And while we are talking about foreign aggression, I can’t avoid mentioning the issue of Ukraine. The Russian invasion of Ukraine undermines the authority of NATO and the United States. And it was the only thing Putin could do to maintain his grip on power. The economy alone could no longer sustain his reign.
He has become a ruler for life, and everybody seems to understand it. He needed to invade Ukraine for the same reasons he invaded Georgia in 2008. And let’s not forget that Ukraine was disarmed by the United States and the United Kingdom in 1994, when it was forced to sign the Budapest Memorandum. Few people in this audience know that at that time, Ukraine had the third largest nuclear arsenal in the world — more than the U.K., France, and China combined. Ukraine had 1,200 nuclear warheads. If some of these warheads were aimed at Moscow today, Putin would never have crossed the Ukrainian border. That document, which included the signatures of Bill Clinton and John Major, also disarmed small nuclear arsenals from Kazakhstan and Belarus. It created a nuclear-free former Soviet Union, but it was done in exchange for territorial integrity.
And if you think that Crimea is a regional, local problem, you’re wrong. The message being sent to every country in the world is that if you want to protect your sovereignty, get some nukes, which is why the Ukrainian crisis affects everybody on this planet. I don’t want to isolate Russia; I want to isolate Putin’s regime, which is a dangerous virus. You don’t engage a virus. It needs to be contained. Contamination is not the answer. Thank you.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Great opening statements. Now, we’re going to move on to timed rebuttals. We want to give each side an opportunity to rebut what they have heard so far. The pro side will speak first. Vladimir, you’ve got two minutes.
VLADIMIR POZNER: If we’re going to be honest, the majority of people in this audience really don’t know much about Russia or Ukraine. And so the debaters up on stage can really say anything. Billions and billions of dollars were not invested in Russia. You’ve got to be kidding me. And whatever was invested was invested to make money.
And as for Putin’s supposed cronies, why are they called “cronies”? Why are they not his comrades? We’re debating semantics and not facts.
Here are the facts: if Ukraine had nuclear missiles, can you imagine what kind of a chess game we’d have? There would be nobody left to play it. Is that what we’re looking for? We should be thankful they don’t have missiles in that country. The fewer missiles there are in the world, the better. Do we want a Russia that is pushed out of everything, doing whatever it wants, and in no way answering for its actions? A country that is not under any pressure from the outside world because it’s not engaged? Or do we want a policy of engagement?
Russia has always been in the crosshairs of the West, and perhaps for good reason. So if you think this is just a Putin issue, you’ve made a big mistake. It’s about a much more basic relationship.
STEPHEN F. COHEN: I didn’t know that Mr. Kasparov was stalking me. I had no idea he lived on the Upper West Side. And I’m hoping we’ll end up in a coffee shop there for a friendly talk. But I wouldn’t want him making any Western policy.
Henry Kissinger, who is ninety-one and not thought to be soft on anybody, wrote in Ms. Applebaum’s own newspaper back in March 2014 that “the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it’s an alibi for the absence of one.” I would say that Dr. Kissinger could have gone further and said that the demonization of Putin is an excuse to abandon analysis, to obscure perilous facts, and to make statements about an evil in Moscow — that it’s a mafia state — and to compare Putin to Hitler. This approach is wrong.
Alongside this line of thinking inevitably comes this romance of the Yeltsin ’nineties. Maybe it was great time for Mr. Kasparov. Maybe it was beneficial to Poland and eastern Europe. I don’t know. But when Mr. Yeltsin was forced from office, 75 percent of Russians lived in poverty, as Garry well knows. The billions and billions of American and Western dollars they so romantically think were sent to Moscow were collected by Mr. Yeltsin’s friends and sent back to the Bank of New York, where they were laundered — a criminal case was brought against the bank for that later. So this romantic idea of the 1990s is completely deceptive. Russia was on its knees, ruled by a weak ruler and pillaged by a mafia. So let’s think about the real problems in the world, and about our security, please.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Anne?
ANNE APPLEBAUM: To be clear, the Russia we have today is the result of our failed policy of engagement. Have we isolated and humiliated Russia since 1991? I would say no. Post-Soviet Russia was not humiliated and was given de facto great power status, as you’ve just heard. Russia received the Soviet UN seat, and the Soviet embassies and nuclear weapons, which were transferred from Ukraine under the terms of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, a series of American presidents — all of them, in fact — have sought to build up Russia’s international status.
Presidents Clinton and Bush invited Russia to join the G8, even though Russia was not one of the world’s top economies. Russia was invited to join the Council of Europe, although it is not a democracy. Russia was invited to join the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose rules it systematically violates.
What was Russia doing during this same period, while we were engaging and inviting the country into our institutions? Putin invaded Chechnya, not once but twice. He invaded Georgia. He invaded Ukraine. He built up his military system.
Last month he held a military exercise in the Arctic, involving 80,000 troops, 220 aircraft, and 41 ships. Earlier this year he conducted an equally vast exercise in the Baltic. In 2009 and in 2013 he conducted military exercises, which concluded with a practice run of a nuclear bombardment of Warsaw.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t say Putin was laundering his money in Western banks and that we were isolating him. What was Russia doing while we let it utilize our banking system and enrich itself? It was recreating a Soviet-style nuclear arsenal and a Soviet-style military to use against us.
GARRY KASPAROV: I am always willing to learn, but this is the first time I’ve heard someone suggest that a policy of engagement in the 1920s could have prevented Stalinist terror. I always believed that it was a criminal regime founded by Lenin and Stalin among others, and that whatever the West did in the 1920s was irrelevant. Lenin said, “We’ll treat the West as useful idiots who’ll sell us the very rope that we’ll use to hang them.”
Now, I’m not here to say that Yeltsin’s regime was a perfect democracy. I am very critical of Yeltsin, and I believe Russia missed great opportunities to become a proper democratic state with established institutions and a normal system of checks and balances. It didn’t happen, and there is a lot of criticism levied at Yeltsin, which is justified. But again, we avoided wars; we avoided ethnic conflict. We could have had a war like in Yugoslavia, if someone like Putin had been in power then.
And yes, I agree, there was massive corruption under Boris Yeltsin, especially in his second term when the oligarchs were ripping off the country. These very people who were stealing money were the ones who convinced Yeltsin to appoint Putin to protect them. They didn’t care about democracy; they wanted to protect themselves. And with very few exceptions, these people are still around.