Russian President Vladimir Putin finally abandoned hope in mid-September that he could rebuild a bridge to the West.
With that realization, he committed Russia to the new anti-Western pact.
The turning point was the signal Putin received from the United Kingdom over the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. It had little to do with the military setbacks in the Ukraine war, for which he had already begun planning.
Russia’s new, harder-line, anti-Western policy was essential for building a new strategic bloc with China, Belarus, Iran, North Korea, and, de facto but integrally, NATO member Turkey.
This is the “new Warsaw Pact.” It signaled that the Russian bid to regain control of Central Asia—which Russia had controlled from the late 19th century until 1991—was now also in full swing. It also meant that the U.S. plan to revive the Iran nuclear deal was, in reality, dead.
Moscow has now walked away from any thought that it could negotiate with the two countries at the core of its problems: the United States and the United Kingdom. On its first day in office on Jan. 20, 2021, the Biden administration had already committed to an irrevocable policy of alienating—and possibly breaking up—Russia, so Putin’s hopes were probably always in vain.
Then-UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson also committed fully to the Biden agenda toward Russia. Putin hoped that the incoming UK Prime Minister Liz Truss could soften the Johnson stance.
Significantly, Putin had pushed one final endeavor to open a strategic dialogue with the UK on Sept. 8. He sent a warm statement of condolence to the family of Queen Elizabeth II, who died that day, and paid unqualified tribute to the late queen. The communiqué implied a clear call for an equally humane response from the UK.
The desired British response didn’t come. Moreover, when the British Crown and government issued invitations to foreign heads-of-state to attend Queen Elizabeth’s state funeral on Sept. 19, Russia was explicitly excluded, one of the few states to be singled out. Even North Korea received an invitation, and China, albeit not at the head-of-state level.
Putin’s gesture had been rejected with venom. The UK wouldn’t be split from the United States in its strenuous proxy war through Ukraine, against Russia.
Within a week, Putin had clearly resigned himself to the reality that the future of Russia was never likely—in the foreseeable future—to include any degree of economic integration with the West. He then used the opportunity of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, on Sept. 15–16 to cement the new, anti-Western bloc, and with Chinese leader Xi Jinping to begin gradually prying India away from its close relationship with the United States and the Quad alliance (India, Japan, the United States, and Australia), which had been designed to contain China.
By Sept. 15, when Putin met with Xi at the SCO summit, China and Russia significantly strengthened the interpretation of their mutual cooperation treaty, with the statement that both countries would support each other’s “core interests.” Beijing would support Moscow on Ukraine; Moscow would support Beijing on Taiwan. This was a major hardening of the new bloc and a sign that Russia wouldn’t compromise on its determination to retain its gains in Ukraine.
Events surrounding the Russia–Ukraine war had already seen Russia pushed by the United States, and particularly the UK, into isolation that forced Moscow into an inevitable and growing interdependence on China. The ever-increasing political, economic, and resource costs of the Russia–Ukraine war have also meant that Putin faced hard choices and the prospect that the negative aspects of the war would soon have a significant impact on his governance.
On Sept. 15, Putin sent his own message back to the UK by causing Russian state TV to run movie footage allegedly showing a young Queen Elizabeth throwing food to “the children of the enslaved people in Africa,” and indicating that the queen was racist. The footage, however, was fake and filmed in French Indo-China by the famous Lumière brothers in 1899 or 1900, decades before the queen was even born. It actually showed a woman tossing coins to children.
It was meant to be the kind of reactive insult from which there was no going back. London got the point. It lost, without caring, a strategic opportunity.
On Sept. 21, Putin announced a partial military mobilization in Russia, reportedly activating 300,000 reserve troops for the Ukraine war. He said that he wasn’t at this time considering introducing military conscription. At the same time, he committed extra funds to increase Russian defense-related production. Russian armor and aircraft producers had, in fact, been delivering significant new stocks of Su-35 fighters, T-90 main battle tanks, and other materiel in September.
Media reporting in the West, Ukraine, and Russia can’t be relied upon for a long-term view of events. History demonstrates that Russia, after accepting an adversary’s thrusts, regroups and relies on significant geographic, human, and resource depth to respond. Stalin, the ultimate Marxist-globalist, when facing the German Operation Barbarossa’s 3 million invading troops in 1941, fell back in disarray before appealing to “Russian” nationalism, abandoning the globalist Soviet ideology until Germany was defeated.
Russia has far greater strategic depth than Ukraine.
Xi, as he saw China under growing threat after 2012, has revived nationalism as a motivating force for the Chinese Communist Party.
History is the best intelligence.
