Far from “provoking” Putin, the West has complaisantly let him become strong militarily and economically. Worse - it can be persuasively argued, as Amir Tahiri does here, that the West created the Putin Monster now devouring chunks of Ukraine.
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Moscow helped overthrow the pro-West regime in Kyrgyzstan, acquired military bases in Armenia and Tajikistan, and clinched a $4 billion deal to supply arms to Iraq.
At the same time, Putin armed secessionists in Moldova and eastern Ukraine and, in August 2008, invaded Georgia to annex Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The US reacted by sending a warship on a brief tour of the Black Sea.
It seems that Putin had worked out a careful plan to test the Western powers’ limit of tolerance as he went from one mischief to another.
He conducted an exceptionally brutal war in Chechnya to crush a rebellion that Yeltsin had failed to tame. There was hardly any Western reaction.
In 2012 Putin started getting involved in the Syrian civil war on the side of President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Tehran. After testing the waters, Putin also cast himself as a big player in Libya in the hope of getting a chunk of it when and if it was broken into pieces.
French President Emmanuel Macron hosted Putin in a lavish banquet in the Palace of Versailles and hailed “the historic friendship” of France and Russia.
Each time Putin misbehaved, Western powers reacted with bland statements, the expulsion of a few diplomats. Meanwhile, Putin built a political support base in the West by financing several parties of both left and right.
Putin at first seized control of chunks of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk and, once convinced that no one would stop him, went along and annexed the whole of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014.
He also obtained a base in Syria, restoring Russia’s military presence in the Mediterranean for the first time since the fall of the Soviet Empire. [Thanks to Obama who asked him to do it.]
His next move was to turn the Caspian Sea into a Russian lake, excluding “outsiders”, meaning the Western powers.
It is hard to know what goes on in Putin’s mind. But his favorite “philosopher”, Alexander Dugin, has dismissed the leaders of Western democracies as a bunch of lily-livered pansies interested in nothing but money and show-off.
Dugin’s view has been partly confirmed by Russia’s success in hiring leading Western politicians with huge salaries for bogus jobs. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, former French Prime Minister François Fillon and at least 12 other premiers and ministers from Austria, Finland and Italy were among the first to jump on the Russian gravy train.
Western money, technology and, above all, greed helped Putin become, in the words of US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, a threat to world peace.
For two decades, Western powers injected billions to revitalize Russia’s moribund economy, making Russia the world’s second-largest oil producer and helping Putin build a $600 billion war chest before launching his “Special Operations” last February.
The West played Pygmalion, but Putin didn’t turn out to be the beautiful Galatea it had imagined, but “the creature” that Dr. Frankenstein produced.