Matthew Bryza: Europeans are ashamed that they had been so naive about Russia - EXCLUSIVE

The editorial team of The Daily Baku conducted an exclusive interview with Matthew Bryza, a former diplomat, former co-chair, and former US Ambassador to Azerbaijan. We present the interview in parts.

“Three major ways that President Putin's desire to invade Ukraine, twice, by the way, 2014, and then his all-out invasion in 2022, have restructured international relations. Number one, I think the Europeans are ashamed that they had been so naive about Russia. In fact, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier said as much in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, and said, we should have been paying better attention to what President Putin's real ambitions were for Ukraine. And having worked directly with President Steinmeier, while he was the foreign minister of Germany during Putin's plans to invade Georgia, I agree with his statement that he was very, very naive about Russia. So, the Europeans have woken up. They are now the strongest supporters of Ukraine”.

Matthew Bryza also touched on the coalition of the willing: “France and the UK are willing to put their own soldiers on the ground in Western Ukraine to guarantee a peace agreement, should there ever be one, when President Putin wants to continue fighting the war, of course. So, the one thing that has happened, one big new development, is that Europe has finally awakened to what President Putin's goals really are, and that is to destroy Ukraine as a country, and to fold it into Russia, if you will, and change the regime, of course, in Kyiv."

Bryza believes that the second major change under President Trump is that Russia’s war against Ukraine has led Trump to adopt a more isolationist foreign policy: "A second big change is that under President Trump, Russia's war on Ukraine has encouraged President Trump to rely more on an isolationist foreign policy according to which the United States focuses on security in the Western Hemisphere and make sure that it and only it will be the predominant power and that no outside powers will be able to dominate the Western Hemisphere. So that means Greenland, Canada, Panama Canal, all the strange things that President Trump seemingly said, seemingly strange things at the start of his administration about wanting to take Greenland, which he's really talking about now, or maybe use force in Mexico or retake the Panama Canal.

I think that whole process of thinking was accelerated by Trump's desire to move away from Putin's war in Ukraine. There are multiple reasons for that movement. One of the main things that's happening, though, is that Putin's war on Ukraine has persuaded Trump that he would like an outcome like happened at the ALTA conference near the end of World War II when Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin decided among themselves that they would be the ones that would, their countries would be the dominant powers in the world."

According to Bryza, the third major change brought about by Putin’s war on Ukraine has occurred within Russia itself.

“Russia is seen as a pariah in much of the world. It, you know, European, I mean, Russians can't really travel to Europe, or they can only do so at great expense and difficulty. The Russian economy is weakening. Inflation is high. Economic growth is low. It's low because the Central Bank of Russia is trying to reduce inflation by raising interest rates. Putin has restructured the entire economy of Russia to produce weapons, not to produce things that make, that generate more wealth. And so that is hurting the Russian economy and weakening it. And economic growth is way down for Russia. So Putin has essentially stolen the future from Russia's young people. He's stolen a prosperous future, according to which, like their parents, they could have traveled to Europe and enjoyed themselves. That's finished for Russia now,” the former diplomat told The Daily Baku.