The Peace Summit in Switzerland brought a number of strategic long-term issues to the public agenda. The most important of them, of course, is how to get Putin to end the war. It is paradoxical that the summit, which was organized specifically to discuss this very topic in the widest possible circle of world leaders and international organizations, in the sake of maximizing turnout, ended up omitting this very issue and postponing it for later.
Questions related to the military-political strategy and post-war security system of those countries that are ready to publicly recognize the unjust and aggressive nature of the war unleashed by Russia may have been discussed on the sidelines, but they were not included in the final documents.
At the same time, in recent months the Kremlin has been actively engaged in building its own concept of the post-war security concept not only of Europe, but of the world as a whole. While we are still hesitant to convene our Tehran conference, they are already talking Yalta - just in Beijing.
Moscow believes that the West, if not yet exhausted, is running out of steam, that it will not be able to continue the current pace of support for Ukraine for long, and that Kiev has actually depleted its resources and is approaching the winter period of 2024-25 in a state of acute infrastructural crisis caused by the destruction of energy facilities. Putin also assumes that Trump will return to power in the United States at the end of the year, and agrees with the media that says that under his leadership America will come out of the war and force Ukraine to negotiate, trading territories for peace.
In general, the Kremlin has long assumed in its foreign policy planning that the coming winter will be a time of negotiations and reaching some kind of peace agreement. On Moscow's terms, of course. Hardly anyone in Russia believes that they will be exactly as Putin recently announced - that Ukraine must voluntarily hand over to Russia even the territories it now confidently controls. Most likely, this is just a starting negotiating position, a bar raised to the max. The desired outcome for the Kremlin is, as they say, to stick to "the situation on the ground," that is, to turn the current front line into a state border between the Russian Federation and Ukraine. And after that, in fact, to build a new international security system.
Putin is actively working to create nothing more and nothing less than a new global union. In America, it is usually called the "Axis of Evil", some prefer to name it “Axis of Jerks”. The Russian dictator likes to promote the brand of a "multipolar anti-imperialist global South." In reality, of course, this is purely a return to the Cold War. Only in which the roles of the Soviet Union and China are switched.
The leading partner - the core of the alliance - is China, which behaves in a measured manner and is a source of long-term investment and technology for others. And Putin’s Russia is the military-ideological vanguard, which is aggressive and ready for anything up to nuclear war. It is very similar to the way China behaved under Mao (and also enjoyed numerous supporters in radical circles in the Western society, like Putin does today with radical right and left political groups).
From the Kremlin dictator's point of view, the development of such an alliance would provide him personally and Russia as a whole the international weight and respect that he believes he has been improperly deprived of during his years in power. And even without Putin in the throne, neither neoliberal technocrat Mishustin, nor hawkish Patrushev nor weird Medvedev would be able to move Russia away from this track.
It would be short-sighted to see this alliance only as a China-North Korea-Iran-Russia military axis. The ambitions of Putin, whom the Chinese so nicely allow to be their cat’s paw, are much bigger. They are even bigger than China's version of the alliance, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The Kremlin is clearly aiming for a global project, revitalizing the pro-Soviet bloc in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and gathering it now around the umbrella of the BRICS alliance, which is now expanding rapidly to include some new countries in Africa and Latin America. According to Putin's idea, as if read from Orwell, BRICS and the Euro-Atlantic alliance are the two global poles dividing the world.
There is no need to go far. It is enough to look at the map of countries that signed the final communiqué of the Peace Summit (below in blue), those that came but did not sign (magenta) and those that refused to participate (gray). Here it comes, the new division of the world, invented and actively implemented by the Kremlin:
It can be said that if Putin manages to insist on his position in Ukraine and force it to sign some new version of the Minsk agreements in the winter of 2025, it will be a serious bid for such a concept to dominate our planet.
The vision of the Free Russia’s Congress of People's Deputies is, of course, the opposite. We do not believe that the future of the world is a confrontation, a new Cold War with the Euro-Asian Union fighting against the Atlantic bloc. We do not believe that the future is a conflict between the golden billion and the rest of humanity, encouraged and managed by the Kremlin. The future of the planet is not short-lived "pragmatic" self-serving deals built on the rule of force. It is not a series of clashes and bargains leading to redistribution of spheres of influence and resources; not an endless zero-sum game.
The future of the planet is certainly multipolar. We cannot allow the emergence of any one new world hegemon, no matter what its views, location or dominant religion. The future of the planet is in distributed global value-based alliances. Built around common ethics (which are different in different parts of the Earth), around commonalities in culture, ways of life. And the coexistence of these unions should give healthy competition and no less healthy cooperation.
Let us apply this approach to modern Europe. The EU is the first example of such a global union of countries based on a common ethics. The continent of Europe still rotates around principles of the Bible, revisited during the Reformation and reassessed during the Renaissance. It was at that time that a common view of good and evil, fair labor, the rule of law, views on the state and social structure, and a proper way of life were crystallized. These views today unite the peoples inhabiting the European continent, the Americas (both North and South), as well as (at least) the Slavic peoples in the post-Soviet space. For all of them, being in a single supranational space - the Northern Union - is natural, all the more noticeable against the background of the failure of integration into European societies of many migrants from the global South.
The creation and development of such a commonwealth of peoples into a military-political, economic, educational and cultural union could breathe new life into the civilization of the global West and ensure its competitiveness in the 21st century, which, according to the predictions of many economists, will be a time of rapid growth of both the economic and demographic potential of the peoples of the global South, to which Moscow, which is currently trying to add itself to, despite the military, demographic and moral catastrophe it is suffering.
When I use the word "competitiveness", I am naturally not talking about confrontation, but about the possibility of building a healthy and mutually beneficial global division of labor. All that needs to be done to achieve this is to destroy the new version of fascism that originated in Moscow.
Crisis, as the East knows well, is also an opportunity. We are now living in years of great challenges. Once again, as in the middle of the 20th century, people are dying en masse in Europe. But it is also an occasion to wake up from the slumber into which the years of post-war prosperity have plunged the continent, and to start building a new security architecture and new balances of power in the world.
We must only realize that we will not achieve victory by simply liberating Ukrainian territory. Even more so, we will not achieve victory if we agree to the shameful peace now being offered to us from Moscow. Just as agreements with Hitler did not work during the 1930-40s, agreements with Putin are impossible now. We must design the future and set ourselves the common goal of creating a new security architecture, and arrive at it by winning this war, no matter what it costs us.
We, the Congress of People's Deputies, the shadow parliament of Russia, are ready to participate in the construction of this architecture right now, not waiting for Putinism to fall and not wanting to allow Russia to plunge into dangerous chaos for all its neighbors. We are making our bid to join the circle of builders of the future now - making the construction process safer and the outcome more predictable than if we try to achieve it without Russians.