What would Russia be like without Putin? Results of the Riga Conference – DW – 22.10.2022
On Saturday, October 22, the two-day Riga Conference ends. At this annual event on Western politics and as a result of international security surveillance. On the second day, the conference participants learned about themselves, what Russia would be like without Putin, and how you would meet with her after the war. DW – about the results of the final day of the forum.
“There is a delayed collapse of the USSR”
“The painful race of the empire” – this is how the former professor of the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, and now professor of the Free University in Riga, Sergey Medvedev, announced with Russia at the session “Will Russia Remain Behind the Iron Curtain?”. The historian that the world is witnessing the collapse of not only the Putin, Soviet or Russian empire, but “550-year-old Muscovy – an empire that arose after the Mongol-Tatar yoke.” “After 1991, we wondered why the USSR collapsed without bloodshed,” Medvedev returned. “Now we are faced with the delayed collapse of the USSR in 1991. What did not happen then is happening now.”
Medvedev An invitation with a proposal to take part in the consideration of the obligation unleashed by Putin against Ukraine. “I got bogged down with an existential challenge on a historical scale. This is the same challenge that the “Third Reichs” put before the world, an empire that survived the 20th century.
“We do not want the destruction of Russia”
But what will happen next? How to complicate relations with Russia after the war and after Putin? The conference participants discussed this for two days. So, on the first day of the head of the Munich Security Conference, K.Christoph Heusgen called three conditions for the post-war normalization of relations with Russia – the personal responsibility of the military security, reparations and “de-Putinization”. Pwarned against applying collective photography and e-mail to Russia and its citizensSwedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt. During the second day of the conference Sergei Medvedev offered his own, wider list of processes that should be skipped in Russia. Among the main ones: “de-Putinization”, demilitarization, denuclearization, de-imperialization and others.
Medvedev’s speech caused a sharp discussion and comments from other participants. On the issue of caution in the question of the future of Russia after its likelihood of being dosed by the senior researcher of the European Council on Relations Kadri Laik.
Obviously, this is not so, objected Liik. For the population and the elite, we need to say that the destruction of Russia is not what we are striving for.”
Kadri Liik, according to her, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. After the start of a full-scale war, the researcher is sure that “Putinism” will go away with the current president of the Russian Federation. She drew attention to the “model of Stalin’s death”, after which the struggle for power began in the USSR. “This system will go away and be replaced by something else, not necessarily good for us,” Liik said and suggested that the hyper-personalized system in Russia will be replaced by collective decision-making.
Not only to repel Russian attacks, but also to punish them
In the meantime, Russia, according to Liik, is under the protection of Putin obsessed with Ukraine, Western politicians and experts are thinking about how they are protected from the aggression of their country. First of all, they are concerned about hybrid attacks – cyber attacks on critical infrastructure, disinformation, promotion of the Kremlin’s population.
In the Baltic countries, Russia has long faced problems with hybrid infections, described during the session “Hybridity of Hybrid Threats” by Victoria Ruzinaite, Senior Analyst at the European Center for Combating Hybrid Threats. According to her, for several years now, the national security strategy of the Baltic states has noted a high degree of protection of the information space from hostile foreign research and research on the resistance of citizens to such influence. The success of the work done, according to her statement, was reflected in how calmly the campaign to demolish Soviet monuments is going on in Latvia.
It is time for the West to move from arresting a Russian cyberattack to criminalizing such attacks, said James Appathurai, NATO Deputy Director General for Emerging Security Threats. “This does not mean that the principle of an eye for an eye should work,” he said. – There is a rule about the inadmissibility of cyber attacks on critical infrastructure.
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