March 24, 2015 6:17 pm The purpose of Putin’s diplomatic acrobatics
Samuel Charap
The Russian president’s goal is not to deceive his counterparts. So why lie, asks Samuel Charap
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The more compelling explanation is international. Russia is often denounced in the west as a revisionist power, determined to tear down the postwar international order. Given Moscow’s flagrant violations of basic principles of international law, and its bilateral and multilateral commitments to Ukraine, these allegations have merit.
Yet if Russia were a truly revisionist power, its leaders would not be devising ever more creative ways to portray the country as a law-abiding actor. Instead of conducting a referendum in Crimea, no matter how preposterously biased, Mr Putin would simply have seized the peninsula without engaging in any procedure or any explanation. Rather than denying his invasion of Ukraine’s east, this revisionist Putin would have been the first to announce his troops’ progress across the frontier. And he would have had no hesitation in admitting that he would continue violating his neighbour’s sovereignty as long as he deemed it in Russia’s interests to do so.
In other words, paradoxically, Moscow could well be lying about its behaviour in Ukraine not because it wants to destroy the international system but because it wants to preserve it; hypocrisy, after all, is the homage vice pays to virtue. As the legal successor of the Soviet Union, Russia was one of the system’s architects. It is a veto-wielding permanent member of its central decision-making body, the UN Security Council. The Kremlin sees itself as behaving much like Washington, which devises clever legal arguments for what are considered in Moscow grave instances of rule-breaking; the invasion of Iraq, say, or the recognition of Kosovo. Many in the Kremlin would say great powers can and do break the rules — but they must cloak their violations in rhetoric to prevent others following suit.
None of this is to say that Russia’s actions are anything but illegal and highly dangerous. But perhaps we in the west should not be so worked up about all the lying. It might be much worse for the international order if Mr Putin were to start telling the truth.
The writer is senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies
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