial the West can do to stop him.

Putin’s apparent goal is to insure that Ukraine remains part of the “Russian realm,” a “buffer zone” that will keep the West away and bar Western institutions, such as NATO and the E.U., from moving closer to Russian borders. This policy may take different forms; deepening the destabilization of Ukraine or Russia’s de-facto control of the eastern Ukrainian territories, with a view of expanding this control in the future, are but two of the options. Putin’s relatively soft tone in the interview notwithstanding, some of his statements sounded like implied threats. He twice evoked the eighteenth-century term Novorossiya (New Russia) with reference to several Ukrainian regions, which, he pointed out, used to be Russian and had been joined to Ukraine less than a hundred years ago. He mentioned the region of Transnistria, a breakaway state that is home to a Russian military contingent. Transnistria, which seceded from the ex-Soviet state of Moldova more than two decades ago, has a border with Ukraine, but not with Russia. Its leaders have since made it clear that Transnistria wishes to become part of Russia, and reiterated this wish, just this week, when they asked Russia to recognize Transnistria’s independence. “People have strong pro-Russian sentiments there,” Putin said in his Q. & A. “They have their own views on how to build their future and their fate. It would be nothing more than a display of democracy if we were to allow those people to do as they wish.”

Photograph: The Kremlin Press Centre/Anadolu Agency/Getty