Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks on March 5 near Moscow. (Photo by Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)
As the Western world struggles to come up with some way to halt Vladimir Putin’s assumption of control over the Crimea and potentially other swaths of eastern Ukraine, Hillary Clinton, likely the U.S. Democratic presidential nominee in 2016, has compared his issuance of Russian passports to Ukrainian citizens to similar moves by Adolf Hitler in the run-up to the Second World War. At the same time, the European Union has just promised to fork over some $15 billion in emergency relief funds over the next two years, showing both the generous coffers at its disposal and its relative weakness as a geopolitical intistution; plenty of carrots but no sticks. Indeed, neither HRC’s invocation of the Nazi threat nor the E.U.’s financial heft are likely to sway Putin or the Kremlin. Instead, they serve to highlight the inability of the West to affect outcomes in Russia’s neck of the woods.
VISUAL CONTEXT: Russian approval of their political leaders
While blanket global media coverage of the stand-off between Ukrainian forces and Russian military arrivals is sure to create some pressure on all parties to seek a resolution, we would do well to recognize that there is no institution or politician with the power, soft or otherwise, to dramatically alter the strategic calculations for the Kremlin. This is best highlighted by the fact that just as the E.U. is poised to provide all that aid, France is proceeding with defense contract sales to Russia, including for a new transport warship. Far more likely to give Putin pause than scrutiny from foreign media would be the loss of some military hardware, or perhaps that internal Kremlin poll showing awfully little appetite for a sustained intervention next-door. The end to this conflict will be determined by internal Russian politics, then, rather than by the efforts (however well-intended) of foreign powers, and specifically the West that sees Putin as its ideological nemesis. Perhaps granting him the worldwide megaphone that was the Sochi Olympic Games was a poor decision in hindsight; expecting some belated warning shots from Brussels and Washington to dramatically alter his mindset, however, seems even more naive.
