Russia And The West.

Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022) passed away this week at the age of 91. He was the last president of the Soviet Union, resigning in 1991. He is considered one of the world's topmost leaders of the 20th century. He led the Soviet Union through a peaceful 'glasnost' and 'perestroika' so that the Cold War could end and the former empire could be dissolved and the new Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) by some of the countries, led by Russia, could be formed. Alas, in the years and decades that followed, the leaders of Russia and the West seem not to have shouldered their tasks as well as Gorbachev and Western leaders that time, evidenced among other things by the now over six-month-old 'Russian War in Ukraine', a war which should better be called 'Russia's and the West's War in Ukraine'. After his resignation, Gorbachev was many times critical of developments at home and also regarding the West's policies towards Russia, and he complained that the US seemed not to give Russia room to develop towards new greatness.

When I last week wrote about the faults of the West in avoiding the Russian War in Ukraine, I underlined that there should have been a much deeper dialogue between the West and Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union. I will write more this today, not directly about Gorbachev, but rather about the fact that there was room for establishing a much better relationship between Russia and the West since the 1990s-which would certainly have been in Gorbachev's spirit, too. The war in Ukraine should have been avoided. I have in earlier articles called it the 'Russian War in Ukraine', which remains true, yet, it is also becoming the 'West's War in Ukraine'.

Russia is obviously directly responsible for the aggression and war, but the West is indirectly responsible, too, since it failed to implement a dialogue-with results. There was plenty of time to dialogue over the recent three decades, during President Boris Yeltsin's quite erratic leadership of Russia from 1991-1999, with collapse of much of the social and economic structures at home, aggression against some former Russian republics, on the one hand, and letting Ukraine go, on the other. There was also opportunity for dialogue during the rule of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev from 2000, not only initially after Putin had taken over, but also later. The West let opportunities pass without taking advantage of them.

Important, too, there was an opportunity for the West to try to...