I'm Steve Gutterman, the editor of RFE/RL's Russia/Ukraine/Belarus Desk.
Welcome to The Week In Russia, in which I dissect some of the key developments in the country and in its war against Ukraine, and some of the takeaways going forward. To subscribe, click here.
As Russia's war against Ukraine grinds on and the Kremlin casts it as a defensive struggle against the West, a name change in Moscow reflects how the state wants citizens to see the direction the country has taken, gradually and suddenly, under President Vladimir Putin.
Here are some of the key developments in Russia over the past week and some of the takeaways going forward.
Shifting Symbolism
In the late 1980s, the sprawling space outside the Kiev Railway Station in Moscow was little more than a wasteland, if memory serves -- a nondescript expanse with a few small structures littered around, its edges lined with kiosks where you could get syrupy cola and shashlik on a piece of cardboard.
That state of affairs persisted into the 1990s, following the Soviet collapse, though a wholesale market occupied part of the square for a time. The area gained a sort of notoriety when an American entrepreneur embroiled in a fight for control of a hotel adjacent to the station was shot dead on a stairway to the subway nearby in 1996 -- a killing emblematic of the often-bloody brand of capitalism that took root in Russia after the collapse of communism.
Several years later, a different kind of symbolism took hold: After renovations, a large part of the territory opened as Europe Square in 2002, featuring the flags of European countries and a fountain with an abstract sculpture depicting the mythological Abduction of Europa at its center.
Just next door, one of the biggest of the many malls that were being built in Russian cities went up as the country's oil wealth fueled consumerism and buoyed Putin, who first came to power as prime minister in August 1999 -- 25 years ago next month -- and is now in his fifth term in the Kremlin. The mall, which opened in 2006, was called Yevropeisky: European.
Russia has always looked to both the east and the west, but Europe Square seemed like a fitting symbol at a time when Moscow was building ties with the European Union and the United States and, as the Soviet era receded, appeared eager to be part of the global economy -- and even part of the West.
"Russia is part of the European culture," Putin said in a BBC interview in 2000, shortly before his inauguration to his first presidential term. "And I cannot imagine my own country in isolation from Europe and what we often call the civilized world."
That was then.
As of this week, Europe Square has a new name: Eurasia Square.
'One Little Change'
The change, decreed by Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, is a symptom of an actual shift in Russia's attentions amid growing economic sanctions and geopolitical isolation from the West as a result of Putin's decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
"One little change that says a lot about the direction in which Russia is moving," BBC correspondent Steve Rosenberg said in a report from the square. "The Russian authorities talk constantly now of the need to tilt east to China, North Korea, Asia as a whole."
But mainly it's a piece of propaganda, a pointed statement as Russia fights an unprovoked war in Ukraine that Putin has cast as an existential struggle against the West -- including what the Kremlin portrays as a decadent Europe that has lost its way and ceded sovereignty to Washington.
The flags of 48 European countries were removed from the square about a year into the full-scale invasion. The name of the European mall has not changed.
Of course, the rift between Russia and Europe goes much further back than February 2022 or even 2014, when Moscow seized Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula and fomented separatism across eastern and southern Ukraine, leading to war in the Donbas.
By 2004, Putin was accusing the West of supporting militants in the Caucasus, and his pressure on independent media, suppression of dissent, and rollback of rights and democracy were raising hackles in the United States and Europe.
Relations tanked further from around the time Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 after a second stint as prime minister, and further still with the poisoning in 2020 and jailing in 2021 of Putin's most prominent opponent, Aleksei Navalny, who died in prison three years later.
But the full-scale invasion of Ukraine sent relations off into a steep downward spiral. The symbolism of a street-name change in Moscow is just part of a transformation that one journalist calls "Russia's spiral into madness under Putin."
And it's a speck of dust or less with the acts of violence that Russia is committing every day in the neighboring country in the biggest war in Europe since 1945.
That's it from me this week.
If you want to know more, catch up on my podcast The Week Ahead In Russia, out every Monday, here on our site or wherever you get your podcasts (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts).
Yours,
Steve Gutterman
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