I hate not re-reading my articles, and even less the ones I published a long time ago. I am afraid that I will find out how naive I was and how badly I wrote. But, curiously, the few times I do, I tend to be surprised. I am left with the alarming feeling that I wrote better before and – very occasionally – with the pleasant discovery that I got it right. Or that the people I quoted got it right.
This is the case of a report I made six years ago in Latvia, a neighboring country of Russia, a member of NATO. I reread it because tomorrow, Monday, I am leaving for another country bordering Russia, Ukraine, which is not a member of NATO but would like to be. What I realized was that my view of Vladimir Putin’s war is based almost entirely on what the Latvians I interviewed told me. Logical: there is no one more qualified than the inhabitants of the former colonies of Moscow to talk about Putin and Russia.
A high percentage of them speak Russian; they keep fresh the memories of what it was like to live under the Russian yoke; they spent the thirty years since the end of the cold war warning the world, with almost no one paying attention, that the Russian wolf was coming. And it has already arrived.
What I heard again and again in Latvia in 2017 was that people greatly valued the freedom and prosperity they had won since becoming independent from Russian – or, for that matter, Soviet – imperialism in at the end of the 20th century, and who were happy about the protection that the decision to join NATO at the beginning of the 21st century had meant for them.
My main interest on that trip was to understand the Latvian view of Putin’s motivation and goals.
Pauls Raudseps, a veteran Latvian journalist, identified four factors for me, all of which are more accurate than ever today: “U, trying to weaken or cause confusion in the West has, since the Soviet era, been part of its nature. Two, they need to convince their people that the Baltic countries are, as their propaganda says, ‘fascist’ and ‘failed’, and that the West in general is in decline. Three, the old Russian imperial impulse. Four, Putin’s desire to maintain power in his mafia State”.
I also spoke with Andris Vicks, director of the National Library of Latvia, whose mother was one of the 90,000 people from the Baltic countries condemned to slavery in the Russian gulags in 1949 (another was the mother of the current Prime Minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas). Vicks added a psychological element to my list of reporter Raudseps. “They are complicated people, the Russians,” he said. They are arrogant but with an inferiority complex. It is a dangerous combination in an individual and it is even more so in a country with such destructive powerâ€.
Impossible not to make a connection, I thought, with Donald Trump, whose profile matches, in a childish version, Vicks’s diagnosis. “Make America great again”, he says, clearly speaking of himself. The director of strategic planning at Latvia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Andris Razanas, told me that Putin’s motivation was to “make Russia great again.”
Zaneta Ozolipa, an academic who advised the Government of Latvia, delved into the issue. “There is a lot of irrationality,” he told me. “Today Russia is smaller in terms of territory than at any time since the time of Peter the Great, 300 years ago. As huge as the country is, Russian pride demands an expansion of the national territory. Added to this is nostalgia for lost greatness, their perception that they won World War II virtually single-handedly and that their sacrifice was never appreciated by the West. Putin uses this collective Russian vision to maintain power and his money, but it is important to understand that this is not pure cynicism: he believes it too, he shares with his compatriots all these resentments and prides and vanities and complex”.
Latvia’s most revered and, by reputation, shrewdest political figure met Putin personally. Her name is Vaira Vike Freiberga and she was president of her country from 1999 to 2007. Why the permanent Russian hostility?, I asked her.
“Mr. Putin is always testing the limits, like a two-year-old child”, he answered me, just like that. Ok, I answered him, but was it a mere childish impulse or was there also a point of realpolitik?
“Both things. Alongside the Russian collective feeling of martyrdom is the feeling of heroism. They need acts of heroism to compensate for permanent martyrdom. So if the ruble falls, or the state doesn’t spend gas and oil money on infrastructure, education and health and people get poorer while the rulers get richer, what Putin does is resort to ‘heroic option. It is an easy tool to gain popularity. Not that they need territory, obviously. They need to feel grown up!â€.
For this reason, ex-president Freiberga told me that she had welcomed the NATO battalions to her country. “It is the correct response that is required of parents to mark the limits of the naughty child”.
The same belligerence, if not more, is seen today in the Baltic countries towards Putin. Along with Poland, they are the most unconditionally loyal Europeans to Ukraine, the least willing to consider the possibility of a negotiated agreement that ends with the cession of Ukrainian territory to Russia.
Irritated six years ago by what she saw as the soft passivity of Western European countries, Freiberga told me that it was time for the free countries of the world to get serious about Russia, to protect the democratic heritage and cultural wealth that western civilization had brought to the world and that they take tough measures against Russia. She must be satisfied, then, with the response of Europe and the United States to the war in Ukraine. At least for now. But he will tremble at signs that his commitment is waning.
The last question I asked Mrs. Freiberga is particularly relevant today. Why should we bother the rest of the world about the fate of countries bordering Russia like Latvia or Ukraine? “Don’t ask for whom the bells toll”, he replied, quoting a 17th century poet. “They play for you”.
