As the free world stands united in support of Ukraine and against Putin’s Russia, the question on everyone’s mind is how to make sure this never happens again. But in order to answer this question it is crucially important to understand how we got here in the first place. Have there been obvious warning signs that many people pointed at but that were nevertheless mostly overlooked or simply ignored? Were there instruments that could—and should have been used in response to the ringing of those alarm bells that many of us have been hearing since Vladimir Putin came to power 23 years ago? In order to stop the backsliding of democracy around the world, we need to remember that democracy is first and foremost based on respect for human rights and freedoms which implies a responsibility to act whenever human lives and human dignity are endangered because turning away—for whatever reason—and allowing impunity to continue inevitably leads to horrifying consequences.

On behalf of Sir Chris Bryant MP, The Henry Jackson Society is pleased to welcome you to join this timely discussion about the unpunished crimes of Vladimir Putin’s regime and what lessons could be learnt from the last 23 years of Putin being in power.

Evgenia Kara-Murza is Advocacy Coordinator at the Free Russia Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan international organization supporting civil society and democratic development in Russia, and wife of Russian opposition leader Vladimir Kara-Murza. She was born in Russia’s Far East, graduated with honors from the Moscow State Linguistic University and worked as a translator and interpreter in Russian, English, and French for pro-democracy NGOs including the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, the Institute of Modern Russia, and Pen America, before joining her husband in advocating for human rights accountability and promoting civil society and democratic change in Russia.

Edward Lucas is a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA).

He was formerly a senior editor at The Economist. Lucas has covered Central and Eastern European affairs since 1986, writing, broadcasting, and speaking on the politics, economics, and security of the region.

A graduate of the London School of Economics and long-serving foreign correspondent in Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, and the Baltic states, he is an internationally recognized expert on espionage, subversion, the use and abuse of history, energy security and information warfare.

He is the author of five books: The New Cold War (2008, revised and republished in 2014); Deception (2011); The Snowden Operation (2014), Cyberphobia (2015), and Spycraft Rebooted: How Technology is Changing Espionage (2018). His website is edwardlucas.com and he tweets as @edwardlucas.

Sir Chris Bryant is a Labour Party politician who has served as Member of Parliament for the Rhondda since 2001. He has held a variety of positions within both the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet, ranging from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, to the Foreign Office where he keeps a keen interest as Chair of the Spain and Russia All Party Parliamentary Groups and as a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

More recently Chris has focused his efforts in Parliament on Health-related issues, introducing a Private Members Bill to better protect our Emergency Workers (which is now Law) and producing the “Time for Change” report as Chair of the Acquired Brain Injury APPG.

Chris currently serves on the Foreign Affairs Select Committee and is the Chair of the Standards and Privileges Committee. He also serves on the Speaker’s Committee for the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority and the Liaison Committee (Commons).

Chris speaks fluent Spanish and good French.

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EVENT SUMMARY

The Henry Jackson Society was pleased to host an event with Evgenia Kara-Murza and Edward Lucas, chaired by Sir Chris Bryant. Evgenia started her speech by a brief introduction on what the reality is in Russia. She then went on to argue that the main reason that Putin decided to wage this genocidal war in Ukraine is due to the fact that he has been able to get away with such aggression previously as evidenced by his actions in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea and Syria. She also went on to argue that repression and human rights abuses within a country tend to spill out, and that concern for human rights is a fundamental part of international relations. Edward Lucas then went to support some of the points made by Evgenia, stating that what is happening now in Russia has very deep roots, that might proceed even Putin himself. He suggested that in 1994 many Baltic and Eastern European countries have warned the West of Russia’s imperialistic ambitions but because there was a lot of money to be made in Russia, these warnings were ignored. Additionally, there was a lot of discussion about what must be done by the West in regard to the Russian diaspora that is opposed to Putin. Both of the speakers agreed that Putin does not have much time left but were fairly pessimistic as to what the future holds for Russia. Nevertheless, they both emphasized the fact that pressure and sanctions on Russia must continue until the whole regime, and not only Putin himself, collapsed.