With the Polish and British asking for more gratitude, the leaked German reports suggesting Bundeswehr is critical of Kyiv’s tactical acumen – saying the Ukrainians aren’t using “what they learned in the Western training camps,” and still no nod from Washington on ATACMS or F16s, Radio Free Europe’s Georgian Service sat down with Pulitzer winning journalist Anne Applebaum to discuss the West’s unity in the face of Russia’s aggression, and that potential dreaded war fatigue.
“I wouldn’t describe the situation right now as war fatigue,” she tells us. “We’re lucky that the most important European countries and both North American countries who are part of NATO remain committed to winning the war. That wasn’t something anybody predicted 18 months ago. Within each country there are opponents of the war, and sometimes they’re very loud. But if you look at Germany, France, Italy, the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Britain, Poland, Romania, of Spain, you see the leaders of those countries still supporting Ukraine. There are no major cracks, though inside French, German and US politics there are opponents, and there is a danger that if any of them were to win an election, then the situation could change. But it doesn’t look likely right now.
“In Poland, we have a very transactional government running the country, and one that’s very worried it’s going to lose the next elections in October. And although the winner will still support Ukraine, because all major political parties in Poland do, the ruling party is a nationalist party and it has some voters who are skeptical of Ukraine. There is quite a lot of propaganda around old Polish-Ukrainian conflicts during the war. And there is some fatigue with Ukrainian refugees. Some of this is being pumped up on social media backed by the Russians, but maybe by others inside Polish politics as well. But I don’t think it’s changed the overall picture. I don’t think it alters the Polish support for Ukraine.”
Putin seems to have resigned himself to a long war, while the Ukrainians are willing to fight as long as it takes to free their country. Has the West come to terms with that?
You can see the Americans have adopted a mindset that it will be a long war because they’ve been very slow about providing advanced weapons to Ukraine, and they seem willing to do so only at each stage they think the Ukrainians are ready, when they’re persuaded that it will be useful, even though it feels feel to people on the ground that it’s a few months too late, that the F16s are needed now, for this summer’s counteroffensive. The US election campaign could complicate this further- there is part of the Republican Party which is not in favor of the war and which may well campaign against it, but I think we’re still six months to a year away from that.
If the Ukrainian counteroffensive doesn’t end up being a resounding success that the Western politicians can proudly tout to their voters, what are the available scenarios?
I’m not going to predict what will happen on the ground in Ukraine because there are too many unknowns. The Ukrainians I’ve talked to feel confident that they are successfully destroying enormous quantities of Russian weaponry, and that they’ve broken through some of the first layers of defense in a few places. The demining of massive amounts of territory in Ukraine was more than they expected, and that means they need more demining equipment- they don’t have enough. And what the West was training them to do, the combined arms operations, assumed that the mines would be gone. You can’t bring tanks over fields that that are full of explosive devices. I don’t think it’s being fought the way they expected it to be fought, but they seem to have some confidence that they’re making progress.
Before the counteroffensive, you wrote in your column at the Atlantic that the Ukrainian counteroffensive needed to show the Russians that the war is not worth fighting. How far do you think the Russians are from that realization at the moment?
The rebellion led by Prigozhin was an interesting indication that some part of the Russian security apparatus already feels the war isn’t worth fighting. Right before Prigozhin made his quick side-trip more than halfway to Moscow, he said the war is being fought on false pretenses, that it’s a war for corruption, that the Russian oligarchs wanted it because they’re greedy, and they want to take Ukrainian steel companies and make money off the spoils. And that’s not a war, he said; it’s not worth people dying for something like that. If he said it, that means that others surely think it too. The question is, when does that number become sufficient to bring the war to a halt? When does it become possible to put pressure on Putin? Again, there’s so much that we can’t see, I’m reluctant to make a prediction. I’m pretty confident that it will happen, because it’s a huge burden on Ukraine to continue fighting the war and a huge burden on Ukraine’s allies, but it’s also a huge burden on Russia. A huge proportion of Russian resources are now being spent on the military. I mean, it’s almost like the Soviet days. And I’m convinced that there is a part of the country that will want to bring it to an end.
What about Prigozhin’s future? How crazy would you say I am if I were to imagine him running in the presidential elections?
Oh, I think Prigozhin thinks of himself as a future leader of Russia. There’s no question. Prigozhin’s career is not over. The Wagner group is crucial to Russian foreign policy, especially in Africa, but not only. There may also be financial reasons why Prigozhin has support inside the Kremlin, considering that part of his activities in Africa involve exploiting mines and other natural resources. There may be direct lines of funding going from Africa to Moscow that people don’t want to see eliminated. It’s clear that he has some kind of loyalty and some kind of support, or he wouldn’t still be alive. So I don’t think it’s wrong to guess that he might continue to play a role in Russia’s future.
What does peace look like now from the perspectives of Kyiv, Moscow and the West?
