The Western commentariat has gone to town with Vladimir Putin’s recent claim at a military hospital in Moscow that the West is Russia’s “enemy.” Unfortunately, that’s not what Putin said, even though that’s how the Kremlin’s official website translated the word he used. Nor is that the only mistranslation produced by the site.
Russia’s leader responded to the following question, as translated by the presidential site: “During a special military operation we are liberating Russian soil. How do you feel about Western countries helping our enemy?”
The translation is inaccurate. In fact, the questioner spoke of “liberating ethnically Russian land” — or russkaya zemlya, and not rossiiskaya zemlya, which means the politically Russian land that encompasses all the nations comprising the Russian Federation.
Unbeknownst to Putin’s interlocutor — a soldier who was obviously coached about the exact wording of the question he would “spontaneously” ask — the implicit claim that only ethnically Russian lands should be “liberated” is explosive and destructive of the Russian Federation. After all, the vast majority of the current Russian state’s lands consists of ethnically non-Russian territories annexed by Moscow in the course of centuries of bloody imperial expansion.
Were Putin to heed his own logic, he’d have to recognize the non-Russian character of Siberia, Central Asia, the Far East, the Caucasus, Belarus, Ukraine, St. Petersburg, the Kuban, Moldova, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, the Baltic states and a good chunk of European Russia and abandon all pretenses to Russian ownership of these lands. Were Putin to do that, the Russian Federation would shrink by some 90 percent.
The next mistranslation is equally important. The second part of the question is not “How do you feel about Western countries helping our enemy?” but “What do you think of the assistance by Western countries to our adversary [protivnik]?” Putin specifically avoids the word for enemy, “vrag.” In contrast, a “protivnik” is your opponent in, among other things, games and sports. A vrag is someone out to destroy you physically.
The importance of this distinction is clear in Putin’s response (in my translation): “The point is not that they are helping our adversary. They [the Western countries] are our adversary. They are solving their own problems with their hands. That’s the nub of the matter. It’s been like this in the course of centuries and, unfortunately, continues today.”
Many commentators claim to see a shift in this remark, from targeting Ukraine as Russia’s adversary to branding the West as such. This move presumably heralds Putin’s willingness and desire to negotiate with the West and leave Ukraine out of the equation. That’s possible, of course, but the language suggests a different, more nuanced interpretation.
Putin states explicitly that Western countries, not the West, have been using Ukraine as a tool of their foreign policy for centuries, effectively claiming that all Ukrainian efforts at national liberation, from the Cossacks of the 17th century to the Zelensky government of today, are nothing but dastardly attempts by nefarious Western forces to undermine Russia.
On the one hand, Putin is saying that Ukrainians have no voice and lack their own preferences: in essence, they’re sheep. On the other hand, Putin is also saying that these sheep-like folk have been fighting for independence for centuries, which, if true — and it is true — suggests that these “Little Russians” may have minds and wills of their own. Can such persistent thorns in Mother Russia’s side really be ignored and kept out of negotiations?
Putin then goes on to say the following (my translation): “Ukraine itself is not an enemy [vrag] for us. But those who want to destroy politically Russian [rossiiskaya] statehood, those who want to achieve, as they say, a strategic defeat of Russia on the battlefield — they are largely in the West, but even so there are different people there. There are people who sympathize with us and who are with us spiritually. But then there are the so-called elites for whom the existence of Russia — in any case, in her present condition, in her present dimensions — is, so they think, unacceptable.”
So, it’s not Ukraine or Western countries who are Russia’s enemies. They’re only opponents. It’s the “so-called elites” who wish to “break up” [razdrobit] Russia who are the true enemies.
Interestingly, Putin is both right and wrong. Most Western countries aren’t at all sure they want Putinite Russia to be defeated and broken up. But it’s not true that Ukrainians are equally ambivalent. They are indeed Putin’s enemies, and by extension Putin’s Russia’s enemies. Putin is also right that there are some “so-called elites,” though hardly a majority, who wish Russia to experience a breakdown and break-up.
What, then, is one to make of Putin’s comments? For starters, his translators are either lousy or inclined to make policy behind their boss’s back. Either way, they should be fired.
More important, for the presidential website to have gotten the language so wrong suggests that something isn’t quite right in Putin’s inner circles — which is exactly what we’d expect from a hyper-centralized dictatorship based on thievery and buck-passing.
Moreover, it’s not at all clear from a correct reading of his comments that Putin thinks of the West as an enemy with whom he should negotiate Ukraine’s fate. Indeed, his comments are, upon closer inspection, nothing new. He’s been berating the West and ridiculing Ukraine for decades.
Which brings us back to Western commentators. Perhaps their misreading of the website’s mistranslation is reflective more of their own desire for a quick end to a genocidal war and less of the Russian dictator’s?
Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”
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