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Vladimir Putin expressed his deepest condolences on the passing of Mikhail Gorbachev. He will send a telegram, his spokesman said, to the former leader’s circle of family and friends to express his solidarity.
In reality, however, the last years of Gorbachev’s life were spent seeing much of what he sought to destroy under Putin, culminating in a devastating war that took a stand in central Europe.
Western hawks played their part in ending détente and returning to the Cold War. But the adoption of competitive nationalism through the current Kremlin leader has been the main driving force of the current state of harmful confrontation.
When Gorbachev resigned as the last leader of the Soviet Union in 1991, NATO’s immediate reaction force in Europe amounted to just 5,000. After the war in Ukraine and emerging tensions on Eastern Europe’s borders with Russia, that number will be 300,000 until December 2023.
Threats of war, ranging from boots on the ground to weapons of mass destruction, were in the Gorbachev era, when the Russian leader called for nuclear disarmament at the Reykjavik summit with Ronald Reagan in 1986.
The most recent nuclear weapons treaty between Washington and Moscow dragged on for five years after it expired last February. But Russia suspended visits by U. S. inspectors. Three weeks ago, as part of a mutual follow-up mechanism. The Kremlin said it was in retaliation for U. S. sanctions. The U. S. military to Ukraine prevented Russian nuclear officials from traveling to the United States. It turns out that there is no way to avoid this impasse at this time.
The United States and Russia are modernizing their missile systems. Putin, while ordering his troops to enter Ukraine, warned the West that his country is a “forceful” nuclear force and that any attempt at interference would have “consequences you have never seen. “”
Since then, he has declared that “you can’t win a nuclear war and you’ll never have to fight. “, adding London and New York.
On ukrainian soil, the Russian bombings on the domain of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest in Europe, illustrate a very risky modus operandi in the face of an imaginable catastrophe. A project of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) that was to spend 4 days examining the situations of the facility was reduced to one day through the Russian army.
Gorbachev, 91, the son of a Ukrainian mother and a Russian father, had not commented publicly on the war in Ukraine. His Gorbachev Foundation, a think tank that “seeks to publicize democratic values,” issued a two-day post-invasion calling for a “rapid cessation of hostilities. “
Gorbachev’s former interpreter Pavel Palazhchenko, who works for the foundation, said: “He warned that things can happen that can be very harmful between Russia and Ukraine can happen, but he did what he could to bring those two nations closer together. instead of seeing a continuation of this hole that we now see widening. So for him, emotionally, it’s very tragic.
The internal reforms that Gorbachev brought to Russia, non-public and political freedoms, in the media and academia, have also been largely reversed — and this allows the Kremlin to condemn critics of foreign policy such as the invasion of Ukraine as a betrayal.
Journalism has come under attack. Novaya Gazeta, the independent newspaper gorbachev helped publish with Nobel Peace Prize money, and partly owned by businessman Alexander Lebedev, ceased publication in March at the risk of new wartime censorship laws.
Moscow’s Echo radio station, which began in 1990, was also forced to close when Russian troops entered Ukraine. One of its founding journalists, Aleksei Veneditkov, close to Gorbachev, said in an interview in July: “What Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev did is absolutely destroyed. “, all its reforms have fallen to zero, in ashes, in smoke . . .
“Freedom the business of Gorbatchev. Il gave freedom to the church, freedom of speech, the first law on the press, on personal property. . . “
Gorbachev, Veneditkov said, disappointed by the invasion of Ukraine. “I can tell you that Gorbachev is disappointed, of course, he understands, it’s his life’s work. “
Destroying what Gorbachev sought to make Russia more vulnerable, Veneditkov argued: “When I am asked ‘is there anything to indicate this?’, the end of next year.
Putin described the end of the Soviet Union as the “greatest geopolitical disaster of the century. “Millions of Russians, he said, found themselves stranded in countries, Ukraine added.
The betrayal, according to Putin on the eve of the invasion of Ukraine, was due to the weakness of former Russian leaders who did not resist the West, a West that had sought to undermine Russia in Georgia, Ukraine and other former Warsaw Pact countries. .
The current Russian president believes that his project repairs the damage caused by leaders like Gorbachev. The “geopolitical catastrophe” of the demise of the Soviet Union, according to him and his supporters, can be reversed by an enlarged Russian Federation.
Dreams of reconquering a lost empire are a pride that, M. Putin’s enemies fervently await, will be pursued by a sworn enemy. But in the meantime, thousands of people are being killed and maimed in Ukraine, and millions more people are facing severe economic hardship in Europe over the coming winter due to the war.
These were the kind of man-made mistakes Gorbachev hoped he could avoid for generations through his policies of détente, glasnost and perestroika, hopes that eventually faded with Putin’s rise.