Russia’s President Vladimir Putin appears to be rather popular in certain European circles, especially at the far-right side of the political spectrum. The president of the French National Front, Marine Le Pen, speaks highly of him and in 2015 received a loan of €9 million from a Kremlin-friendly bank. The Austrian Freedom Party FPÖ recently signed a cooperation agreement with Putin’s political party United Russia. Italian media report extensively about links between the influential Five Stars movement and the Kremlin. Examples of other Putin loving parties are the British UKIP, the Belgian Vlaams Belang, the Greek Golden Dawn, the German DNP as well as right-wing movements in Slovenia, Slovakia and Bulgaria. In France even promising presidential candidate François Fillon speaks in complimentary terms about the man in the Kremlin.
There are mainly two reasons for their praise. They see him as a “strong” leader who supposedly defends “traditional (Christian) European values.” They also think he is indispensable in the fight against radical Islam.
What they cannot, or do not want to, understand, however, is that Putin’s alleged positive sides cannot be seen in isolation from all those other characteristics that shape his policy. All those characteristics together make Putin what he is and by which Russia has degenerated into what it is today. According to informed observers inside and outside Russia: a kleptocracy in which a small group around the president enriches itself by plundering the country’s public wealth. Spanish public prosecutor José Grinda concluded in his investigation of criminal Russian groups that Russia is a “mafia state” where the actions of the government cannot be distinguished from those of organized crime.
The other quintessential traits of the Putin system’are known well enough. Virtually all media are government owned or in the hands of friendly oligarchs, propagating only information okayed by the Kremlin. The government restricts access to the internet and controls the social media. A handful of independent journalists struggle on at literal risk of their own lives: nowhere is the number of murdered journalists higher than in Russia. Elections are arranged by the Kremlin at all levels, demonstrations are made impossible. The government dictates the outcome of important court cases, verdicts are bought. Because of the deeply engrained corruption everything is up for sale: diplomas, public positions, licenses. Life is being made impossible for nongovernmental organizations defending democracy, human rights and historic truths. Russian opposition activists abroad are killed with plutonium or their computers infected with child pornography to smear their reputations. Putin’s 15 years at the helm of Russia have not brought any modernisation of the economy, which continues to be driven by exports of gas, oil, minerals and weapons. Russia’s potentially rich vast agricultural lands continue to impoverish as 15 percent of the population lives below the already very low Russian poverty threshold.
What then is “strong’”about a leader who is responsible for his country’s such disastrous state of affairs? Where are the “traditional (Christian) European values that he supposedly defends ? And how can these be squared with Russia’s gross violations of international law, like the annexation of Ukrainian Crimea and its armed intervention in Ukraïne’s Donbas ?
It can also be questioned if Russia can be an effective partner in the fight against radical Islam. See its inhumane bombardments of Aleppo where no ISIS-fighters were to be seen. Russia has its own Islam-problem. Some 14 percent of its population is Muslim, mostly in the Caucasus where the Islamist fire continues to smoulder and from where thousands of young men left to fight for IS in Syria and Iraq. In the 1990s Russia crushed the independence wars of small Islamic Chechnya with unimaginable violence at a cost of tens of thousands of civilian deaths. Thereafter it bought “peace” in Chechnya with annual transfers of billions of dollars to brute dictator Ramzan Kadyrov.
It therefore testifies to dangerous naivety to flirt with Putin and to blindly seek him as an ally. After all, it is impossible to have ‘a little bit of Putin’: choosing him as a partner will automatically force one to take in all sides of his character. He not interested in societies governed by democratic-rule-of-law, be it in Russia or abroad. There is no indication whatsoever that he sincerely wants to cooperate with the West to achieve possible common goals.
Europeans who see the Russian president through rose-colored spectacles are able to practice their political activities thanks to the democratic rule-of law societies in which they live. It is incomprehensible that they do not realize that unconditional cooperation with today’s Russia is like putting the saw into the branch on which they are so comfortably sitting.
