Mira Milosevich holds a Ph.D. in European Studies, teaches postgraduate courses in political science and international relations, is a lecturer at the Instituto de Empresas, and is an expert on political history and processes of transition to democracy in post-communist countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Her publications include Breve historia de la Revolución rusa (A Brief History of the Russian Revolution), El trigo de la guerra: Nacionalismo y violencia en Kosovo (The Wheat of War: Nationalism and Violence in Kosovo), and El imperio zombi: Rusia y el orden mundial (The Zombie Empire: Russia and the World Order).
According to Olekasndr Shulga, a Ukrainian expert on the Russian world, one of the great myths about Russia is that Russia cannot be understood. You say that Russia is irrational. Can Russia’s irrationality be understood?
Yes. I’m not saying that irrationality cannot be understood; what I’m saying is that the West judges Russia from a rational point of view. For example, more than 80% of analysts thought that Russia would not invade Ukraine because the West would impose sanctions, because Russia would be isolated, because there was no need to do so if it could influence Ukraine, and so on. It was a rational judgement. But Russia does not follow that logic, so it is irrational in that sense. In fact, Russia is probably the most predictable country, because it has not changed its security and defence policy in the last four centuries. Russia does not fit into the West’s rational predictions because it has other criteria and interests. Russia knew that the West was going to impose sanctions on it, but that deterrence has not worked in this case.
Is the problem that this Western logic is being used for everything to do with Russia, leading to mistakes?
One mistake after another. It’s like when people talk about negotiations, but at no point has Russia ever said it wants to negotiate. Another huge mistake—and here we go back to the Cold War—is that the West wanted to bring Russia into the international liberal order, first with capitalism and then with democratisation. Russia at no time wanted to be part of the order created and sustained by the United States; Moscow never expressed that desire. There is a lot of wishful thinking. In reality, what the West is doing is projecting its own position on Russia, but that means nothing to the Russians.
This wishful thinking—Russia wants to negotiate, Russia wants peace, etc.—is it not seen as a sign of weakness? What language does the Kremlin understand?
Another of the West’s mistakes is that it failed to see where Russia was going. In 2006, Russia said it was going to abandon its ‘integration’ with the West because it saw that it was not possible to maintain equal status with the United States, which is impossible because they are not the same. However, Russia is a nuclear power and this has given it a weapon of deterrence. What language does Russia understand? George Kennan said that Russia was impervious to any rational argument, but it understood force. Russia, the Soviet Union, was contained during the Cold War by NATO and the Marshall Plan. The truth is that, today, the West has no clear strategy with Russia. It has often been said that the West wants Ukraine to win the war, but the West wants to avoid a nuclear conflict with Russia. Why has North Korea opted for nuclear weapons? To avoid regime change. And the same goes for Iran. Russia understands force and at the same time it is a nuclear power, we cannot forget that.
Yes, but it is a double-edged sword.
Yes, of course, we simply must not forget that there is that factor.
Is the imperialist ideology defended by the Kremlin, also typical of the Tsarist and Soviet empires, and which you define as “re-imperialisation,” returning only under Putin or did it reappear earlier?
Re-imperialisation is a concept introduced by Henry Kissinger in his book Diplomacy. Kissinger says—in 1994, when he published this book—that Russia’s history shows that it has always wanted to have an empire: what Catherine the Great used to say, to expand the borders, to create buffer zones between the potential enemy and Russia. Kissinger said he would not be surprised if Russia returned to that imperial path, hence the re-imperialisation.
Yeltsin initiates a titanic shift: from a communist system to a democracy, from a centralised to a market economy, from being an empire to being a nation state, and so on. All this fails and the tacit recognition is when Yeltsin appoints Putin as his successor. As early as 1993, Yeltsin considers using the 25 million Russians living in the former Soviet republics, the compatriots, as a weapon of influence, but if a clear date for the start of re-imperialisation were to be set, it would be August 2008, when Russia intervenes in Georgia.
Is Putin’s goal to make Russia a superpower like the USSR?
Putin gave a speech in the Bundestag in 2001, in which he spoke of having a practical relationship with the West and the rest of the world, and, from there, having a power, not necessarily like that of the USSR, that would facilitate great power status. When he realises that this is not possible, it takes the path of re-imperialisation. This compares very much with the U.S. Monroe Doctrine, which is a hegemonic, but not an imperial policy. Since World War II, the United States has maintained its hegemony by having other countries coordinate its foreign and security policy in exchange for all the benefits that come with being an ally of the United States. It is a hegemonic policy and the allies are volunteers (that is why they are called allies) but this hegemonism turns into imperialism when Russia supports Lukashenko and does not recognise Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, when it invades Georgia, and when it invades Ukraine with the excuse of defending the Russians living there. This is the small but important difference between hegemonism and imperialism.
You often mention the apathy of Russian society. Is it this apathy that allows Putin to maintain control over Russia?
Isaiah Berlin said that Stalin’s greatest contribution to statecraft is the concept of “artificial dialectics”: i.e., the ability to maintain a middle course between apathy and fanaticism. This helped Stalin to maintain power, and post-Soviet Russia and especially Putin also govern in this sense.
