I prefer not to reread my articles, especially those that I published a long time ago. I'm afraid I'll find out how naive he was and how badly he wrote. But, curiously, on the few occasions that I do it, I am usually surprised. I am left with the alarming feeling that I wrote better before and – very occasionally – with the pleasant discovery that I hit the nail on the head. Or that the people I cited gave in it.
Such is the case of a report I did six years ago in Latvia, a neighboring country of Russia, a NATO member. I reread it because tomorrow, Monday, I am leaving for another country on the border with Russia, Ukraine, which is not a member of NATO but would like to be. What I understood was that my view of Vladimir Putin's war is based almost entirely on what the Latvians I interviewed told me. Logical: there is no one more qualified to talk about Putin and Russia than the inhabitants of the former colonies of Moscow.
A high percentage of them speak Russian; they keep fresh the memories of what it was like to live under the Russian yoke; they spent the thirty years since the end of the cold war alerting the world, with almost no one paying attention, that the Russian wolf was coming. And now it came.
What I heard over and over again in Latvia in 2017 was that people greatly valued the freedom and prosperity they had won since gaining independence from Russian – or, for that matter, Soviet – imperialism at the end of the 20th century, and that he was pleased with the protection that his decision to join NATO at the beginning of the 21st century had given them.
My main interest on that trip was to understand the view they had in Latvia of Putin's motivation and goals.
Pauls Raudseps, a veteran Latvian journalist, identified four factors for me, all more accurate than ever today: “One, trying to weaken or cause confusion in the West has, since Soviet times, been part of their nature. Two, they need to convince their people that the Baltics are, as their propaganda says, 'fascist' and 'failed', and that the West, in general, is in decline. Three, the old Russian imperial drive. Four, Putin's desire to maintain power in the mafia of the State ”.
I also spoke with Andris Vicks, director of the Latvian National Library, whose mother was one of the 90,000 people from the Baltics sentenced to slavery by Russian gulags in 1949 (another was the mother of Estonia's current Prime Minister, Kaja callas). Vicks added a psychological element to journalist Raudseps' list for me. “They are complicated people, the Russians,” he said. “They are arrogant but with an inferiority complex. It is a dangerous combination in an individual and it is even more so in a country with such destructive power”.
Impossible not to make a connection, I thought, with Donald Trump, whose profile matches, in a child's version, Vicks' diagnosis. “Make America great again,” he says, talking about himself, of course. The director of strategic planning at the Latvian Foreign Ministry, Andris Razanas, told me that Putin's motivating sentiment was to “make Russia great again”.
He elaborated on the question by Zaneta Ozolipa, an academic who advised the Latvian government. "There is a lot of irrationality," she told me. “Today, Russia is smaller in terms of territory than at any time since the time of Peter the Great, 300 years ago. As huge as the country is, Russian pride demands an expansion of the national territory. Added to this is nostalgia for lost greatness, their perception that they won World War II virtually single-handedly and that their sacrifice was never appreciated by the West. Putin uses this collective Russian vision to keep power and money from him, but it is important to understand that it is not about pure cynicism: he believes it too, he shares with his compatriots all these resentments and pride, and vanities and complexes ” .
Latvia's most revered and, by reputation, shrewdest political figure knew Putin personally. Her name is Vaira Vike Freiberga and she was president of her country from 1999 to 2007. Why the permanent Russian hostility? I asked her.
“Mr. Putin is always testing the limits, like a two-year-old,” he replied, flat out. Ok, I replied, but was it merely a childish impulse or was there also a point of realpolitik?
"Both. Side by side with the collective Russian feeling of martyrdom is the feeling of heroism. They need acts of heroism to make up for the ongoing martyrdom. So if the ruble falls, or the state doesn't spend oil and gas money on infrastructure, education and healthcare, and people get poorer while the rulers get richer, what Putin does is resort to the heroic option. . It is an easy tool to gain popularity. Not that they need territory, obviously. They need to feel big!”
That is why former President Freiberga told me that she had welcomed the NATO battalions to her country. "It is the correct response that parents are required to set the limits for the unruly child."
The same belligerence, or more, is seen today in the Baltics towards Putin. Together with Poland, they are the Europeans most staunchly loyal to Ukraine, the least willing to contemplate the possibility of a negotiated agreement that ends with the ceding of Ukrainian territory to Russia.
Irritated six years ago with what she was seeing, such as the soft passivity of Western European countries, Freiberga told me that it was time for the free countries of the world to get serious about Russia, to protect the democratic heritage and cultural richness that Western civilization had brought to the world and to crack down on Russia. She will be pleased, then, with the response of Europe and the United States to the war in Ukraine. At least to date. But she will tremble at the signs that her commitment is waning.
The last question I asked Mrs. Freiberga is especially pertinent today. Why should the rest of the world bother about the fate of countries bordering Russia like Latvia or Ukraine? "Ask not for whom the bell tolls," she replied, quoting a seventeenth-century poet. "They fold for you."
