‘Action man’ Vladimir Putin is defined by his inaction on MH17

No one plays Vladimir Putin better than Vladimir Putin. He is the “Russian guy” of Western paranoia whose popularity is quietly envied by politicians worldwide. In Oliver Stone’s The Putin Interviews, we see the Russian President cast as cultural statesman par excellence, yet equipped with an almost technocratic eye for detail. Putin is unexpectedly mercurial.

Stone seems at first fascinated and then enthralled by the former communist spy chief whose ­unlikeliest intrigue to date is being cast as rebel leader of the Western right underground. But on this day, Australia will not forget the dark side of Putin — a president who didn’t defend the dignity of our murdered com­patriots after flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine on July 17, 2014.

The horror of MH17 was not confined to first causes. From the outset, culpability for the killing of 298 passengers and crew was contested by Ukrainians and Russian-backed rebels locked in a civil war. In the middle lay the victims — Australian children, women and men among them. If you want to recognise the ugly face of nationalism, remember the twisted bodies of MH17 victims lying dead in foreign fields while Russian-backed rebels delayed their recovery. Or consider the words of Igor Girkin, a rebel suspected of ­involvement in the MH17 attack. Girkin’s macabre story about the MH17 tragedy allegedly included the suggestion that the victims were dead before takeoff because “a significant number of the bodies weren’t fresh”. It is hard to imagine propaganda more surreal by ­absurdly grotesque proportion.

The Russian response to MH17 is a lesson on immodest ­national­ism. The rebels put ­national interests before the basic humanity of the victims. If the victims had been Russian, they would not have been left exposed in fields for days.

Despite the still-unresolved case of MH17, Putin has been transformed in recent years from a figure of derision and suspicion to a somewhat gallant defender of Western civilisation. The transformation rivals Donald Trump’s ­ascendancy on the scale of ­improbability. In the year before the US election, ­alternative media was animated by the possibility that the anti-­politician Trump might win the Republican presidential nomination. The enthusiasm for Trump in alternative media was wildly at odds with his negative ­appraisal by the mainstream political-media class. But more unexpected was the silent majority’s defence of Putin as an ally. It was so improbable that upon reading it for the first time, I thought it was satire.

Like Trump, Putin is considered a straight-talking, anti-­establishment hero by people tired of being governed by unelected bureaucrats and statesmen with forked tongues. He was light years ahead of the West in combating ­Islamist terrorism but the West ­berated him for it. He recovered the spiritual and cultural identity of the Russian people from the ashes of sterile communism. He transformed a post-Soviet wasteland led by the sad figure of Boris Yeltsin into a state steeped in ­national pride. He reduced Russia’s national debt. And he pro­tected his nation from supra­national organisations that under­mine sovereign states by pushing porous border policy and hard left ideology.

Biographies of Putin reveal that some European powers might have deepened his hostility towards the West. They publicly humiliated the president during his early years in the Kremlin. By way of example, Putin inherited big government debt from loans taken from the Paris Club and London Club during the 1990s. When the dire state of the economy became clear, Putin ­requested deferment on paying back the principal sum. In his book All The Kremlin’s Men, journalist Mikhail Zygar describes the Western response. The German ministry of finance issued a press release threatening to oppose Russia’s full membership of the G8 unless it paid down the debt.

Western powers have ridiculed and publicly humiliated Putin since the early years of his presidency. In recent years the media has become more involved. The cases of Russian dissidents dying in mysterious circumstances abroad and the reputed suppression of Putin’s political opponents at home led to open questioning of the supposedly democratic state. The left became more hostile to Putin after the ejection of some NGOs from Russia, including those associated with billionaire socialist George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. For the same reason, the right grew fonder.

In a 2016 interview with the New York Review of Books, Soros criticised both Putin and Hun­gary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban for challenging EU ­migration policy. He said: “Orban attacks (EU values and principles) from the ­inside; Putin from the outside. Both of them are trying to reverse the subordination of ­national sovereignty to a supranational, European order.”

Putin, Trump, Brexit, Orban. They all share one goal that ­endears them to the modern right. They are resisting the “subordination of national sovereignty to a supranational” order. The task of resisting supranational rule is both defensive and constructive. The constructive elements were laid out by Trump in his recent speech in Poland. Putin has inspired a ­resurgence of Russian cultural tradition along similar lines. In short, they are calling for a renaissance of Western civilisation.

The realisation that there are political leaders still committed to Western civilisation has shocked the hard left and delighted the right. In some quarters, the sheer relief at hearing statesmen recognise the greatness of the West has led to the idea that the US and other Western states are natural allies of Russia. We are simply being kept apart by those who would rather see the West fall. There is some truth in it, but when the bodies of innocent Australian children, women and men lay strewn across fields in a strange land, the Russian President could have intervened to bring them home. He did not.

Putin’s lack of compassion for our compatriots and his recent ­refusal to oppose North Korea’s nuclear ambitions indicate his sole loyalty is to Russia. Today we will not forget.