Anne Applebaum is an American journalist and historian, specializing in Central and Eastern Europe. A researcher in international studies at Johns-Hopkins University (Maryland), she is a reporter for the monthly The Atlantic. She has worked for many titles in the Anglo-Saxon press, including The Economist as a correspondent in Warsaw. Anne Applebaum thus covered the collapse of communism, then the rise of democratic society in the former Eastern bloc. An essential historian of the former USSR, she is notably the author of Iron Curtain, crushed Eastern Europe 1944-1956 (Grasset, 2014) and red starvation (Grasset, 2019), which looks back on the food shortage organized by Stalin in Ukraine. His most recent work is Declining democracies (Grasset, 2021).
How do you explain this return to war in Europe, since the invasion of Ukraine by troops sent by Russian President Vladimir Putin?
For about ten years, we did not want to see what type of regime prevailed in Russia. We refused to admit that Putin was at war with the West. We see today where this denial has led us. The Russian president sees Western democracies as an existential threat, not because of NATO weapons, but because he fears the effects of the ideals of freedom on his regime. He invaded Ukraine because that country does not want his model of kleptocratic autocracy. Putin cannot accept seeing a close neighbour, a former Russian colony, become a democracy. The desire of Ukrainians to integrate into the Western world is a personal affront to him.
You say that the West did not want to see that a war was started. Can you come back to the main moments of this conflict?
From the 1990s, we were not aware of the risk that was taking hold. We have, for example, allowed Russian oligarchs, that is, men who have robbed the Russian state, to launder their money in the West. Our financial institutions have welcomed them with open arms. As such, we participated in the establishment of a kleptocratic regime in Russia. We have not taken seriously the Kremlin’s desire to subvert our democracies, whether through disinformation or through the financial support given to far-right anti-Atlanticist and Eurosceptic parties. Moscow was also able to buy influence by appointing former French or German political leaders to the boards of companies close to the government. In Great Britain, a Russian billionaire entered the House of Lords thanks to the support of Boris Johnson.
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