Maaike Schoon, presenter of Buitenhof, was “stunned” at the answers that the Russian ambassador to the Netherlands, Alexander Shulgin, gave her on Sunday. That’s what she said to the guest who followed after him, Renée Jones-Bos, former ambassador for the Netherlands in Moscow.
Strange – I wasn’t baffled at all. I would have been stunned if Shulgin had answered the furious questions: “Mrs. Clean, you took the words right out of my mouth. It is criminal what my head of state is doing there in Ukraine. Bombing civilians and children’s hospitals – and that in a sovereign country! Where does he get the filthy guts from? You will understand that I have called him to account by telephone several times, but the gentleman keeps himself unreachable for me. Well, he’s not rid of me yet! I have already contacted my American colleague in The Hague to jointly bring Putin to the forefront. You know what I can’t understand? That a well-known Dutch politician dares to call such a crook ‘a beautiful guy’. Can you explain that to me?”
Instead, Shulgin took up his verbal repeater and answered with a stoic volley of preposterous, blatant twists, denials, and other lies. Maaike Schoon became increasingly angry in her ‘bewilderment’, while it would have been better to lure him out of his army tent coolly and slyly. Now she got a lesson in self-control from the representative of a regime that usually doesn’t excel at it.
Too bad, but there are worse things, if I have followed the latest developments in Ukraine closely. A humanitarian disaster is unfolding before our very eyes. A nation is partly massacred and its land is destroyed. By an enemy who dreams of restoring an Imperial Empire and who knows he can keep going militarily.
“How far do we let Putin go?” That question has often been asked of the powerful of this earth in recent days.
President Biden said it was a “hypothetical question” that he declined to answer. Will we also do nothing if the pressure from the public increases and there are even more victims, presenter Rick Nieman asked in WNL On Sunday to Prime Minister Rutte. “It remains no,” said Rutte. “It would be unwise and put us in a third world war.” That’s how he had personally explained it to President Zelensky.
This answer means de facto: Putin can go as far as he wants, as long as he stays away from the NATO countries. Chemical weapons? Bad for the Ukrainians, but so be it. Strategic Nuclear Weapons? Well, a very hypothetical question, we’d rather not think about that just yet.
But Putin said he was thinking about it much earlier on February 24, when he announced military action in the Donbas region on state TV: “Whoever opposes us and threatens our people should know that Russia will respond immediately.” . That will lead to consequences that you have never experienced before.”
Putin is often taken for a madman, but in retrospect that speech seems to have been a masterstroke: from that moment on, the West decided that it did not want to experience what it had never experienced before. Putin had his way. Are we rid of him with that, will he now relax? I have yet to see it.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC on the morning of March 14, 2022