From petro-power to pariah state: the cancelling of Putin’s Russia

This week someone posted a bad tweet about how the world was “cancelling” Russia. It was naturally mocked, as attempts to shoehorn everything into the tired “cancel culture” debate often deservedly are.

Still, there’s something to be said for how, in less than a week, Vladimir Putin’s regime, with its mass resource wealth, nuclear arsenal, and not insubstantial cultural capital, was reduced to an international pariah state.

Putin’s friendlessness was made clear yesterday, when the United Nations General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is a symbolic gesture, one which will do little to stop the Russian military advance.

But here’s a telling sign of just how isolated Putin is in the world: just four countries — North Korea, Eritrea, Belarus and Syria — voted with Moscow. Sympathetic countries like India, China and Cuba abstained. Russia’s key allies in Europe, Serbia and Hungary, both voted to condemn.

An emboldened West

Already, it feels like Putin miscalculated both the unity of the Western response, and the fortitude of Ukrainian resistance. While nobody really knows what’s going on in the head of an increasingly paranoid Russian president, many seasoned Russia-watchers were still startled by the invasion, despite all the bluster on the Ukrainian border. 

Two key assumptions underpinning the invasion — that Ukrainians would embrace the invaders with open arms, and that a decrepit, divided West would respond with hand-wringing and platitudes — have not eventuated.

Instead, as US President Joe Biden flagged in his State of the Union address, we’ve seen a reinvigorated Western (or more accurately, international) alliance united against Putin’s invasion. Countries have quickly thrown out the rulebook that guided decades of foreign policy. Germany ditched its cautious postwar pacifism, boosting defence spending and sending troops to neighbouring NATO members, while beginning to sever its huge dependency on Russian gas. 

Neutral Switzerland joined the European Union’s sanctions. Singapore deviated from the rest of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to block Russian finance.

Harsh financial sanctions were always a given. Russian banks were excluded from the SWIFT payments system, and its Central Bank was restricted from using foreign currency reserves. But more jarring has been the way Western capital and its major brands have turned against Russia. Shell and BP are dumping Russian assets. Apple, Nike, Microsoft, General Motors, Disney, Netflix — the list of big companies pulling their products from the Russian market or dramatically changing their relations with the country is swelling.

Western sanctions don’t necessarily precipitate regime change — just look at North Korea, Iran and Cuba. And while their intended targets are the gangster capitalist oligarchs who have propped up Putin’s regime, and whose blood money is drowning Western financial hubs like London, it’s ordinary Russians who are on the coalface.

Soft power shrivels

But whatever the longer-term impact of sanctions — notably Putin was able to withstand them in 2014 — there’s a real sense that Russian money, Russian business, even the whiff of Russian-ness are suddenly toxic and unpalatable.

It’s led to a kind of unprecedented “soft power” boycott of Russia by the world’s cultural and sporting bodies. Russia was booted from Eurovision. The Bolshoi’s residency at the Royal Opera House cancelled. Valery Gergiev, one of the world’s leading orchestral conductors and a friend of Putin, dumped by the Munich Philharmonic. Russians will miss out on Hollywood blockbusters.

At times, the correction has bordered on the absurd. Price comparison site comparethemarket ditched a fictional meerkat form its advertisements, because apparently the meerkat is Russian. An Italian university tried to cancel a course on Dostoevsky. 

More outright hypocrisy has been the response from international sporting bodies. Sochi lost the Formula One Grand Prix (although Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates all hosted in the last season). Days after the Winter Olympics in Beijing, the IOC finally responded to pressure and banned Russia and Belarusian athletes from the Winter Paralympics. For years, the IOC had allowed athletes to compete despite a massive state-sponsored doping program.

Russia hosted the last World Cup. It won’t play in the next one, after FIFA suspended its national team and club sides from all competitions. St Petersburg was stripped of the UEFA Champions League Final. Roman Abramovich, the notorious Putin-friendly owner of Chelsea FC, says he will sell the club.

The footballing isolation will hurt, because sportwashing is so key to Putin’s narrative of new Russian greatness. It’s also the arena where Russia’s pariah-dom will be made most obvious to the most people around the world. 

Then again, it’s where the isolation of Russia starts to feel a little cynical. FIFA is a deeply corrupt organisation that’s all too happy to do image laundering for murderous, dictatorial regimes. The English Premier League decked its socials in blue and yellow, just months after rubber-stamping Saudi Arabia’s takeover of Newcastle United. 

For all its indefensible, cartoonishly evil behaviour at home and abroad, the Saudis have never faced the kind of international backlash Russia is rightly copping. Palestinian activists, whose calls for Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel are often met with opprobrium and discomfort, must be wondering why the West had no qualms taking such quick action on Ukraine.

But Russia is an easy villain here. The invasion is so unjustifiable, Putin’s rationale (de-Nazification???) so absurd that save for a few conspiracy theorists, propagandists, and edgy teens on Q+A, you won’t find any defenders in the West.

While the Cold War is over, Putin is enough of a malevolent, dead-eyed autocrat to reanimate memories of a sinister, threatening Russia. And of course, as Western media have pointed out, Putin’s victims elicit greater sympathy here because they are blonde, blue-eyed, “civilised” Europeans.

All this is to say the reasons the West turned so strongly against Putin are a morally ambiguous thicket of geopolitics, hypocrisy, racism, money and PR-management. But the outcome — Putin’s cancellation, and near universal condemnation of the invasion — is a morally good one.