Brussels Forum

'Ambassador, dear, you are lying'

By JOHN F. HARRIS

President Barack Obama arrives Tuesday in the capital of Europe, a city of frameworks and furrowed brows, of multilateral dialogue and expressions of grave concern, where the locals speak French, international bureaucrats do their work in English and representatives of the 28 member countries of the European Union are all fluent in the universal language of blah, blah, blah.

It takes a powerful force to jolt this place out of its usual instinct for diplomatic abstractions and harumphing; Russian President Valdimir Putin turns out to be up to the task.

At a riveting session Friday before the annual Brussels Forum, the Russian ambassador to the EU, Vladimir Chizhov, appalled the audience of international officials and national security specialists by brazenly spouting the Moscow line: Russia was compelled to annex Crimea because Ukraine was in danger of becoming a chaotic “failed state” — as though the audience was unaware how much Russia’s own manipulations helped bring about this very chaos.

A few moments later, a top official with the Ukrainian ministry of foreign affairs, Vasyl Filipchuk, turned to the Russian. He allowed that “I sincerely respect you” as a “very skillful diplomat,” then got to the point: “Ambassador, dear, you are lying.”

“You are calling white as black and black as white,” the diplomat said.

Next up at the gathering of transatlantic policymakers and intellectuals was the former president of Georgia, Mikheil Saakashvili. Unlike his Ukrainian counterpart, he said, “I have no respect for Ambassador Chizhov. He reminds me of a character from ‘Dr. Strangelove.’”

This remarkable exchange — downright raucous by the usual standards of Brussels eurobabble — had the effect of spotlighting Obama’s challenge on his Europe tour this week. The continent’s leaders are consumed with the now-what question: In the wake of Russia’s crude yet effective land snatch, can there be any prospect of going back to anything approximating precrisis normal relations with Moscow? Or is time for the United States and European allies to face up to a new reality — that Putin’s Russia is an aggressively adversarial power and is going to remain that way for the indefinite future?

People here will be listening more intently than they have for a long time to a visiting American president for insights into his view of the question. Obama has made a series of statements and warnings, combined with economic sanctions, designed to show how seriously he takes Putin’s incursion. But a chorus of voices here said he risks looking irrelevant unless he follows up this week with even more dramatic gestures.

The stakes for Obama are especially high, given how easily the the Ukraine crisis could become a metaphor for presidential impotence or American passivity.

And the challenge is especially hard, because virtually no one here believes that Obama or allies who object to the annexation have any good options for the short term. Sanctions, focused so far on Putin’s inner circle, may sting. But there is no prospect that they will cause Putin to reverse course on his land grab, and may be provoking him to further escalation.

This reality puts the emphasis on the long-term options. Several important voices said it is time for the West to recognize that Putin’s invasion represents “a complete and utter collapse of the fundamental assumptions of security in the post-World War II order,” as Toomas Ilves, the president of Estonia, put it here.

Obama, like other presidents since the demise of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, has tended to regard Russia as somewhat akin to how generations of American diplomats regarded France. In other words: a proud, stubborn country that often delights in being a pain in the ass, but one that at the end of the day has predictable interests that compel it to engage constructively with the United States and its European allies.

But Crimea, in the view of many Americans and Europeans here, forces a different interpretation: Putin’s Russia is a metastatic force, fundamentally hostile in its motives and long-term designs.
In sum, if world leaders care about Ukraine’s crisis, or preventing future Crimeas, they will need to meet Putin in a sustained way with sterner stuff than sanctions.

Robert Zoellick, the former World Bank president and a leading Republican national security voice, said the Crimea annexation has “fundamentally changed the post-Cold War set of norms and expectations” in ways that will echo all across nations near Russia’s borders.

He said while the United States and NATO won’t intervene militarily in Ukraine directly, western nations must consider giving military aid to Ukraine if leaders there demonstrate they are willing to stand up to Russia’s superior forces.

Although financial sanctions more severe than those imposed to date could be punishing, Zoellick argued, “I think the key point for President Putin’s view of the world is he’s not going to be seriously affected by slaps on the wrists of [revoked] visas or this sanction or that sanction. … But what he could be affected by is if he gets himself into a military mess and that ultimately depends on the Ukrainians. That’s going to be an issue that the transatlantic community is going to face.”

This stern message won praise from Ilves (who grew up in New Jersey and sounds like it). He said European sanctions have been “really kind of piddly” because countries don’t want to hurt their own banks or business contracts with Moscow.

Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, likewise said in an interview here that U.S. policymakers have been asking the wrong question. The importance of the Crimea crisis is “not how we change Putin but how we change ourselves” to prepare for a new era of long-term containment.

At least rhetorically, the call to rethink Russia policy was bipartisan in Brussels.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) said Putin “has reignited a dangerous pre-1991 Soviet-style game of Russian roulette with the international community, and we cannot blink. … Our policies toward Russia require urgent re-examination.”

But if Obama is being goaded at home, as well as by certain Russia hawks abroad, he’ll find plenty of people urging him to proceed at all deliberate speed — and to return to the pre-crisis status quo as quickly as possible.

It was the foreign minister of Belgium, Didier Reynders, who introduced the panel at which fireworks erupted. In his prefatory remarks, Reynders made his preferences clear. While “both sides of the Atlantic” are “deeply attached to the preservation of territorial integrity and to peaceful means of conflict resolution,” the minister urged people to recall the good old days. “We both know that Russia is and must remain a partner whose added value on the diplomatic scene has proven, more than once, very useful.”