The poisoning of Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny last week could not have come at a more difficult juncture.
Europe was trying to come to grips with what to do about the “stolen” presidential election in Belarus and the ensuing protests and arrests.
While from a Russian perspective what unfolded in Belarus was pure geopolitics or as Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov put it was about “geopolitics and the fight for the post-Soviet space,” for Europe it was about democracy and civil liberties or rather the violation thereof.
On Monday, doctors at Berlin’s Charite hospital attested that Navalny, who had been arrested 13 times in Russia for organizing protests, was indeed poisoned by an as yet unidentified substance of the family of acetylcholinesterase inhibitors.
This put the German government in a difficult position. On the one hand, it wants to preserve economic and political relations with Russia. German Chancellor Angela Merkel had long been a conduit between the West and Russian President Vladimir Putin. She is getting increasingly exasperated with the Russian leader.
Merkel is still hedging her bets though, which was made clear when she stated that Navalny had been transferred to Berlin for humanitarian reasons and not as a guest of the government.
On the other hand, democracy and the rule of law are the foundation stones of the German state as well as the guiding principles of the EU, and Merkel and German Minister of Foreign Affairs Heiko Maas have demanded an immediate and full investigation.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov called the findings of the Charite’s doctors hasty and made it clear that an investigation was not necessary unless there was unambiguous evidence of a poisoning. Advice from abroad was not welcome.
Christian Democratic Union member of the Bundestag and chair of the parliamentary select committee for foreign affairs, Norbert Roettgen, had much sterner words for the Russian leadership. It was easier for him than for Merkel because he is not weighed down by the governmental responsibility of managing the bilateral relationship.
Russia’s political culture is vastly different from Europe’s with its democratic give and take. Russia and the Soviet Union were never parliamentarian democracies per se and were always run by a strong man or a clique of strong men, be they the tsar, Stalin, the politburo of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, or now Putin.
In recent history there is a long list of political activists, politicians, and journalists who were assassinated or poisoned. Just to name a few, Alexander Litvinenko died in London in 2006 of polonium poisoning, former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned by dioxin in 2004, and physicist and liberal politician Boris Nemtsov and journalist Anna Politkovskaya were shot dead in Moscow. In 2018 former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned by Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury, England.
Skripal survived, but as soon as the involvement of Russian security apparatus was proven, Western nations including the US extradited around 300 diplomats.
This time the reaction has been much quieter. One gets the feeling that the leadership in Germany and the EU feel that they are dancing on the edge of a volcano and want to carefully calibrate before acting.
Europe is like the rest of the world, focused on combatting the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout. In other words, it seems that there is little capacity for big moves on the geopolitical scene.
For sure Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron and President of the European Council Charles Michel made it clear that the solution to the problems in Belarus had to be found in Minsk and not in Moscow or Brussels, and on Tuesday, Belarus opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya addressed the European Parliament from her exile in Lithuania. There are warm words, yet to be identified sanctions, but not much else.
The US is preoccupied with a presidential election of which the outcome is uncertain and bogged down with dealing with the pandemic.
Europe is like the rest of the world, focused on combatting the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout. In other words, it seems that there is little capacity for big moves on the geopolitical scene.
Cornelia Meyer
Europe is trying to find its feet vis-a-vis Russia and the emerging situation in Belarus. The relationship with its most important ally, the US, has changed. Its President Donald Trump is less interested in the transatlantic alliance and does not give the same weight to western Europe as an ally. This in turn has changed geopolitics.
The pandemic has shifted priorities and then there is a whole host of other issues closer to home, such as Brexit, which preoccupy European leaders.
This makes matters regarding Navalny or Belarus more complex and less straightforward. Germany in particular is caught between principle, realpolitik, and the art of the possible.
- Cornelia Meyer is a business consultant, macro-economist, and energy expert. Twitter: @MeyerResources
