Putin at Valdai: his peace formula and his congratulations to Trump
Putin's Thursday visit to the Valdai Discussion Club annual gathering in Sochi was the key item in the news programming of Russian state television on that day. The entirety of the speech was broadcast live, shunting aside the regular prime time programming, and after a brief summary of world news,
part of his Q&A with his Sochi audience also was carried live.
That all of this received no immediate media coverage in the United States is not in the least surprising. To be sure, in the past two days excerpts from what he said to the Valdai participants have appeared in mainstream Western media, mostly without citing where he was speaking, to whom and why. Of greater importance, there is good reason to believe that Putin's words on the 7th were followed closely by the team of advisers to Donald Trump, as I will explain in a minute.
For those of you unfamiliar with the Valdai Club, allow me to explain that it takes its name from a lakeside resort approximately midway between Petersburg and Moscow which hosted Soviet political bosses for their summer vacations en famille during the bad old days going back to the Stalin era. As from the '90's it democratized and some of its hotel style rooms, suites and detached villas were rented out on a normal commercial basis to domestic and foreign visitors while others were allocated to civil servants in the Moscow municipal administration for a week or two. In summer swimming, boating and fishing were its homely virtues. In winter it offered excellent cross country skiing trails.
Soon after he assumed the presidency, Vladimir Putin chose this area for his own occasional getaways from work in the Kremlin. A special rail spur was built to make his arrival easier. He made short visits on and off season, except during March and April when the birch trees were in flower and he stayed away because of allergies.
In the fall of 2004, Putin's staff organized the first meeting in this Valdai resort of a mixed group of Russian and specially invited foreign academics, mostly specialists in foreign relations at leading universities. They were assigned to working groups to address key issues in the international arena, and they all assembled to hear a speech delivered by the President and then to engage in an open discussion with him.
This was from the very start a prestigious affair. All travel expenses were covered by the Russian government.
It very quickly became clear that notwithstanding the high standard of hospitality at Valdai, the facilities simply were too small to accommodate the larger number of participants who were invited in later years and the event was moved to Sochi in the far south of Russia where it remains to this day.
In good times and bad, year after year many of the same American and other Western guests came to the yearly Valdai gatherings.
Perversely the organizers gave preference to Russia haters in choosing their invitees from the States. Thus a permanent fixture at the Valdai Club was Professor Angela Stent from Georgetown University who came, accepted the caviar treatment, had her photo taken with Vladimir Vladimirovich, placed it on the desk of her university office upon return home and then proceeded to unleash her usual condemnatory words in her publications about the KGB officer in the Kremlin and his thieving entourage. After the Russian annexation of Crimea in the late spring of 2014 and the sharp deterioration of relations between Russia and the West that followed the shoot-down of MH17 that summer, some of the invitees did not wait to return home to show their teeth to their Valdai hosts. It was in this period that the former US ambassador to Moscow under President Reagan Jack Matlock, who was invited to the Valdai Club on the strength of the professorship he had assumed upon retirement, displayed the bravery (or insolence) of telling Vladimir Putin in the plenary session that he broke out the champagne in late 1991 when he learned that the Soviet Union had collapsed.
I do not mean to suggest that only enemies were regularly invited to Valdai. I know, for example, that Professor Steve Cohen received an invitation but turned it down to avoid any appearance of accepting compensation in kind from Moscow for his pro-Russian writings.
With the onset of Covid, the Russian borders were sealed and the Valdai Club suspended its activities.
When Russia resumed issuance of visas following the waning of Covid, Western sanctions on travel to Russia over the start of the Special Military Operation put an end to participation by nearly all Westerners and Americans in particular.
As their cameras scanned the audience in the plenary session for Putin's talk on Thursday, it was clear that Africans, East Asians and other representatives of 'friendly' countries predominated. I spotted one well known professor of Russian affairs from the University of Kent in England who is cautiously sympathetic to the Russian cause. And a special 17 minute video on youtube released this morning shows the prominent position given to Professor Glenn Diesen from Norway at the gathering: as the rapporteur for his working group on multiculturalism in Eurasia, Diesen had a direct exchange with Putin that I will get to in a minute. I mention Diesen here to make the point that invitees from 'unfriendly countries' now seem to be objective or even friendly observers who may otherwise appear on Al Jazeera or WION and the like, as well as on lesser alternative media in the United States. Perhaps Putin's advisers have put paid to inviting those who are contemptuous of Russia.
