r/CredibleDefense • u/Haha-Hehe-Lolo • 12h ago
Cynicism Without Substance. Why Vladimir Putin’s History Lectures Cannot Be Answered With Pragmatic Diplomacy
Time and time again, people insist that the collective West (NATO, Europe, the United States) simply refuses to take "Russian security concerns" seriously. That "we should abandon all that idealistic, moralistic nonsense and just engage in good old-fashioned, pragmatic diplomacy." Something we saw during the Cold War, and even before that.
A few users were making that very argument in today's thread.
Well. Today, Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and Finland’s President Alexander Stubb called Russia's dictator, breaking with the current European norms and earning the ire of their fellow leaders, from Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
https://www.ft.com/content/a384acd1-c90c-4b71-bf7d-6c6e00bf9822?syn-25a6b1a6=1
What did they achieve?
An hour-long lecture about medieval Slavic history.
Vladimir Putin used most of his call with the leaders of Finland and Norway to lecture them about medieval Slavic history, underscoring the difficulties Europe faces in asserting itself in upcoming peace talks with Russia.
Tuesday’s call with President Alexander Stubb of Finland and Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre was the first time Russia’s leader had spoken to any of Ukraine’s European allies since July last year when he held a call with French President Emmanuel Macron.
Originally scheduled for less than half an hour, the call ran on for 90 minutes, Stubb told Finnish media. But instead of discussing crucial issues about how to end the war, Putin subjected the Nordic leaders to a lengthy rant about what the Kremlin called the “initial reasons for the conflict”, said three people familiar with the conversation.
The prospect of an immediate ceasefire, Ukraine’s main demand, was barely discussed, the people added. The Nordic leaders decided not to interrupt Putin’s historical asides in an effort to see how serious he was about dialogue with Europe, one of them said.
Putin’s historical fixations have been a core driver of the invasion, which he ordered in February of 2022, a few days after he released an hour-long televised tirade. In August last year, he went off on a similarly lengthy tangent about medieval Slavic rulers during a failed summit with US President Donald Trump.
Last Thursday, Putin cited “the latest genetic research” which he claimed showed that “it’s one people, Russians and Ukrainians [ . . . ] That’s how the history of historical Russia happened, those are today’s realities.”
It happens again and again. From Obama to Macron, to Tucker Carlson, to Trump, and now to Stubb.
People see not Putin as he actually is, but a phantom of their own imagination. A projection of their expectations and desires. They see the Putin they want to see, rather than the one who actually exists.
And time and again, they are proven wrong.
For this reason, I'd like to share an article by Alexander Baunov, a former diplomat and senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, as he explores this question.
http s://carnegieendowment.org/ru /russia-eurasia/politika/2026/08/russia-private-diplomacy-strategy
Cynicism Without Substance: Why the Closed-Door Meeting With the CIA Director Was Pointless
History and common sense suggest that behind-the-scenes diplomacy can be more effective than public debate of positions.
In practice, however, Moscow has long done at every level precisely what it accuses others of doing: blurring the distinction between public and private rhetoric.
When a war has reached a stalemate and the sides are ruthless toward one another in public rhetoric, "diplomacy behind closed doors" can seem like the only hope: cynical at times, but effective. This is precisely the kind of diplomacy the Kremlin has always championed. It has always contrasted diplomacy based on trade-offs with fine but futile talk of principles, suggesting that it is ready to act accordingly as soon as the West embraces Russia’s pragmatic approach. That is how Russia wants to be seen.
...
Moscow complains so frequently about its Western counterparts’ hypocrisy that it creates the impression of being perpetually ready for a cynical, substantive conversation. After all, Russian spokespeople can be remarkably frank even in public. All that remains is for the West to agree to the requisite level of cynicism, and the Russians will open up and finally explain what they really want and what they are actually prepared to accept.
In reality, the two sides have long since not merely drawn level but switched roles. The United States has a thoroughly cynical president who outdoes even Putin in this respect, opening up new horizons of pragmatism for Europeans as well. Meanwhile, even in confidential settings, the Russian side continues to speak in the clichés of its own propaganda. Neither the secrecy of a visit nor a cool, businesslike manner has been enough for some time to draw Russia into a substantive conversation - one that, in this case, might bring the end of the war in Ukraine closer.
Without Slogans or Substance
Moscow’s constant complaints about the ideological nature of Western diplomacy seem to have defined, by contrast, its own negotiating credo: ruthless pragmatism and cold-blooded realism, without sentimentality.
Russia’s long-serving foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, articulated it once again after his conversation with British Prime Minister Liz Truss on February 10, 2022, when she was trying to prevent the launch of the special military operation. Lavrov said that he had no desire to participate “in diplomatic negotiations that could just as well be broadcast live,” in which Russia had heard “nothing secret, nothing confidential, nothing shared in confidence, beyond what is being said from the lofty podiums in London.”
The long war has done nothing to alter Russia’s negotiating doctrine. In an interview on Russian television in February 2026, Lavrov again complained that European leaders called him, asked that the conversations be kept secret, and even “turn up here and make contact clandestinely,” only to say exactly what they said in public: “The same appeals: let’s bring this to an end.” An irritated Lavrov called this “pathetic diplomacy.”
This was also the point of Putin’s Munich speech, which once stunned Western audiences with its almost indecent bluntness: “The format of this conference allows me to dispense with ‘excessive politeness’ and the need to speak in roundabout, pleasant but empty diplomatic clichés, and to say what I really think.”
