As a rule, on these pages I (Gilbert Doctorow, lead image) do not write critiques or responses to the writings of others, but today will be an exception. A colleague in Germany sent me the link below to a remarkable essay by John Helmer which is too important to ignore. Then one reader of my essays spontaneously asked me to comment on the points Helmer makes in the article in question. I now will do just that.
For those who are unfamiliar with him, John Helmer is an Australian born, Harvard educated journalist who has been living in Moscow since 1989 and who is best known for his web platform Dances with Bears. His long residence in Moscow, his broad contacts with political elites there and his diligence at investigative reporting all mean that Helmer fills his articles like this one with invaluable insider’s talk. However, the question is whether his assembly of the facts at his disposal and his overall interpretation are as good as his skills at bringing to our attention little known connections between state actors. I have my doubts, which I will set out here.
In the given case, Helmer focuses attention on a certain Vladimir Medinsky, the man
most widely known in the West as Putin’s chief negotiator in the March 2022 Russia-Ukraine peace talks in Istanbul that produced a lengthy draft treaty that was initialed by both sides but subsequently was rejected by Zelensky at the urging of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Helmer intimates that Medinsky was working on the side of the oligarchs back in March 2022 for a settlement that would end the conflict with minimal loss to the oligarchs’ interests and at the cost of Russia’s national interests. Moreover, he sees the same likelihood should Medinsky now be reappointed by Putin to lead the next round of peace talks, which appears probable given his recent reappearance at top state meetings relating to the Ukraine war.
Helmer airs the attacks that some high military officers have made on the political leadership of Putin going into peace talks. The suggestion is that Putin has been aligned with the oligarchs in Round One of the peace talks and cannot be trusted now. As for Medinsky, Helmer somewhat gratuitously tells us that he was born in Ukraine. He talks about Medinsky’s dubious merits during his term as Culture Minister which ended in the fall of 2019 when Putin reassigned him to be a presidential adviser. That was his title when, out of nowhere, Medinsky was made chief negotiator.
I take a personal interest in the discussion of Medinsky because he is someone whom I actually met back in the autumn of 2019 when he was still Culture Minister and visited various seminars within the St Petersburg Cultural Forum that Helmer mentions at the start of his essay. Medinsky spent perhaps 20 or 30 minutes with the dozen of us sitting around a seminar table. This was enough time to understand that he was a shallow chap. Subsequently I looked closely at the whole series of Russian history books that were published over Medinsky’s name for use in Russian secondary schools. None of them was impressive from an academic point of view, though they all were strongly patriotic. Indeed, Medinsky’s chief goal as Culture Minister was to restore patriotism to the school curricula. I also became acquainted back then with the allegations over possible plagiarism by Medinsky in his dissertation. These charges eventually were dropped but certainly tarnished his name.
Nonetheless, I must ask how this bears on his role as chief negotiator in the peace talks? Helmer chooses to ignore that the biggest failing of Medinsky as Culture Minister and as author-editor of history books was his overbearing patriotism, or nationalism, if you will.
Mention of Medinsky’s birth and early years in Ukraine is really a false scent if Helmer intends to impune his zeal for defending Russian interests. In Soviet times, Party and military families moved jobs and lived all across the USSR. If you look at the upper echelons of Russia’s political establishment, you will find a great many examples of Russians who grew up in Ukraine and/or come from mixed marriages. The Number Three ranking politician, chairwoman of the upper house of parliament, Valentina Matviyenko, is a case in point.
Would Medinsky have negotiated a treaty with Kiev that betrayed Russia’s state interests? I think that has to be excluded. After all, he did not go into the talks as sole negotiator, only as the lead. At his side there was Leonid Slutsky, who was present in his capacity as Chairman of the Duma Committee for International Affairs. Slutsky was/is the successor to the arch nationalist founder of the LDPR party Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who, we were recently reminded by Russian state television, was saying back in 2014 that Ukraine is not a country but a collection of beggars who should not be given one ruble (this when Putin was offering them $15 billion to keep them on Russia’s side and out of the clutches of the EU). Accordingly, Slutsky’s complicity in a sell-out of Russian interests, of a capitulation to satisfy oligarchs, is unthinkable.
We do not have the original text of the March 2022 draft treaty to inspect. But the very fact that it was not a dozen pages long but well more than a hundred, that it was a couple of inches thick, tells us that the terms governing Ukraine’s future military and state status were very detailed, meaning almost certainly that Russia’s security interests and the welfare of the Russian speakers in what remained of Ukraine would be assured.
Helmer does well to call our attention to the contradictory voices in the Russian civilian and military elites. He also does well to pose questions about Vladimir Putin’s judgment in pursuing a ‘gently, gently’ policy and ignoring the violation of Russia’s red lines by NATO for far too long.
But that last issue would appear to be behind us. The latest definition of Russia’s nuclear doctrine was as tough as tough can be. It seems that the Putin government has turned a corner, something which the longtime critic of Putin’s gentlemanly ways, Paul Craig Roberts, celebrates in his latest web essay.
[*] This reply to my essay of September 27 was published on September 30. Doctorow and I have agreed there remain issues of evidence and interpretation to be discussed, which we will do in a few days’ time.