********
As I said above, Russian state news promoted the planned address by Putin to the Valdai gathering in Sochi all that day and then broadcast it live.
I have no hesitation in saying that this hype was unjustified. The speech itself was a reiteration for the n-th time of the accusations against the US-led West that Putin set out first at his speech to the Munich Security Conference in February 2007 to which he has subsequently added over the years to the original charges of hegemonism and running roughshod over the national interests of others, Russia first of all, the further charges of practicing neo-colonialism in Africa, in Latin America and elsewhere in the Rest of the World. I was definitely not the only one who found that the argumentation offered nothing new and worthy of our attention. The elements of his Munich speech were called out by one of the participants from South Africa, I believe, when he was given the microphone to put a question to the Russian leader. Indeed, Putin looked ill at ease when he read the speech. Perhaps it was slapped together by one of his assistants.
Happily, there was a lot more to Putin's visit to the Valdai Club than his speech. It was followed by a lengthy session of Q&A, which I missed in the direct broadcast because I was for two hours engaged in my own air time on Judging Freedom and Dialogue Works. It was on one or another of those interviews that I said Putin was one of the few world leaders who had not congratulated Donald Trump on his electoral victory. Little did I know then that an indirect 'congratulation' was made by Putin from the dais of the Valdai Discussion Club in his answer to one of the questioners. Nota bene that the generous words about Trump's bravery that Putin made in his remark on Trump's election are not the same as a direct phone call to Trump such as he would have done in the past, before relations with the USA descended to the level of de facto war. This very significant detail was not mentioned by any of the Western media when they yesterday carried the news that Putin had finally 'congratulated' the winner of the 6 November elections. Also please note that, per Vyacheslav Nikonov on the talk show 'The Great Game' last night, very soon after Putin made his statement at the Valdai event, his Kremlin office got a phone call from advisers to Trump who acknowledged the congratulations and said that Trump was eager to speak to Putin. And who says that nobody of importance in the States watches Russian television! We were further told that the initiative for any telephone conversation or meeting will have to come from the American side.
I freely admit that I have not watched the full Q&A, which seems not yet to have been posted on the internet whereas the speech is there on several youtube channels. However, the Great Game broadcast included two worthy video clips from the Q&A. One is the aforementioned indirect message congratulating Trump (minute 20 following) and the other is about Putin's peace formula (minute 11 following). See
https://www.1tv.ru/shows/big-game/vypuski/bolshaya-igra-chast-2-vypusk-ot-08-11-2024
Nikonov called it a peace formula but what Putin was spelling out in his answer to one questioner is that the four Donbas and Novaya Rossiya oblasts (Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson) that declared their resolve to be independent of Ukraine in the autumn of 2021 and concluded mutual defense treaties with Russia, followed by their conducting referendums on joining the Russian Federation – that these territories would never be given back to Kiev. He said they were historically Russian lands that now were politically reintegrated into Russia. This has to be read as a firm and irreversible answer to those named in the American press today as advisers to Trump who are saying that Zelensky must concede the loss of Crimea, as if the other oblasts were still in play.
Finally I direct attention to the exchange between Professor Glenn Diesen and Vladimir Putin directly following on Diesen's report of the conclusions of his working group. I assume that such one-on-one exchanges took place with each of the working group chairman. It is not clear to me when they occurred - was it before the plenary session at which Putin spoke?
See Professor Glenn Diesen speaking with President Vladimir Putin at Valdai Discussion Club (07.11.2024)
The exchange between Diesen and Putin is interesting not so much for the former's question about whether the kind of moderating influence on relations as we see in BRICS with respect to Eastern and South Asia could also be applied to relations between the Western extreme of Eurasia and Russia. What was absolutely fascinating was Putin's response.(see minute 10 following). He recalled that such a possibility existed at the start of the 1990s and he called attention to a 1993 meeting in St Petersburg between the visiting Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Putin's immediate boss at the time, the city mayor Anatoly Sobchak. Putin was then a deputy mayor responsible for attracting primarily German investors and busineses to the city, and his German language skills, honed during his service in East Germany, were put to use when the outside interpreter was let go and Sobchak asked Putin to do the translating in his discussion with Kohl. Per Putin, he was agape at what Kohl said, namely that for Europe to preserve its position as an independent center of civilization it had to join with Russia. Putin is hinting that Kohl suggested Europe would otherwise be subjugated by the USA which is what is happening now. I urge all who can find the time to listen to this recounting.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024