Russia: Wolfgang Eichwede about Putin and what drives him

I am convinced that today we are turning a new page in the history of our bilateral relations.

And in doing so, we are making our joint contribution to building the European house.

Was that a bluff by Vladimir Putin at the time?

Or did he actually still intend to build a European house, a common one, as he called it?

I don't think that's what he intended.

He had considered it advantageous to himself at the time, so to speak.

You have to see that right from the start Putin was of a nature that on the one hand built up his power consistently, extraordinarily consistently and on the other hand saw in these early years that he needed the West.

And because he wanted to use him, he had to need him, he also had the ability to strike the notes that many of our politicians responded to with pleasure.

That is very interesting.

You actually got to know him personally very early on, in the mid-1990s, when Putin was still Deputy Mayor of Saint Petersburg, then for another reason in 2000, when he was freshly appointed President of Russia.

Take us with you to this time.

How did you experience him back then?

At the end of April 2000 I just had the good fortune and the opportunity to bring back to Russia a piece from the Amber Room, that famous Amber Room that was stolen by the Germans during the war.

For this reason he came to the tsar's palace in St. Petersburg and was very cheerful.

On the one hand.

On the other hand, in everything he said, he was as quick as he was cold.

I often asked myself then, and since then I have asked myself again and again, like our politicians, who don't think as quickly as he does, how they can deal with him in a conversation and be up to him.

What does that mean?

Cold?

Impenetrable.

They speak, they look, he also looks at you when they talk to each other, but at the same time they know that they cannot look into him.

I don't believe,

So I agree with Wolfgang.

I think that he, that there are certain traits in Putin that have not changed since the early 2000s, since the 1990s.

And I still think that he has undergone a development.

I mean, if you look at the speech he gave in the German Bundestag, that was in 2001, when Russia, then he really had a great interest in more contact with the West, economically and politically.

That was before the first revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine.

And from my point of view, that was a very big turning point in Russian politics.

For Putin, it was always about domination, it was always about controlling the Russian state and about domination.

And the moment he sees his rule in danger, he resorts to ruthless means.

And we have.

It's ultimately a development.

I would say no later than the middle of 2000 years after the Rose Revolution in Georgia, especially the Orange Revolution.

War as an Answer to Domestic...

War...

…conflicts.

Putin has been at war since his first day in office.

War was waged by Putin, starting in 1999. That's something.

We always look at this speech in the Bundestag.

And it is often forgotten that Putin entered the Kremlin as president on the waves of war.

In your opinion, are there forces that drive Vladimir Putin, or does he act completely independently of others?

I think he drives himself. When the Ukraine, the people close to Russia in many phases of Russian history, organized the Maidan, there was a danger for him that this Maidan could spread to Russia.

I was in Moscow at the time, and I demonstrated a lot with my friends in 2014 against the occupation of Crimea.

It could be shouted on the streets: "We want a Russia without Putin".

That could be called without the police intervening.

But as soon as they carried a sign "Maidan", the police attacked and that's what happened.

What we have in Russia today is a vertical of power that has really been taken to the extreme, with Vladimir Putin at the top.

All other political institutions, political forces, economic forces are subordinate to this power vertical and the power of this personalized power of Vladimir Putin.

And what we have seen even more intensely in the last three years finally started in 2020 with the pandemic and, from my point of view, this is the key event in 2020, the democracy movement in Belarus.

We talked about Georgia, about Ukraine, 2004, 2014.

Bloodily crushed, but visible.

Crushed in blood with the support of Moscow.

I was living in Russia at the time, during this phase, and it was incredible for me to see what a state of shock this democracy movement triggered in Moscow.

And indeed it was the case that for a few days after the presidential election and these very obvious falsifications and then the start of these mass protests in Belarus, complete silence reigned in Moscow.

And then the Kremlin decided to stand behind Lukashenko and ultimately enabled the brutal crackdown and suppression of this pro-democracy movement.

And the earthquake that triggered it again accelerated these autocratic tendencies in Russia.

And from February 24 last year, with the introduction of wartime censorship,

Mr. Eichwede, do you believe in a Russia that you like very much without Vladimir Putin in the foreseeable future?

This is the crucial constriction.

In perspective, once again I have experienced so much Russia, this Russia will change too.

And this too has a chance to change.

But that will take a very, very long time.

And we will have to brace ourselves for a long period of confrontation here from the western side, a very long one.

I don't think it will pay off in one, two or three years.

And that's the problem I have with many discussions with colleagues or friends here in Germany who shout "peace, peace, no weapons".

Even those who do not supply weapons are guilty because they deny those who are being raped the opportunity to defend themselves.

We need to know that if this Putinian regime wins, or even wins in part,