[Op-ed by Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, two Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.]
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Whatever the outcome of the current negotiations, Putin’s obsession with Europe is so great that leading European nations and hardline anti-Kremlin states like Germany, France, Poland, the Baltic states, and the UK will continue to experience attacks.
Ukraine has been the fulcrum of the Russian president’s campaign to change the post-Cold War settlement of 1989-91, but it is only one part of a much more ambitious campaign to build a more Russia-friendly Europe.
It’s worth remembering that Putin’s ultimatum to the West in December 2021, on the eve of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, was primarily targeted at NATO’s presence on the European continent. In particular, it made extraordinary demands for the withdrawal of troops and weapons from NATO’s Eastern flank, including the return of NATO forces to their bases of 1997. That would have meant withdrawing garrisons in the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania.
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Moscow firmly believes that Europe must be put “in its place” regardless of any deal over Ukraine.
This explains the Kremlin’s accelerating shadow war operations against Europe — including arson, sabotage, drone attacks, targeted assassinations of Russian emigres, and cyberattacks against infrastructure — that aim to unnerve the population and pressure governments to shift policy in Russia’s favor. An end to fighting in Ukraine does not change this logic.
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Internal Russian factors also make a sustained peace improbable. Three and a half years of war in Ukraine have eroded the role of many key Russian institutions in anything involving relations with the outside world.
For instance, nobody cares what role Lavrov and his foreign ministry play in the current negotiations; the real talks with the Americans are taking place elsewhere and are handled by other actors — starting with Putin himself, his personal appointees such as Kirill Dmitriev, and the intelligence agencies, which have boosted their influence through several rounds of hostage exchanges.
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The security agencies, meanwhile — omnipresent and all-powerful after two decades of growing power — have made full use of the Kremlin’s paranoia about Ukrainian spies and saboteurs, and now have their fingers in everything of any importance in the country — from federal ministries and regional governments, which are kept in line through selective repression carried out by the FSB, to corporations harassed by innumerable criminal investigations, which involve the FSB, or military counterintelligence, in one way or another.
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Territorial gains in Ukraine, the fate of Zelenskyy, or a downsized Ukrainian army are too trivial to matter. By Russian spy standards, such outcomes would simply be inconsequential. It would merely enable a greater focus on the next round, with the new and bigger target of democratic Europe.