Russian Revenge and Putin’s Campaign Against the West
In 2022, Russia’s conduct changed abruptly. As historian Sergey Radchenko explained, “Whereas previously, special operations supported foreign policy, today special operations are foreign policy.” Radchenko added that Russia’s leader had seemingly determined that his country no longer had a stake in preserving anything of the postwar order. Hannah Notte’s “We Shall Outlast Them” offers a valuable overview for both experts and generalists seeking to understand what this new Russian foreign policy looks like on the ground and how it affects the lives of people across the globe.
Based in Berlin, Notte directs the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program for the James Martin Center and is also affiliated with the Kennan Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. She has published widely on Russian foreign policy issues. For this book, Notte’s research takes the reader to several countries in Africa, the South Caucasus, Kazakhstan, and Europe; in each region, she seeks to understand what Russia’s foreign policy objectives are now and how they are being pursued. The book’s most memorable scenes recount Notte’s discussions with locals whose occupations involve supporting, reacting to, or countering Russia’s designs: journalists, foreign diplomats, activists from nongovernmental organizations, and military personnel. Notte has also maintained contact with some of Russia’s top foreign policy thinkers, who provide context and nuance to the Kremlin’s talking points.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 hovers over every encounter, with Notte seeking to understand why what seems to most Westerners an obvious good-versus-evil struggle is interpreted so differently by others. Russia, she shows, has cleverly tailored its policies to a range of countries with the goal of disrupting the flow of support going to Ukraine and—more ambitiously—undermining the Western-dominated international order. In its place, Notte writes, Russia aims to “emerge as a privileged pole in an international power system not unlike the nineteenth century’s Concert of Europe.”
In Notte’s travels and investigations, she identifies several reasons that Russia is enjoying considerable success. The first is material self-interest. Whereas Western-led efforts to economically isolate rogue regimes such as Iran and North Korea have succeeded to some degree, Russia’s economic and geographic heft have made it a far more difficult target; as historian Stephen Kotkin has pointed out, “it’s not possible to blockade Eurasia.” Notte shows how Russia’s energy exports pivoted sharply from Europe to India in 2022-2023 and how an armada of shadow fleet vessels now transports most of Russia’s oil. Notte also explains the West’s policy ambivalence: it has not wanted to remove all Russian oil from the market lest gas prices rise for its consumers, but instead has developed tools to reduce how much Russia earns from the sales. One Indian official even remarks that the U.S. government encouraged his country to purchase Russian fuel at a discount.
A host of enterprising intermediaries have also emerged in countries such as Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Kazakhstan to facilitate Russian access to Western goods and technology that are under export controls. This “Eurasian roundabout” generated suspicious spikes in trade after the start of the war. In 2022, for instance, U.S. and European companies exported more than $8.5 million worth of integrated circuits to Armenia, a 16-fold increase over 2021. The website of a Russian trading firm advertised that it sourced Western goods and imported them via Kazakhstan, “bypassing sanctions 100%.”
In other parts of the world, Notte shows, Russia has succeeded in portraying itself as a victim of Western aggression. Notte’s on-the-ground reporting is especially revealing when she spends time with locals who serve as foot soldiers in Russia’s information operations. In South Africa, she shows how the Soviet Union’s support for the African National Congress during the apartheid era now pays dividends for Russia, which enjoys the benefit of the doubt among former activists who now hold senior positions. Two narratives stand out. First, the depiction of NATO as a malevolent and aggressive force resonates strongly in South Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. Because Russians have been fed anti-NATO narratives to much of the world ever since the alliance’s founding, it is no wonder Putin has cast NATO as a cause of the war, even though Ukraine had no realistic prospect of joining the alliance. Second, Russia’s claim that its expansionist war against Ukraine is an “anti-colonial” struggle has gained surprising traction, with Notte’s South African interlocutors characterizing Russia’s actions as defensive moves against the imperialist forces of the U.S. and Europe. Astonishingly, Putin’s claims to uphold “traditional values” have also gained support within the Afrikaner community, some of whom have established an “African village” in central Russia (perhaps prior to realizing they could claim asylum status in the United States). “Putin,” Notte writes, “could wear an anti-imperialist face for some audiences, while appearing as a white Christian nationalist to others.”
The semi-official Wagner mercenary organization served as a key tool of Russia’s Africa policy until 2023, when Yevgeny Prigozhin mounted a rebellion against the Russian military that led, two months later, to his death. Notte details the efforts of Wagner and its successor, the Africa Corps, to provide regime security to and extract minerals from dictatorial governments in the Sahel region. In addition to suppressing opposition with armed enforcers, the Russians tilt the information environment in favor of incumbent governments and their Russian patrons. In France, Notte meets Ephrem Yalike-Ngonzo, a journalist who was recruited in the Central African Republic by a mysterious Russian who commissioned him to write stories favorable to Wagner and Russia’s role in the country. After being told to cover up a deadly attack by Wagner on a remote village, Yalike-Ngonzo quit his position and eventually fled the country, fearing retribution from the Russians.
