Speaking at the annual Lennart Meri Conference in Tallinn—the most prominent security forum in the Baltics, and arguably in all of Eastern and Northern Europe. The topic is a sacrosanct one: how should the West build relations with Russia after the war? I have the following four theses on this:
1. There will be no “after the war”—this is an illusion, a projection of wishful thinking. War is the new norm, the new state of being for both Russia and the international system. Think of the Middle East—80 years of continuous war with no end in sight. There will be no peace, only a “process.” Even if some ceasefires between Ukraine and Russia emerge, they will be painfully negotiated over months and immediately violated. No long-term peace is possible because today's Russia—with or without Putin—is ontologically incompatible with the existence of an independent Ukraine, especially within its 1991 borders, and even more so as a member of the Western alliance. Russia is now in a state of permanent war; its economy, elites, and ideological machinery are geared toward war. And this is a heavy train you can’t just stop with a whistle. It barrels ahead under its own momentum, no matter who’s in the engineer’s seat—and the passengers enjoy watching the scenery roll by. And there’s enough fuel—like in Sorokin’s latest novel, the locomotive is fed with human bodies.
2. Putin is currently winning this war and achieving his strategic goals. It’s not about his army being entrenched in eastern Ukraine, having captured 1% of Ukrainian territory over the past year at the cost of 400,000 lives, losing up to 100 soldiers per square kilometer of conquered land. Russia has plenty of people—just as in World War II, they’ve already sacrificed nearly a million, and if needed, they’ll sacrifice another million or two, using money, deceit, coercion, and repression. For now, money is enough.
The key is that Putin has imposed this war on Russia, Ukraine, and the world. He’s made it the norm, shifted the global system into a qualitatively new state—and that has been his goal for at least the past 20 years, since the first Maidan and the Orange Revolutions. He is imposing his agenda of confrontation and strategic opposition to the West. He weakens the West by exposing its indecision and ineffectiveness. He drives wedges into existing cracks, from supporting Trump during his first term to backing any anti-establishment forces—from the far left to the far right. This is exactly what the Kremlin has wanted since the mid-2000s, when they became enamored with Yuryev’s bad novel The Third Empire. Ukraine is just one platform in this global confrontation—success there is important but not critical.
Moreover, three years of war have given Putin two unexpected (or at least not fully anticipated) gifts. The first is Russia itself, which slipped into this war like a hand into a glove, accepted it, absorbed it, normalized it, and now supplies cannon fodder, obedience, complicity (from weaving camouflage nets to children's matinees), and the most crucial resource: indifference. The second gift is the global world, which has proven far more flexible and cooperative with Russia—constructing mechanisms of alternative globalization that bypass the West. This includes North Korean soldiers and shells, Iranian drones, Chinese chips, Indian oil buyers, Latin American and African Putin admirers. It includes countless ways to circumvent sanctions and acquire critical technologies even from the West itself, allowing Putin to wage war indefinitely, while Russians continue living comfortably.
Essentially, this reflects the reality that the world no longer belongs to the West—not economically, financially, technologically, or militarily. Here in Tallinn, we sit with representatives of about one billion people with roughly shared views and interests. But outside this hotel, there are another 7 billion people who see Russia, Ukraine, Putin, the war, and the West’s role very differently.
3. The West is losing this war. In fact, it has been steadily losing Russia since the early 1990s, mistakenly treating the collapse of the USSR as the end of history and assuming that Russia had ceased to be an empire and had become a normal country. Hence the endless appeasement of Russia, the infatuation with its “reformers,” the consideration of its “special interests,” the turning a blind eye to authoritarian tendencies at home and imperial ones abroad. Abkhazia and Transnistria, the shelling of the White House in 1993 and the 1996 elections, the Kosovo confrontations, Putin’s appointment, meddling in Ukrainian affairs, the Munich speech, Georgia in 2008, Crimea—all of it was overlooked, while trade and flattery continued, and visits were made for the 2018 World Cup. Until February 24 struck.
Even now, Western support for Ukraine remains cautious and minimal, just enough to prevent it from dying entirely (and even that only after Ukraine had fought alone in the first month and managed to survive—to the West’s astonishment, which had already written it off). Because there’s only one thing the West fears more than the fall of Kyiv: the defeat of Moscow and the unpredictability of the situation in Russia. Russia is too big to fail—hence the paralysis of will in the West and the absence of strategic vision.
4. And here lies the main trap: the problem of Russia. Not the problem of Putin, not the problem of the war, not even the problem of the USSR's collapse, but the problem of Russia itself. By comparison, the world faced the problem of Germany for a century—from the 1860s to the 1960s—a nation unsettled in its territorial form. This led to three European and two world wars, the remaking of the global order, and the deaths of at least 100 million people, including the Holocaust. (Okay, Germany wasn’t solely responsible, but it stood at the origins of many of these conflicts.) With great difficulty, this problem was resolved through Germany’s defeat, division, and occupation, followed by its integration into numerous institutions. And even then, revanchism is still alive and stirring in the East.
The world has faced the problem of Russia for a century as well—a half-collapsed empire unable to define its borders. The two partial collapses of the empire, in 1917 and 1991, chipped away at the edges but did not destroy the structures, the spirit, or the colonial character of the empire. For a hundred years, it has generated conflicts, instability, and threats—from world revolution in the 1920s to world counter-revolution in the 2020s. From Stalin’s empire to Putin’s, Russia has represented an existential challenge and problem for the West, and ultimately for global security as a whole. It is the main generator of entropy, chaos, and fear in today’s world (as Surkov would agree).
How can this problem be solved? One obvious solution is Germany in 1945: defeat, occupation, and division. Technically, the West could do this, even with the nuclear factor in play—there are non-nuclear tools to defeat Russia if the political will existed. But that political will is nowhere to be found. As I wrote above, Russia is too big to fail; the West is terrified even to imagine a world without Russia—what about all that vast territory, the nuclear arsenal, the uranium mines, the satellites, Tchaikovsky and “Tolstoevsky,” and so on?
So it’s likely the world will continue to live with this enormous toxic swamp in Northern Eurasia, hoping that, gradually, over the course of the 21st century, this not-fully-collapsed empire will digest itself and give birth to some forms of life more friendly to the outside world. “Pity only that I won’t live in those wonderful years…”
Until then—war, as stated in point 1. There will be no “after the war” or “after Putin.” The only thing that might exist is “after Russia”—but from the vantage point of 2025, that is nowhere in sight.
