Watching the atrocities coming out now - the towns, the villages that the Russian army has vacated - watching the devastation on the coastal areas of eastern Ukraine, I can understand why people say, “look, we simply do not want to trade with these people - we’re not going to let them have access to their yachts, and to their money, and all that,” that’s fine by me. And he doesn’t care about the plight of Russian people. Putin has a war chest, which is quite large. What about the sanctions against Russia - do you support them? Well, it’s always the case that when sanctions are slapped on a dictatorial regime they hurt the people, not the dictators. It’s a capacity that we have in the West to have a civilised, rational debate amongst ourselves.
They do say that when war begins, the truth dies very quickly. This is not a good foundation for Europeanism. What I find intolerable is the lack of tolerance - that I’ve been told, “butt off, you’re a Westplainer in that you even have an opinion about what should be happening in Eastern Europe”. But in any case, I am perfectly willing to accept an Eastern European progressive who says to me that I’m wrong. It will be good for the people of Eastern Europe, it will be good for Nato, and it will be good for Russia, to minimise tensions to the extent that we can do that. Given that Putin was pushing Russia back towards a re-militarised stance, and Nato and Russia were always going to develop an enmity between them, is it not a good idea to have a neutral zone between the two? Do we really want Russian nuclear weapons and Nato nuclear weapons to be side by side? For me, the neutrality of Eastern Europe is not a second best, it would be first best. Is your argument that without Nato expansion in Eastern Europe we would not be in this position? My point is this: there was an agreement between Gorbachev and George Bush Senior that Gorbachev would let Eastern Europe go its own way, on the condition that Nato would not expand eastward. And Putin, being a KGB strategist, utilised that pent-up frustration of Russians against the West in order to build up his horrid empire.
It was a catastrophe, a humanitarian catastrophe. Don’t forget how in the Nineties, even the reformers - liberals, neoliberals in Russia - were crushed by the West, by the International Monetary Fund, forcing Russia into an awful default in 1998 that caused the life expectancy of men in Russia to drop from 75 to 58. While I’m not claiming to have the monopoly of truth, I do believe that as a European, as a citizen of the world, I have the right to, for instance, comment that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian power was built on a bedrock of animosity between the West and Russia, and that Putin exploited the humiliation of the Russians - at the hands of Nato, at the hands of the International Monetary Fund. Because we do know that mansplaining is something that we men often do. So having gone out on a limb, having condemned Putin, it was a bit surprising to be lambasted by several commentators as “Putin’s useful idiot.” Was the charge against you based on your blaming Nato expansion for the current crisis? The most pertinent criticism that I received was that I was “Westsplaining” - this is a version of “mansplaining” - that I was being condescending in the way that I was telling Eastern Europeans what’s in their interest. And I was in a minority of one opposing it. It was in a Senate meeting of the University of Athens, which was discussing the motion for awarding an honorary doctorate to Putin, who had just become president of Russia.
Who gives a damn about how I feel about my treatment by people on social media? Back in 2001, I labelled Vladimir Putin a war criminal because of the murder of 250,000 people in Grozny, Chechnya. But let’s be clear, my pain is neither here nor there when you have atrocities, murders, a whole country being devastated by Putin’s armies. Have you had experience of being cast as pro-Putin for expressing unease about some of the Western measures against Russia? Immensely, and painfully. But what does he really think about this conflict? Freddie Sayers spoke to him about liberal warmongering, who’s benefitting from the war, and the West’s moral duty to put Ukrainian lives first. Since war broke out in Ukraine, Greek politician and economist Yanis Varoufakis has been accused of being a Putin apologist, a “Westsplainer”, and a conspiracy theorist.
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