Zooming out from efforts to gain influence in far-flung regions, Notte describes how Western efforts to isolate Russia and Russia’s own suspicion of multilateral institutions (“global structures issuing rules,” in the words of one Russian expert) have significantly weakened the UN’s ability to function. She notes that Russia spurned the UN to establish a rival negotiating platform for Syria, the Astana format, and then refused to renew a UN mechanism that delivered humanitarian aid to rebel-held parts of the country.
In two cases—the review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation (NPT) Treaty in 2022 and a feel-good “Summit of the Future” in 2024—Russian efforts to use negotiations over final documents to rally the Global South against Western countries backfired. At the NPT Treaty conference, Russia’s obstruction blocked a consensus outcome; at the Summit of the Future, its last-minute amendment was voted down. In both cases, the petty tactics were most likely dictated by the Kremlin rather than Russia’s diplomats. Even if Russia suffered temporary setbacks, it was succeeding in eroding mechanisms for cooperation as well as accountability—such as the Chemical Weapons Convention—which, Notte writes, would probably lead more countries to “question the purpose of the entire process and the degree to which it was worth committing resources to it.”
Turning to Russia’s more direct confrontation with the West, Notte’s personal reporting again lends texture to the increasingly frequent news articles about Russia’s escalating attacks in Europe. Her interview with Pal Bratbak, a Norwegian NATO officer, provides a thorough tutorial on the vexed problem of how to protect undersea cables that traverse international waters, where ships with malign intentions are free to sail. As with Russia’s cyber operations and its attacks on European defense factories and transport nodes, Bratbak notes, it is “easy and cheap to attack” underwater infrastructure “and incredibly expensive and hard to detect.”
Notte carefully analyzes Moscow’s “louder and shriller” nuclear signaling, including by talking directly with some of the protagonists on the Russian side. These include Dmitri Trenin, a fixture in Russia’s foreign policy community, who believes the threat of nuclear strikes against European cities is “very useful.” Notte also meets Mikhail Ulyanov, a senior Russian diplomat, who dismisses the provocative rhetoric as nonsense while slyly noting that Russia respects scholars’ right to free speech. Notte soberly concludes that Russia’s nuclear scare tactics were attempts at intimidation whose effect has eroded over time, delivering no dividends but damaging long-standing norms of the nuclear order.
Notte gives some attention to China in discussions about multilateral institutions, most notably the BRICS+ grouping, but she devotes insufficient attention to how Russia-China ties, characterized as a “no-limits partnership” by Presidents Xi and Putin in early 2022, have evolved into a highly asymmetric relationship in which China is the dominant party. In public, Xi assiduously treats Putin as an equal partner, but as the Ukraine war has dragged on, China has been ruthlessly pragmatic in capitalizing on Russia’s economic vulnerability. After losing the EU as its main economic partner, Russia now relies on China as its most important customer and supplier. In certain sectors the transformation is striking. Russia’s semiconductor imports from China rose from $200 million in 2021 to more than $500 million in 2022. By 2023, according to U.S. officials, China supplied about 90 percent of Russia’s microelectronics imports and roughly 70 percent of its machine tool imports. China has stretched out negotiations with Russia on a new gas pipeline, Power of Siberia 2, even as state-owned Gazprom, its European market gone, sells China gas at prices well below what Europe once paid.
As sanctions have denied Russia access to the Western financial system, Russia floated a BRICS-led alternative to the dollar, but other members of the bloc have quietly rejected the idea. Meanwhile, China is filling the vacuum: yuan settlements constituted the payment mechanism for under 2 percent of Russia’s total trade before the war and reached nearly 40 percent by January 2024, after which Russia’s central bank stopped publishing the figure. In this light, we should interrogate whether Russia’s aggressive bluster and its claim to a place at the top geopolitical table are a clever public relations campaign to distract from the reality that Moscow is inexorably sinking into vassalage vis-a-vis Beijing. In the future, perhaps Russia’s accusations of colonial aggression will come to be directed toward China rather than the West.
Notte’s book repeatedly tallies the costs of Moscow’s confrontational new approach for Russia’s reputation, influence, and economy. At one point she asks whether Russian officials find it humiliating to debase their country in this manner, including by importing North Korean troops to help fight Ukraine. The answer provided by Pavlo Klimkin, Ukraine’s former foreign minister, who was born and educated in Soviet Russia, encapsulates the challenge facing the West: “Yes, it is humiliating, but the Russians don’t care. Because they understand that to not get results in their war against us, Ukraine, is even more humiliating.” This is Notte’s sobering message: 2022 marked a decisive turning point in Russian policy, not just in Ukraine but worldwide, and the West’s support for Ukraine has costs for the West and the world in terms of Russian revenge, intimidation, and nihilism. “We Shall Outlast Them” shows that for Moscow this is a global struggle; if we want to protect Ukraine—and ourselves—we need to treat it as such.