Yet a major question remains: does the Russian side actually practice the cold-blooded pragmatism it tirelessly proclaims? And is “going beyond diplomatic niceties” enough to achieve it? Since 2022, Putin, Lavrov and his deputies, Dmitry Medvedev, and Nikolai Patrushev have abandoned not only diplomacy but the most basic manners in virtually every setting. They have long since stopped closing the door behind them in their verbal lavatory. Yet we have seen no results from this frankness.
Frankness is needed in substance as well as form. And Russia’s negotiating cynicism has obvious substance problems. All too often, the Kremlin has nothing substantive to say.
In international diplomacy, reciting a century’s worth of grievances, displaying medieval maps, delivering history lectures, and invoking the conduct of rulers from the distant past elicit ordinary human bewilderment, rather than frankness in return. Nor does boldly denying basic facts to someone’s face count as candor, much as Russian interlocutors enjoy doing it: now that we are alone, admit that you have no fair elections, free press, or independent judiciary; that Ukraine is under your external control; and that Europe always wanted to rearm and was merely looking for a pretext.
In Russia, people are convinced that the West, like Russia itself, has a second face behind closed doors and speaks a different language there. The fact that Westerners are hiding this other face and language somewhere from the Russians is taken as proof of their hypocrisy, their desire to “deceive and trick.” Yet Western interlocutors increasingly discover that Russia has no second language beyond that of propaganda. In negotiations, Russia has long been doing precisely what it accuses the West of doing: speaking in slogans.
In 2009, before his first meeting with Putin, advisers recommended that U.S. President Barack Obama let his counterpart speak first. They soon regretted it. William Burns, then deputy secretary of state, recalls that, in response to a brief opening question, Putin spent fifty minutes setting out his grievances against the West over the previous quarter-century, even though the entire meeting was scheduled to last an hour. Putin was prime minister at the time.
The annexation of Crimea and the hybrid invasion of the Donbas in 2014 might have seemed to create ample scope for frank, secret diplomacy. In reality, however, the quality of Russia’s negotiations only deteriorated. History lectures and complaints about the West’s conduct, which had supposedly forced Russia to overstep its bounds, were now compounded by an inability to agree on basic facts. It was during this period that Putin spoke of shops where any military uniform could be bought, and Obama retorted, “Vladimir, we’re not blind.”
Preparations for a new war in late 2021 and early 2022 only reinforced this trend. John Sullivan, then the U.S. ambassador to Russia, came away from numerous meetings with the Russian side with the impression that “the Russians simply read from a piece of paper; it was almost impossible to draw them into a substantive discussion.”
French President Emmanuel Macron encountered the same thing during a five-hour confidential conversation with Putin on the eve of the Russian invasion. The Kremlin leader could not be steered away from history lectures and back to the issue at hand: the looming war and the attempt to prevent it.
By all appearances, Putin had no desire to return to that subject. He was merely trying to persuade his counterparts to put themselves in his shoes and accept what he intended to do anyway. Behind diplomacy’s closed doors, Putin brought his own picture of the past and present, rather than cold pragmatism, a picture strikingly at odds with both his counterparts’ understanding and the facts.
Whether the Doors Are Open or Closed
Following their boss’s lead, his subordinates began bringing the same thing to confidential meetings. Western diplomats who worked in Moscow after 2022 told me, with surprise, that a private conversation with pro-government Russian experts, or those who had adopted pro-war positions, had become indistinguishable from watching federal TV channels. People who had once been capable of reasoning now simply repeated the official position, word by word.
Russian diplomats and establishment experts were not the only ones who stopped looking for common ground and began speaking the language of propaganda. Russia’s intelligence services followed behind them, if they were not already out in front. Direct contacts between their representatives in Russia and the United States continued even after the full-scale war began.
For example, William Burns, by then CIA director, met Foreign Intelligence Service chief Sergei Naryshkin in Ankara in November 2022 to warn against nuclear escalation. The message got through, but otherwise, in Burns’s assessment, the meeting was fairly dispiriting: Naryshkin was unyielding, self-assured, and arrogant, boasting that Russia would simply outlast Ukraine and the West.
The Foreign Intelligence Service’s press releases have long surpassed professional propaganda in both their propagandistic fervor and their unrestrained language. What would once have been regarded as glaring incompetence is probably now worn with pride as a mark of exceptional professionalism. After all, if Western partners are constantly plotting deception, the professional is the one who deceives first.
The meeting in Anchorage initially slowed this process. Putin apparently did believe that Donald Trump was willing and able to force Ukraine and his allies to accept Moscow’s terms. When Trump would not or could not do so, Russian spokespeople quickly reverted to their familiar posture of wounded indignation. They simply added to their list of grievances against the West the deception in Anchorage, where everything had supposedly been agreed, only for those agreements to go unfulfilled.
Historical experience and common sense suggest that behind-the-scenes diplomacy can be more productive than public debate of positions. These hopes are reinforced by Russia’s decades-long insistence on the benefits of candid, closed-door discussions. In practice, however, Moscow has long done at every level precisely what it accuses others of doing: blurring the distinction between public and private rhetoric.
And while results can sometimes be achieved on specific issues, such as conveying warnings or exchanging prisoners, confidential negotiations are unlikely to shift Putin on the central question of peace, or even to clarify what he intends to do and what he is prepared to accept.