It is hard for European allies to know which is worse, hearing their sacrifice in the US-led war in Afghanistan mocked by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, seeing his State Department counterpart Marco Rubio dissembling about the interruption to Starlink service in Ukraine, or watching the commander-in-chief of the free world blithely end sanctions on Russia.
One option is to sit tight and hope that next month’s mid-terms will bring deliverance.
Mid-term blues?
It is possible, perhaps, that a huge political defeat for Donald Trump will change American foreign policy, though those who sincerely hanker for the eras of Joe Biden and Barack Obama may need to adjust their rose-tinted filters.
More likely is that constitutional tussles will make the US even more distracted and unpredictable. Who really believes that a midnight phone call alerting the president to a surprise Russian incursion into Nato territory will gain a firmer response if the Democrats control Congress?
It is also tempting simply to wallow in outrage.
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A lethal plume of toxic smoke was blowing towards us from a blaze at a battery manufacturing plant in Kaliningrad.
Troops in the Russian exclave had been ordered to help put the fire out: untrained and under-equipped, they mutinied. Terrified civilians were thronging the borders.
The Kremlin, oblivious to the unfolding humanitarian and environmental catastrophe, blamed the West for sabotage and incitement, and demanded a transit corridor across Lithuania.
The crisis scenarios were hypothetical; the aim was to explore the dilemmas and trade-offs they created. (You are the Lithuanian government. Do you let the mutineers in? Or leave them to be massacred?)
The games-master provided regular “injects” – new developments – such as ill-written social media posts from US president Donald Trump. He blamed the authorities in “Lithvastonia” for having started the fire in “Kaliningradia”.
An amusing parody, we thought. A few hours later, the real US president published news of his deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin on sanctions-busting diesel imports, then blamed Ukraine for being invaded.
Not so amusing, especially for our Ukrainian participant, a senior military commander there.
As we were leaving (us to safety, him to danger), news broke that Russia is stepping up its assassination attempts in Europe, targeting defence industry bosses (and perhaps Polish politicians). Our scenarios seemed tame in comparison.
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Russia will use nuclear weapons if Nato tries to blockade Kaliningrad. That was the blunt warning from the Kremlin last week. In truth, this is an empty threat against an invented danger. Russia’s nuclear bluff is worn out from overuse, and Nato has no such intention.
But the outburst does signal something useful: Russia’s sensitivity about Kaliningrad.
The northern half of the former German territory of East Prussia is the Kremlin’s last great trophy from the Soviet victory over Hitler in 1945.
Like many trophies, it is less impressive on close inspection. Kaliningrad is an artificial creation, from its name (after the war criminal Mikhail Kalinin) to its population (imported after ethnic cleansing) and its southern border (a crude straight line, of the kind European colonists inflicted on African countries).
Now Moscow’s grip on this exclave — an island of Russian territory sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania — is increasingly fragile. Not because anyone will sever the precarious air, sea, and land routes that keep it supplied, but because of Russia’s all-too-real, corrupt, authoritarian, and incompetent system of government.
The weakness of the Russian system, aggravated by the cost of the disastrous war in Ukraine, makes holding on to Kaliningrad unsustainable: economically, socially, demographically, and politically.
Outside commentary mostly misses this, depicting Kaliningrad as a fortress from which Russia can menace its neighbours.
It is more realistic to see it the other way round, as Russia’s greatest strategic vulnerability: an Achilles’ heel.
The name poses an implicit question: do you really believe that Kaliningrad will still be under Moscow’s rule by the middle of the century? It looks increasingly unlikely.
BISC will this week convene 20 experts for crisis simulations examining how Kremlin rule might unravel, and how neighbouring countries could, would, and should react.
The causes are imaginary, for now. But an environmental disaster, a breakdown in fuel supplies, or a public-health emergency, such as the one now unfolding in Siberia, are all entirely possible in Russia’s current ramshackle state. Decision-makers will have to react to the resulting refugee flows, pollution, and humanitarian needs.
We do not yet know the BISC study’s outcome: as with military ‘war games’, the aim of these exercises is to test how different scenarios play out. We hope the conclusions will be useful for those who deal with these dilemmas in real life.
Next up will be a book, Fragile Fortress, to be published later this year. Edited by the British Russia-watcher Christopher Peters, and written by local and foreign experts, it explores topics including memory politics, economic weaknesses, internal repression, and the state of public opinion. The main message: Kaliningrad survives only thanks to economic subsidy and political support from Moscow.
These efforts could hardly be more topical.
While the Kremlin blusters about a threat from Nato, social media scare stories depict supposed Russian invasion plans to be launched from Kaliningrad, with maps showing thick red arrows piercing the Suwałki Gap, a strategic stretch of land which links Poland and Lithuania.
But as the book’s military chapter shows, such an attack is impossible in current (or likely) conditions. Russia has almost no ground forces left in Kaliningrad: they have all gone to Ukraine. Nor does the Russian air force there have the kind of airfields and hangars needed for a real war.
Nato, especially since Sweden and Finland joined the alliance, is overwhelmingly dominant in land, sea, and air in the region: a point underlined by its recent surveillance exercises in the region.
In short, the nuclear bluster is irrelevant. Nobody is menacing Kaliningrad from the outside. And the real question is when and how, but not if, the Kremlin will lose it in the end.
The new biopic about the wartime leadership of general Charles de Gaulle is a must-watch. The two-part epic depicts the transformation of France’s fortunes from defeat and collaboration to victory and sovereignty, exemplified by de Gaulle.
He arrives in London with nothing but moral authority and self-belief, and — if this is a plot spoiler I apologise — returns home in triumph as his country’s leader and liberator, albeit with a little help from the British, Americans, and others.
The film, a box-office record-breaker in France, has many virtues, chiefly the impeccable acting of Simon Abkarian in the title role, and Simon Russell Beale as Churchill (speaking admirably understandable, if accented, French). But other aspects of the story hit me the hardest.
One was the all-too-topical depiction of the United States: vital for victory, yet misguided, sometimes even perfidious. In the cartoonish, goodies-and-baddies version of wartime history, few remember that US president Franklin Roosevelt did not back de Gaulle and his “Free French”.
Following the fall of France in 1940, the administration in Washington established full diplomatic relations with the collaborationist Vichy regime, regarding de Gaulle as an authoritarian pretender, and moreover militarily insignificant. Later, with the Nazis in retreat, the US planned to divide up post-war France and administer most of it as a colony: the place was too important to be run by the French.
The film simplifies the more complicated real-life story (de Gaulle made mistakes too), but it depicts the outlines vividly and accurately: a much-needed revision. It also touches on the shameful treatment, at US insistence, of French African soldiers. Their presence offended entrenched principles of racial segregation. These warriors were banned from the Paris liberation parade, also at American behest, for fear of tainting the newsreel pictures. This episode is not shown in the film.
Other untold stories lie further east, with equally poignant echoes today. I watched the film with a Czech friend: its thrilling, joyous denouement, with the uprising in Paris, and the arrival of the longed-for liberators, contrasts painfully with the events in her capital city in May 1945. There was an uprising in Prague too, but the Americans (only 80km away) let the Soviets march in. Warsaw, destroyed in the 1944 uprising, fared even worse.
Further off-stage are the tragic, heroic events in Tallinn in that year, when Otto Tief’s government briefly tried to restore Estonia’s independence as the Germans fled. Like the Latvian Central Council under Pauls Kalniņš, it was savagely ended by Soviet occupation.
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