The report reflects on the current state and prospects of Russia’s relations with the Western world against the backdrop of the Russo—Ukrainian war and persistence of Putin’s dictatorship and, taking the experience of integration processes in the second half of the 20th century into account, propose to assess the possibility of the Russian Federation’s transformation through development and promulgation on behalf of the European Union (EU) of a program for post-Putin Russia’s integration into modern European institutions.
The authors analyze the reasons behind Russia’s failed attempts to follow the European development model in the 1980s and 1990s, concluding that neither the Russian authorities nor the Western governments were ready for the new Russia’s real integration into Euro-Atlantic structures, which eventually led to mutual alienation used by reactionary forces in Russia to revive the authoritarian system.
The paper notes that under the circumstances, Russia’s military defeat does not seem a likely scenario and hence the only means of undermining Putin’s regime is to offer the Russian public an alternative to the militarization, impoverishment and disenfranchisement that are becoming the regime’s main features. Under these conditions, an important element of Putin’s strategy to retain power is to emphasize the West’s hostility towards Russia. In order to neutralize this factor, a program of accelerated integration of the Russian Federation into the EU — in the event of the regime’s change with war criminals punished, peace with Ukraine achieved, and the damage done to it repaired — could be developed in cooperation with other European countries.
The researchers’ approach stands out as they assess the existing problems not from the value-based perspective but in an exclusively rational way in order to seek and identify possible benefits for both sides in terms of security, economic cooperation, and formation of a common legal, social, and political space. The authors assume that the consolidation of Greater Europe, considering the declining relative weight of the Eurocentric world, seems to be the only effective option for preserving its role and significance in the 21st century. The report argues that Russia’s policy in the 2020s presents Europe with a challenge similar to that of fascist Germany and Italy in the 1930s — and an adequate response may be to incorporate it into a unified Europe, as was done in the 1950s to the perpetrators of WW2.
The authors believe that the most important difference between the current situation and the previous one is the possibility of Russia’s peaceful transition to a just democratic regime if a significant part of Russian society and Russian elites perceive the relevant EU proposals as a real opportunity for change, which as of now seems unrealistic to be achieved by progressive forces inside Russia without external support.
