There is one other area in which Europe in general, and Britain in particular, can do more. Broadcast media are usually classed as soft power, but they are as important to Putin as his T-80 tanks. He has invested in them heavily. Among Russian speakers – including in eastern Ukraine and the Russian-speaking minorities in the Baltic states – he has used television to impose his own narrative of a socially conservative, proud Russia threatened by fascists in Kiev, an expansionist Nato and a decadent EU.
Last year a Russianist of my acquaintance was sitting naked and at ease in the hot tub with a friend of his in Moscow after several vodkas, as is the Russian custom, when this highly educated Russian asked: “So tell me, honestly, why do you support the fascists in Kiev?”
We need to counter this propaganda not with lies of our own but with reliable information and a scrupulously presented array of different views. No one is better placed to do this than the BBC. The US may have the best drones in the world, and Germany the best machine tools, but Britain has the best international broadcaster.
And there is an appetite for it: the BBC’s sadly diminished online Russian-language service still has an audience of nearly seven million, and during the crisis its Ukrainian-language audience has tripled to more than 600,000.
In his excellent report on the future of news, James Harding, the head of BBC News, makes a strong commitment to growing the World Service. Immediately stepping up its Russian and Ukrainian offerings would be a good way for the BBC to show that it will put its money where its mouth is. Without compromising the BBC’s independence, the British government could also chip in some extra funding.
If ever there were people in need of accurate, fair, balanced information, it is Russians and Ukrainians today. None of these things will stop Putin tomorrow, but in combination they will work in the end. Dictators win in the short run, democracies in the long.