I can really only envision peace in one way – it has to reflect a political change in Russia. In other words, the Russians have to understand that the war was a mistake; understand that Ukraine is a separate country, that it’s not going to be part of Russia, not now and not ever. And then they have to withdraw from all or most of the Ukrainian territory that they’ve occupied. The Ukrainian position is that Ukraine has only one set of borders, and those are the international borders agreed to in 1991. Therefore, the Russians will have to leave and find a way to make amends for the damage they’ve caused. Any other scenario, any kind of ceasefire or temporary ceasefire or anything that leaves the situation as it is now, is not a recipe for permanent peace, it’s a recipe for a future war, which is what happened after 2014 – a line was drawn, but the Russians didn’t agree to it. Until there is that moment of reflection and reckoning, acknowledgement that Ukraine is an independent country with a right to exist, the war will not be over.
The way things are going, what place do you think Putin will have in the history books?
Some of that depends on who wins the war, because history is written by the victors. I don’t think there’s any question that Putin will be remembered as the man who really set out to destroy his own country. And apart from what he did to Ukraine, apart from what he did to Georgia, apart from what he did to Chechnya, apart from what he did to Syria, this is somebody who has worsened the living standards and freedom and culture of Russia itself. He doesn’t seem to care about the well being or prosperity of ordinary Russians. They’re just cannon fodder to him. He’s not interested in Russian achievements in infrastructure or art or in literature or anything else. He has impoverished Russians. And he’s also brought back a form of dictatorship that I think most Russians had thought they’d left behind. What he’s doing is really destroying modern Russia. And I think that’s what he’ll be remembered for overall.
Let’s move on to Georgia, seeing as we just had the 15th anniversary of the war. What do you think is the legacy of that war and how significant is it?
I think the legacy of the war to the Western world was that it was a kind of warning shot, the first indication that Putin was not the democrat he pretended to be. I’ve recently spent some time looking up things he said in the first few years he was in power. He talked a lot about democracy and freedom and rule of law. He fooled a lot of people. And I think the invasion of Georgia was a wake up call to that. That was the moment people realized that he wasn’t going to be the easy neighbor so many hoped for. We let him get away with mass murder in Chechnya, wrongly seen as an internal affair, but the invasion of Georgia was an aggressive act towards a sovereign neighbor. And I think that was the moment when perceptions of Putin really began to change. That was when people began to see Putin as a real problem.
It began to change attitudes, to change the way people saw Russia. But it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t really until 2014 that people began to understand that there was going to have to be a security shift, even a military shift, in Europe. Notably, it was after 2014 that Obama, who got a lot of things wrong about Russia, first put American troops in Central Europe. And 2014 was the moment when people began to think the Central European members of NATO might not be as safe as we thought they were. So 2008 was the beginning of the awareness, 2014 saw the beginning of changes, but 2022 was the moment when Russia was excluded from European civilization.
Do Georgians have reason to be angry at the West for not doing more? As it was aptly put by our Prime Minister recently – “was our war not a war?”
Georgia has reason to be disappointed. It’s true that the West was not prepared militarily to help Georgia. There was no plan, there was disillusionment on the West’s part with Saakashvili- a feeling that he allowed himself to be provoked or indeed himself helped to provoke the war. There were mixed feelings in the West about how that war began. But, sure, I think the Georgians are right to feel that not enough attention was paid to them, and not enough effort was made to prepare for that kind of invasion.
Has Russia’s war rehabilitated Saakashvili’s image and role somewhat?
Absolutely. Saakashvili’s warnings about Russia and about the forces of liberalism in the post Soviet world, including in Georgia, were correct. The picture of him now in prison, the photographs and video that we’ve all seen, have really shocked people. He’s seen as a kind of Prophet of the future. He is somebody who foresaw what could happen. And he warned people and people didn’t listen.
How do you see Georgia’s place in the West now?
In 2008, it felt like Georgia was aspiring to be a democracy, to reinstate the rule of law after years of lawlessness and, before that, Soviet occupation. It felt very much like a place that was improving. It doesn’t feel like that now, and I’m speaking as somebody who’s watching it from the outside. Imprisoning Saakashvili, imprisoning others who’ve spoken out against the current government, some of the language used by the current government, which can be aggressively anti liberal, anti human rights, anti free speech, that language doesn’t sound like the language that should be used by democratic governments. Mind you, we all have these problems – in American politics, in Polish politics and elsewhere. But Georgia doesn’t feel, from the outside, like a place where things are improving right now. The current Georgian regime is illiberal and appears to be strangely dependent on Russia, perhaps on Russian money. It’s a very strange situation. It’s a strange position for a government to take given that, as I understand it, most Georgians support the Ukrainians in the war. A government that far away from the views of its people is suspect. I also worry about what it conceals. What’s the real relationship between Georgian Dream and Russia? What’s the main party founder’s relationship to Russia?
I worry about Georgia becoming the kind of place through which illegal goods can be shipped, maybe by Turkey, maybe elsewhere. If we want Russia to be convinced the war was a mistake, we should make sure the sanctions work, that the electronics that can be used to build weapons don’t make it into the country. And I worry that Georgia is a weak link in that chain. So it’s a bad moment for Georgians to be equivocal; it’s a moment for Georgians to be in solidarity with Ukrainians, with Europeans and with Americans against this war.
Interview by Vazha Tavberidze
