Moscow’s failure to change after the end of the Cold War made the continuation of centuries of expansionism inevitable, Turner and Landsbergis said at an awards dinner in Washington.
Turner, the Republican leader of the House Intelligence Committee and a champion of Ukraine, said he’s often asked how the West “lost” Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union and said it was because of a fundamental misunderstanding.
“If you think back to that moment where the Berlin Wall was falling down, the Soviet Union did not take down that wall, they merely didn’t shoot the people who were doing so,” he said at the September 26 event hosted by the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) “That’s a pretty big distinction, because we made the mistake of assuming that the emerging Russia was different from the Soviet Union, and they had not made that journey.”
That mistake made the West vulnerable to the rise of Putin and the reassertion of Russia’s imperial ambitions, he said.
He also said the atrocities carried out during the Balkan wars by Russia’s Serbian allies pre-figured Russia’s indiscriminate killing of civilians in the Ukraine war.
“Think back to Bosnia and the travesty of Srebrenica, it is a small dotted line between this, the massacre at Srebrenica, and what has occurred at Mariupol,” Turner said. “What we’re standing against is the same level of evil, which is why we have to all be so cautious. It is a small stone’s throw to the use of a nuclear weapon on innocent people.”
Landsbergis, Lithuania’s Foreign Minister, has long spoken out for Ukraine on the international stage, and like Turner was accepting CEPA’s Transatlantic Leadership Award, said his country is all too aware of Russia’s potential for brutality and its imperial ambitions.
“We’ve been here before. This is a deja vu moment that has happened in 2008, that has happened in 2014, that has happened in 2022 and if not handled correctly, this will happen again,” he said. “This is the same Putin, with same ambition, doing exactly the same thing that he’s done in the past, and he’s going to continue.”
He said the Baltic states, who faced the full extent of Russian repression when they were occupied by the Soviet Union, have often struggled to convince their allies and post-colonial nations around the world of the threat.
“The notion is that the Russians are somehow different, that Russia was not part of the colonial establishment of the 19th century. It was, it was the only one that didn’t break [up],” he said. “The Soviet Union inherited the same mentality, and unfortunately, the new re-emerged Russia inherited the same thing, and those who broke free felt it.”
That was the reason Lithuanians would not trust Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said, despite attempts by their Western allies to convince them Moscow had changed.
“The only hope is that this time we do understand it, and we have the ability to stop it once and for all,” he said. Then “countries who surround Russia would start to feel safe.”
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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