The Munich Security Conference is one of the odder pitstops on relentless circuit of global decision-makers. Located in a hotel in the middle of the bustling southern Germany city, US multi-star generals share elevators with the EU’s queenly Ursula von der Leyen, Volodymyr Zelensky’s vast khaki-clad security detail hurtle past, and Kamala Harris and Antony Blinken shuffle meetings with European leaders and British foreign secretaries – present and possibly future – David Cameron and David Lammy.
When I started coming to Munich five years ago, it felt like a niche talking shop for securocrats, with lengthy sessions on the future of urban warfare and nuclear proliferation. Great for the security nerds (and the defence industries, who in turn profit out of the arms business, for good and ill) but distant from everyday concerns.
How that has changed. The mood reflects the sense of a world where multiple threats are converging to shake the underpinnings of all our safety – from Ukraine’s military struggling to hold on in the vicious war waged by Russia, to China’s tacit support for land grabs, raising fears of an Asian tinderbox crisis in Taiwan.
Even so, news of the death of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison camp, announced, probably not by coincidence, as the event got under way today felt like a shock wave. A political assassination, by one means or another, it is intended to shore up Vladimir Putin’s absolute control ahead of Russia’s sham elections – and as a grim warning to any successors brave enough to attempt to stand against him.
The official version that Navalny was “feeling unwell” and then “almost immediately lost consciousness” simply shows that Russian authorities know how to drop broad hints of its ability to disappear enemies with a flourish. Add that to revelations that the Kremlin has been working on a nuclear anti-satellite weapon in space, and the sense of a return to a sharper version of Cold War antagonism is unmissable.
Even those who argue that the West mishandled Russia after the fall of communism will be hard pressed to explain why this sense of grievance has so quickly translated into a desire to extirpate a neighbouring country via a massive land and sea war, declare its democratically elected government to be Nazis, threaten the leaders of Baltic states, question Poland’s autonomy and murder dissidents in London and at home in an endless list of reprisals for daring not to bow to a tyrannical figure in the Kremlin.
A security get-together is an odd place to find yourself wiping away tears, but this death reminded me so painfully of the shock on hearing that Boris Nemtsov, the opposition figure, had been gunned down in 2015. Now it doesn’t feel so unusual at all, which seems even more bleak for those of us who met this generation of Russian opponents of Putin.
I think too of the death toll imposed by Putin in Ukraine on so many Ukrainians and young Russians drafted or propagandised into fighting, whose names will never be famous. Together, they are warning of what happens when we take a peaceful world order for granted – or rely on others to do the job of defending democracies.
I met Navalny’s daughter Dasha in the US last year and thought of her as the news swept through the Munich crowds. She looks and sounds like a polished, Stanford undergraduate. Dasha and her mother have been forced out of Russia – families of dissidents are no longer safe. “My dad,” she said matter-of-factly, “has been fighting against Putin before it was mainstream.”
That has ended tragically in the inevitable extinguishing of a life in sordid circumstances. He was a human symbol of the urgent threat the world faces. Security architecture is creaking under the demand of backing Ukraine against Russia’s mighty war machine, with unprecedented uncertainty in Washington about the immediate future of the US commitment to Nato.
Two figures not present in the Munich scrum cast their threatening shadow over global security: Putin and Donald Trump, who are a multiplier effect of one another in terms of negative impact. The Trumpian broadside last week, perversely encouraging Russian aggression towards states which do not pay their full Nato dues, has ramped up pressure on American officials to send a reassuring message. My interview with the Pentagon’s top Russia expert, Celeste Wallander on the Power Play podcast goes as far as a senior official can go towards saying that regardless of the implied threat from the man highly likely to be the Republican presidential candidate, the Pentagon intends to uphold the Nato guarantee that “an attack on one is an attack on all” members.
That could well foreshadow a major clash in the strained US constitution if Trump were to emerge triumphant in November. And even if the US commitment remains intact or Trump is exaggerating for effect, it assumes that Nato countries continue to have the wherewithal to defend themselves and weaker members from incursions, direct or by technological means.
It leaves Ursula von der Leyen as president of the EU Commission having to beat the drum for Europe to actively support defence investment. “We have to spend more, we have to spend better,” the Commission president says (regardless of the fact that she was jointly responsible for the lag in German capability in an undistinguished period as defence minister under Angela Merkel.)
The epitaph for Navalny, fittingly, was expressed by his daughter before his death. She had asked him why he took so many risks for his beliefs – to the extent of retuning to Russia in the knowledge that he would face arrest. He replied: “You can’t run away from your problems.” That is a bitter lesson of the post-(Berlin) Wall era. If we didn’t hear that warning then, we surely should do now.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor of Politico and host of the Power Play interview podcast
Alexei Navalny’s death is a chilling message to us all
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16.02.2024
The Munich Security Conference is one of the odder pitstops on relentless circuit of global decision-makers. Located in a hotel in the middle of the bustling southern Germany city, US multi-star generals share elevators with the EU’s queenly Ursula von der Leyen, Volodymyr Zelensky’s vast khaki-clad security detail hurtle past, and Kamala Harris and Antony Blinken shuffle meetings with European leaders and British foreign secretaries – present and possibly future – David Cameron and David Lammy.
When I started coming to Munich five years ago, it felt like a niche talking shop for securocrats, with lengthy sessions on the future of urban warfare and nuclear proliferation. Great for the security nerds (and the defence industries, who in turn profit out of the arms business, for good and ill) but distant from everyday concerns.
How that has changed. The mood reflects the sense of a world where multiple threats are converging to shake the underpinnings of all our safety – from Ukraine’s military struggling to hold on in the vicious war waged by Russia, to China’s tacit support for land grabs, raising fears of an Asian tinderbox crisis in Taiwan.
Even so, news of the death of Alexei Navalny in an Arctic prison camp, announced, probably not by coincidence, as the event got under way today felt like a shock wave. A political assassination, by one means or another, it is intended to shore up Vladimir Putin’s absolute control........
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