After Russia’s infamous war of aggression against Ukraine, those who understand Putin in the West don’t have it that easy anymore. And yet they keep their heads above water. A few logical-sounding justifications are followed up here.
If you want war, prepare for war – Russian military drills in Belarus in September 2021.
Putin understanders like to protest against the word «Putin understander». Wanting to understand the motives of the other side, that can’t be bad, it’s even a prerequisite for dialogue and peace policy, is her argument that sounds logical. And understanding does not mean having understanding or even defending Putin’s actions. But that is exactly what those who understand Putin regularly do.
When Russia was already waging war against Ukraine in the Donbass for several months in 2014, more than 60 German personalities from politics, business, culture and the media claimed in an appeal: “Nobody wants war!” But “America, the European Union and Russia are inevitably heading towards him if they don’t finally stop the ominous spiral of threats and counter-threats”.
It does not say what threats or counter-threats are said to have been made to Russia by the West. Instead, it is claimed that those responsible in the West are risking a war to the same extent as Russia because of their historically oblivious actions. “Among Americans, Europeans and Russians, the guiding principle of permanently banning war from their relationships has been lost.” The consequences are “the threatening expansion of the West to the East without simultaneous intensification of cooperation with Moscow and the illegal annexation of Crimea by the Russian state under its President Vladimir Putin”.
The Tale of the Triumphal Cry
The blame for the confrontation is thus assigned to both sides, although the facts already showed at the time who was the aggressor and who was striving for peace. Even after the end of the Soviet Union, “cooperation with Moscow” had been intensified in the most generous way for years, despite blatant Russian human rights violations or war crimes such as in the Chechen wars.
The USA and the NATO countries initially ensured that Russia remained the only remaining nuclear power of the former Soviet successor states. Ukraine and Kazakhstan surrendered their nuclear weapons to Moscow, which also received $9 billion from the US to scrap those weapons. A very strange form of “Western deceit” and alleged triumph over Russia’s weakness.
Why don’t people who understand Putin want to live in Russia?
Russia was invited to the G-7 meetings of the most important industrialized countries, even though its economic power did not adequately justify it. With the signing of the NATO-Russia Founding Act, Russia was also named a privileged partner of NATO. Russia’s security interests had also been respected by keeping the NATO presence in the Baltic States only symbolic, with only 1,500 NATO soldiers.
The West has offered Russia “modernization partnerships” a number of times in the interest of both parties. The examples could be continued endlessly. However, it is not known that a NATO representative or a responsible politician in the West has ever made military threats to the nuclear power Russia.
You have to be able to count
In order to justify the Putin ideology and to explain Russia’s alleged feelings of a threat, those who understand Putin like to point to NATO’s armament costs. The NATO countries have military budgets of $1.1 trillion, while humble, peaceful Russia is said to make do with almost a twentieth of that amount, at just $61 billion.
This is a classic in the argumentative repertoire of pacifist masturbation, easy to understand and simply beautiful. This comparison is made every day in political talk shows and parliamentary debates, and is constantly repeated in social networks. This was also the case in the last major pacifist appeal with the motto “No to war – together we will stop the armament madness!”. This time signed not just by 60, but by more than 600 celebrities. “The ‘defense expenditures’ of all thirty NATO countries already exceed those of Russia by a factor of almost twenty,” they argue. Defense spend in quotes, signaling that it could also be attack spend.
However, the developmental level of this argument corresponds to that of preschool children. Because in the first school year, children already get to know the numbers from 1 to 100 and the basic arithmetic operations addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, they no longer just compare two randomly selected numbers with each other. However, the “pupils’ bench of the present” (Shakespeare) is obviously too hard for childish adults.
How do the Russians manage to be militarily equal to, and even superior to, NATO with almost a twentieth of NATO’s military budget? Apparently, other economic and mathematical laws apply in Russia than in the West. How can they build the supposedly fastest missiles in the world there with much less money and have as many nuclear weapons ready for use as the USA? Why is the theoretical combat capability of all NATO armies estimated to be only four to five times higher than that of Russia? How can Russia fund almost a million active duty soldiers with roughly the same officially stated amount, but Britain only 190,000?
It could be pointed out to junior high school students that workers and clerks in American armament factories are paid about five to six times the wages and salaries of their Russian counterparts. Likewise soldiers, officers, civilian personnel. Western armaments companies have to assert themselves against competitors and pay competitive wages if they want to get government armaments contracts, Russian ones don’t. Western arms factories are private companies, while Russian ones are mostly state-owned. In Russia, the government can order which orders are to be carried out and at what price.
Luminaries and their opinions
Furthermore, the factor X must be considered. Russia does not publicly declare all of its many military budgets, a fact regularly ignored or underestimated in international studies, which those who understand Putin like to refer to.
Many Putin understanders and would-be pacifists are currently also happy to confirm their childish level of thinking with the excuse that they “maybe have been naive in the past” (Ingo Schulze) when they categorically ruled out a major Russian attack on Ukraine and dismissed this possibility as Western warmongering. As is well known, naive means credulous, thoughtless, ignorant, easily seduced. Just like preschoolers who only think with their hearts. With the difference that the children don’t dip their hands in blood when they ask for understanding with false claims for robbers and murderers, as the grown-up war enablers are forced to do.
It is always astonishing that most of those who understand Putin publicly do not understand Russian at all or only very poorly, as the writer Ingo Schulze recently admitted about himself, who signed both of the above-mentioned Putin understander manifestos. Well, in argumentative pre-school age you don’t have any foreign language lessons.
The dialectics of those who understand Putin can also be played off against them themselves – why don’t they actually understand the West? Why don’t they at least try and ask adults for advice, such as officers, who could explain to them that 1,500 NATO soldiers cannot pose a serious threat to 150,000 Russian soldiers? Why do people from the field come to different judgments than you and see serious military dangers for Western countries?
If the NATO spokeswoman were to claim that she was a better actress than Corinna Harfouch, who signed the peace appeal, one would only laugh. Luminaries like the film director Wim Wenders, the writer Christoph Hein or the theologian Margot Kässmann imagine that they can assess military issues better than specialists when they state in the appeal: “The acquisition of conventional weapons such as fighter jets and armed drones for deterrence under nuclear military blocs is pointless.” Everything under the atomic bomb is pointless if you want to capitulate anyway, right? Or should Western soldiers fight enemy tanks with Swiss army knives?
Neutrality and pacifism are perhaps an option when two forces that embody hatred of people, cruelty and lawlessness to the same extent are at war. When choosing his exile, Bertolt Brecht, who was persecuted by the Nazis, chose the land of unlimited opportunity, the democratic USA, where he could freely and with impunity rail against the barbarism of capitalism, rather than Stalin’s multi-ethnic prison.
Why don’t people who understand Putin want to live in Russia?
The writer Christoph Brumme, Born in Wernigerode in eastern Germany in 1962, has lived in the eastern Ukrainian city of Poltava since 2016. In 2019 Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf published: «111 reasons to love Ukraine. A declaration of love to the most beautiful country in the world».