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Opinion | Ukraine war: Europe turning back fleeing Russians only plays into Putin’s hands
- Treating all Russians as part of Putin’s ambitions and applying collective punishment is a mistake by the West that could easily backfire
- Russians fighting to conserve the values of democracy and freedom deserve the West’s support instead of its ire
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Isolationist strategies have become the standard measure when dealing with rogue states. As a result, Russia has felt the full force of Western-led sanctions this year, stunting its economic growth and preventing it from meeting its military objectives.
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Still, recent events surrounding the partial mobilisation of 300,000 reservists to salvage modest military gains and the annexation of occupied territories challenge this idea. This approach is problematic.
These countermeasures not only fail to take Russia’s history of being excluded and self-imposing exclusion from the world into account, but it will also turn democracy-valuing Russians into collateral in the war to protect Ukraine.
Russia bridges Europe with Asia, and despite the criss-crossing of so many cultures it has maintained its own identity, culture, religion and language. In the last 600 years, it has borne the brunt of exclusion from Europe and self-imposed its isolation, ending with the Iron Curtain’s fall in 1989.
Former Warsaw Pact countries rushed to join the West when they broke free from communism. The Russian Federation, on the other hand, was both attracted and repulsed at the thought of integrating itself into another faction, particularly one against which it had always competed.
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The carefully staged celebrations in Moscow provide a sliver of victory on a political front, contrasting the losses on the battlefield. These annexed territories have looked eastward towards the Kremlin for support since 2014.
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