The Kremlin has reacted very harshly against protests by groups of mothers and wives of soldiers. Do they fear a repeat of what happened during the war in Afghanistan?
There is a huge difference between the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and this war: money. Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan earned hardly any money and their families received nothing when they died; now a Russian soldier in Ukraine earns 2,000 euros a month, twice the average Russian salary, and if he dies the family receives between 60,000-80,000 dollars. This cannot pay for the loss of loved ones, but it can postpone the anger of the population. As long as Putin can buy his people or others, such as the North Koreans, to wage war, he will do so.
Could the arrival of the North Koreans—we shall see in what numbers—delay the need for a new and unpopular mobilisation?
Of course. It is not that Russia does not have people; it does, but Putin does not want to jeopardise his government and his power by angering the Russians. He thinks he knows the limit of the Russians, and his power will not be in danger as long as he pays huge compensation and salaries. He is employing artificial dialectics.
There has been much speculation that failure in the war would lead to Putin’s downfall.
Yes. There were also many rumours circulating about his ill health that were denied by MI6. The Russians say that Putin already has in his head who his heir is going to be, although that person will not know until Putin decides to retire. In the event of an abrupt change, I do not see any opposition or political figure who could replace him, and I think it is more likely to be a technocrat like Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. Nevertheless, I think the possibility of a palace coup does not seem credible.
We had the case of Prigozhin’s ride to Moscow. What do you think of this event? How is it possible that a criminal like Yevgeny Prigozhin could achieve so much power?
Prigozhin was Putin’s cook, which is no small thing in the Russian tradition, because Vladimir Putin’s grandfather was Stalin’s cook. So he was a person of absolute and utmost trust because all tyrants fear being poisoned, but, having said that, Putin let him get rich because of that trust, which does not mean that he really had political power. When Prigozhin goes to Moscow, it is almost a question of working conditions because Minister Shoigu does not give him what he asks for in order to continue killing Ukrainians. Prigozhin’s profile had grown largely because the French held him responsible for everything that happened in Africa, when the real culprits were and are the Russian armed forces, and, in the end, Shoigu is the one who had real political power.
How is it possible for a character like Prighozin to achieve such notoriety? This is common in many post-communist countries. For example, in many places in Bulgaria, an EU country, one pay for one’s car insurance, and then one pays for “insurance” in one’s neighbourhood so that the car doesn’t get scratched or its tires punctured. In regimes like Russia’s, which are hybrid, this kind of situation is normal. Ukraine was also like this before the war, and it is still fighting corruption today.
We have talked about the West’s mistakes in judging Russia, but what about the war?
The West’s three great expectations when the war began in 2022 have not been met: the fall of Putin’s regime through a palace coup and regime change; the collapse of the Russian economy through sanctions and the freezing of Russian assets; and, finally, a decisive Ukrainian victory. Unfortunately, the Western narrative on Russia since February 2022 has not been accurate.
But the feeling, which many Ukrainians share, is that the West is not providing the means for Ukraine to win the war, but rather for Russia not to win.
Yes: what is necessary neither to lose the war, nor to win it. We have also seen that many countries are getting rid of their old arsenals, sending them to Ukraine, in order to acquire new ones. I don’t think that’s fair either.
The point is that while Ukraine has red lines imposed on it, Russia does not, as we have seen with the arrival of North Korean troops.
I am convinced that the North Koreans will not go into Ukrainian territory. Russia has done a perverse imitation of what NATO did in Kosovo, which was to protect the Kosovars from Slobodan Milosevic’s regime, and that is where the Russians talk about protecting their population in post-Soviet countries. With the excuse that Ukraine receives weapons and training from the West and that, although not much is said about it, there are Western soldiers who control the use of the weaponry on the ground, Russia says that these North Koreans have come to supervise the weaponry delivered and, at the same time, to train because they have not had a real war since 1952. Russia is assisted by international law if it uses these forces in the Kursk region, although this already represents an escalation. If they use them in Ukraine the escalation will be much more dramatic.
There is also another factor here: China. North Korea is a Chinese-controlled country and Beijing is not at all happy about Russia strengthening its ties with North Korea. So Putin is also sending a message to China: I am extremely dependent on you and some say I am going to become your vassal, but I still have the capacity to make a deal with your biggest ally. There are different approaches to this issue, but the consequences are going to be serious.
Can the West afford another retreat from Kabul? Can we afford another defeat in Ukraine?
Of course the West cannot and should not act out another Kabul-style disengagement, in this case from Ukraine, because it would pose a very clear threat to the security and defence architecture of Europe and the transatlantic alliance as a whole. The question is whether Europe and the Alliance have sufficient instruments to prevent this without further escalation with Russia. In my view, this war will either end in a Two-Korean-style division of territory (albeit not internationally recognised) or in a long war of attrition, although I do not know how long it will go, given war-weariness. Many talk about the war ending next year, but that is far from clear.
