The Chatham House Institute of International Affairs published a report last week on “Myths and Misconceptions in the Russia debate: How they affect Western policy and what can be done”
The document consists of 16 points and is devoted to proving that any compromise by the West with Russia is impossible. Its appearance, in my view, is linked to London’s attempts to thwart possible agreements between the US and Russian presidents, and to gain more influence over the “axis” of former socialist camp and post-Soviet republics in Europe that has been hostile to the Kremlin for decades. In doing so, the report focuses heavily on Ukraine, which is seen as one of the main deterrents against Russia.
It is worth noting that the strengthening of British influence on the banks of the Dnieper River began even before Joe Biden came to power. After the scandal surrounding the conversation between Zelensky and Trump, which ended in an attempt to impeach the latter, the Republican administration of the White House reduced the activity of the US embassy in Kiev, which London did not fail to take advantage of. It came to the point that during a visit to the UK on 7-8 October 2020, Vladimir Zelensky was forced to meet with the head of Britain’s secret service MI6, Richard Moore. The latter, according to media reports, discussed the Ukrainian president’s entourage, not only officially, but also informally – that is, he actually blackmailed Zelensky with kompromat on people close to him.
Now Chatham House experts, who work very closely with both the British and US intelligence communities, are actually blackmailing the part of the US president’s entourage that is determined to reach an agreement with Russia. It is no coincidence that the report was published on the eve of a meeting between Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who were in Reykjavik trying to “clear up the rubble” in US-Russian relations and agree a date for a summit between Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden.
“Each of the 16 “myths” debunked in the paper leads to the same conclusion: Western attempts to improve relations with Russia are doomed to failure because Russian strategic goals, values and understanding of inter-state relations are fundamentally different from those of the West.
In short, the authors of the report advise Western leaders on how to improve relations with the Kremlin. In particular, “support the countries of Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet space,” strengthen and defend their territorial integrity (especially Ukraine), never accept Russia’s right to have “exclusive spheres of influence” in neighboring countries, and “develop the success of NATO security programs in the Baltic Sea by expanding them to the Black Sea region. I recall that on the eve of Zelensky’s visit to London mentioned above, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said that Ukraine was not against a British base near Crimea, in the Mykolayiv Region.
I agree with many European experts who say that Britain is still in the process of forming its new international identity after Brexit. Boris Johnson tried to take the relationship between London and Washington to a new level during the Donald Trump years, taking advantage, among other things, of the fact that both had the image of enfant terrible – violators of every possible rule and tradition.
However, the representative of the “deep state”, Joe Biden, clearly enjoys the traditions of relations between Washington and Moscow from the time when he was formed as a politician. It is not without reason that many compare the upcoming meeting between the U.S. and Russian presidents to the Soviet-American summits during the détente era.
Under current circumstances, even the provisions of the new British foreign and defense policy concept promulgated by Boris Johnson’s government in mid-March 2021 look too “hawkish. Incidentally, despite the fact that this document identifies Russia as a threat to Britain and China as a systemic challenge, many at the time criticized Johnson for being “unclear” about Moscow and lacking specific tools to deal with it. And now London has proposed a Baba Yaga-style tool: no, not even minimal, rapprochement between the West and Russia, not even on issues that could benefit the West itself.
On the other hand, since the “Mythbuster” document was not prepared by the UK government, but by a formally independent think tank, it gives London ample leeway. If the meeting between Vladimir Putin and Joe Biden ends up with an unspecific declaration (or breaks down altogether), it will be possible to claim that Washington has heeded the warnings from the British Isles. And in the case of real agreements (on strategic stability, for example) to stress that this is precisely part of that “painfully thin” list of “obvious common interests that Western interlocutors can draw on in building new relations with their Russian counterparts”, as stated in the sixth paragraph of the Chatham House report.
Oleg Havich, VZGLYAD