Valdai Club

One thematic session was held on the last day of the 19th Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club, during which the Club's experts tried to formulate what lessons the military-political crisis of 2022 presents for the future. The conference ended with a plenary session, in which Russian President Vladimir Putin participated.

Experts were unanimous in their assessments of the events that unfolded in Europe after February 24, 2022: a special Russian military operation in Ukraine provoked an all-out war of the West against Russia. The goal of the West is to inflict a military defeat on Russia and, by destroying its military power, to bring it into a state of “1990s minus”, which Western propaganda holds will succeed in “turning Russia into a normal country.”

According to one of the experts, the Russian operation has several goals. This is not only the elimination of the anti-Russian foothold within the country's borders, but also the preparation of Russia for a long existence in a crumbling world, the cleansing of pro-Western elements from the elite, as well as the final liberation of the world from the 500-year yoke of Western civilisation, and the return of rights to the "global majority".

Indeed, the institutions of global governance that arose after the Second World War were created to express the interests of the developed countries, which today account for a mere eighth of the world's population. After the end of the Cold War, the West abandoned agreements with Russia on acceptable coexistence, deciding to create an even more rigid system - the so-called "rules-based world order". However, according to one of the participants, this ‘new’ world order was a product of Western imperialism, grounded in the use of resources and cheap labour from poor countries.

The world that was being created in the 1990s was unfair. The leaders of that era only exacerbated previous injustices. According to one expert, Western hegemony began to crumble in 1999, when the West, “going mad with impunity, raped Yugoslavia.” Then there were Iraq and Afghanistan, wars that the West lost. Another blow to the hegemony was the economic crisis of 2008-09. Contradictions were accumulating throughout the world, which, according to historical logic, should have resulted in war. The likelihood of war hung in the air in 2016-2017, the expert stressed, but the pandemic postponed the crisis. Meanwhile, the response to the pandemic has become a concentrated expression of Western selfishness. Vaccination has driven the countries of the Global South into debt, and the fierce defence of the intellectual property rights of large pharmaceutical companies has shown that "banknotes are more important than saving lives."

According to one of the experts, confrontation between Russia and the West is inevitable, since the Western (primarily American) vision of the world does not imply the existence of alternative centres of power in the world. As long as Russia in any of its incarnations claims such a role, the West will always counteract by any means. As history has shown, the most cruel illusion is to believe that the West will not interfere in your affairs if you do not interfere in its affairs. In 1943, Stalin dissolved the Comintern, believing that the West would allow the Soviet Union to develop peacefully if Moscow abandoned the idea of ​​world revolution. He was wrong, just like Gorbachev was in the 1980s, as he who believed that the West would abide by verbal agreements not to expand NATO to the East.

During the discussion, a quote was used from Mark Twain, the words that he heard in the Ends of the Earth New York club in 1906: "We are of the Anglo-Saxon race, and when the Anglo-Saxon wants a thing he just takes it." “If we translate this outstanding declaration into simple human language,” the author continued, “it will sound something like this: ‘The English and the Americans are thieves, highwaymen, pirates, and we are proud to be of the combination’.” This interpretation of the modus operandi of the self-proclaimed hegemon on the world stage, in many ways, mirrors the perspective of the Global South.

The region’s historical memory of the USSR’s help in the fight against colonialism is preserved there, and the current clash between Russia and the West gives people hope that Russia will again stand at the forefront and, realizing its national interests, provide the countries of the Global South with the opportunity for free independent development. As the session on images of Russia showed, in these countries the collapse of the USSR was sometimes experienced almost more acutely than in the post-Soviet space. At the same time, the non-West sometimes perceives the current crisis as a struggle between two parts of the West. The task of Russia is to show that this is not so.