RZESZOW, Poland — Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attempt to overthrow the Ukrainian government should mark the beginning of the “de-Putinization” of Russia, according to a senior Baltic leader.
“I believe that de-Putinization will first take place first in Ukraine,” Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis told a local public broadcaster in an interview. “This is Ukraine’s greatest gift to the world. The Putin regime is being dismantled there.”
That statement evokes President Joe Biden’s declaration that Putin “cannot remain in power” — a dramatic statement that was quickly walked back by White House officials keen to avoid an escalation or expansion of the war. Landsbergis argued that Western officials should understand the war in Ukraine as the eruption of a more fundamental contest, one that might outlast even Putin’s rule in the Kremlin.
“In Lithuania, we think that as long as there’s this regime, a regime of lies and propaganda, with its institutions and its intelligence services and so on, nothing will change,” he told the Lithuanian Radio and Television interviewer. “As you said: If we replace Putin, who knows if it won’t get worse. This is a systemic evil that has spread like a cancer throughout the country.”
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That assessment, offered last week but aired Wednesday as the heads of state from Poland and the three Baltic nations traveled to Kyiv, corresponds to a Russian effort to recast the invasion of Ukraine as a preemptive strike against the wider West. “Our special military operation is designed to put an end to NATO’s unlimited expansion and to keep the U.S. and other NATO countries from achieving total domination in the world arena,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told Russian media on Monday.
Russian officials have justified the offensive, in part, on the grounds that it was necessary to thwart Ukraine’s aspiration to join NATO. The Ukrainian application has been stalled since 2008 — its frozen status was affirmed at the 2021 NATO summit — but the Russian assault has spurred Sweden and Finland, which shares an 800-mile border with Russia, to begin internal debates that could end with the rapid accession of the Nordic states to the trans-Atlantic alliance.
“Russia is a next-door neighbor … and we see how Russia acts now in Ukraine,” Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin told reporters Wednesday. “And, of course, we have to wonder, what is the best way to secure that this wouldn’t ever happen in Finland? And as I mentioned, the NATO Article 5 assures that if some member countr[ies] are attacked, others will defend, And, of course, the umbrella with nuclear weapons will make it so that we have that kind of security.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ineligibility to invoke that collective defense provision has left Kyiv in the position of pleading for weapons from the United States and European countries, which have been provided but not at the pace or quality that Ukrainian officials desire. The recently discovered massacres of civilians in Bucha, a town outside Kyiv, have prompted some U.S. and European officials to argue for additional military assistance to Ukraine rather than urge Zelensky to press for a ceasefire.
“This war will be won on the battlefield,” European Union High Representative Josep Borrell declared on April 9 after his visit to Kyiv. “Weapon deliveries will be tailored to Ukrainian needs.”
Lavrov’s team cited that remark to try to associate Borrell, a former Spanish politician, with Nazi Germany’s invasion of Russia.
“The world can see that the EU is turning into a militarized and aggressive instrument of foreign expansion,” the Russian Foreign Minister claimed in a Tuesday statement. “It is waging yet another Drive to the East (Drang nach Osten) campaign, in keeping with the centuries-old ‘European values.’ This is how the West is implementing its striving for boundless global domination over those whom it considers to be genetically inferior.”
Such rhetoric has provided an official reinforcement of recent nongovernmental Russian arguments that seek to portray the conflict as a clash of civilizations.
“In fact, we are talking about the rejection of part of the legacy of Peter the Great — a three-hundred-year tradition of positioning Russia not only as a great European power, an integral part of the balance of power on the continent, but also an integral part of the pan-European civilization,” the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy’s Dmitri Trenin wrote in a new essay on the ramifications of the war. “The global world, in which the spread of the Western model has reached insurmountable limits, is increasingly diverging into civilizational platforms, where each civilization has its own idea.”
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Landsbergis, for his part, put the fault not with Russian civilization but with Putin, who came to power just two years after the signing of a landmark agreement between NATO and Russia, and the political system that has formed around him.
“What we have now is a Putinist Russia. If we need to make a historical analogy again: The Germany of 1933, which was taken over by Nazis, was another Germany,” he said. “If we want to replace Putin, then we restrict his scope of action and hope that the dissatisfied elites will overthrow their leader. But if we want systemic change, we need to think in a different way. The country will have to be isolated, and perhaps for a long time, and for us, this would be the real end of this war. It is regime change.”
