Russia’s Absence at Davos Marks Unraveling of Globalization – Vigour Times

Russia’s participation at the Davos event spans 30 years of globalization and economic integration that is now unraveling in the face of resurgent great-power competition and fragmentation of global supply chains.

The Davos meetings of the global political, financial and corporate elites came to symbolize the era of globalization, for better in the minds of its advocates and for worse in the view of its detractors. Now, many participants are convinced that the era is over, its demise accelerated by the war in Ukraine.

“Even when the fighting stops as it eventually must, the situation will never revert to what it was before,” the financier and philanthropist

George Soros

told an audience Tuesday.

The conflict has heralded another shift. After the collapse of the Soviet Union three decades ago, Western governments dismantled their defense establishments, generating a “peace dividend” that freed government resources for social and other programs. Now, Western governments are ramping up military spending.

“We have ended the peace dividend. We’re now in a new environment,” said

Ian Bremmer,

president of the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm firm.

Ukrainian politicians and officials are delivering a message here to anyone who will listen that the country needs more aid and weapons and that Russia should be punished for its actions. President

Volodomyr Zelensky

has delivered two carefully targeted speeches to different audiences by video, accusing Mr. Putin on Wednesday of living in a “bubble of alternative reality.”

Russian government officials didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on Russia’s exclusion from the event.

It was at Davos, in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, that Russia and other former Soviet republic first came out into the wider world and began their integration with the global economy, said

Daniel Yergin,

vice chairman of S&P Global and an energy historian who has been attending the event since the early 1990s.

It was at the 1996 Davos meeting that a group of newly empowered oligarchs hatched a plan to support the re-election of President

Boris Yeltsin,

then trailing desperately in the opinion polls against his Communist opponent,

Gennady Zyuganov.

After Mr. Putin rose to power in 1999, Russians became prominent Davos fixtures, with some of the oligarchs now under Western sanctions throwing lavish, exclusive parties.

Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska, for example, was reputed for hosting among the event’s most extravagant fetes. At the event in January 2018, for example, he brought in a troupe of Cossack dancers, Grammy winner Enrique Iglesias and an abundance of black caviar and Dom Pérignon Champagne.

This year isn’t the first time that high-profile Russians, including Mr. Deripaska, have posed a challenge for forum officials. The U.S. blacklisted Mr. Deripaska and dozens of other Russian business people and officials in 2018 in response to Russia’s alleged meddling in U.S. elections, cyberattacks on critical U.S. infrastructure, the Kremlin’s 2014 military intervention in Ukraine, and supplying bombs and materiel to the regime of Syrian President

Bashar al-Assad.

That led forum officials to ask Mr. Deripaska, construction billionaire

Viktor Vekselberg

and banker

Andrey Kostin

not to attend the next annual gathering, according to Russian officials at the time. The forum organizers ended up reversing course after Moscow threatened to boycott the annual gathering.

Mr. Deripaska’s spokesman Ruben Bunyatyan said this year “Davos is not a priority issue for Mr. Deripaska,” who is also under sanctions from the European Union and other Western governments. He has called the restrictions against him misguided and groundless.

In February, following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine, the forum put out a statement condemning “the aggression by Russia against Ukraine, the attacks and atrocities.”

“Our full solidarity is with Ukraine’s people and all those who are suffering innocently from this totally unacceptable war,” the statement said.

Yann Zopf, a spokesman for the forum, said in an interview Tuesday that it was “a conscious decision to condemn” Russia’s aggression “and as a consequence we did not invite Russian officials. At the same time, it is to comply with international sanctions.”

The forum has around 1,000 partners who pay to become members, which enables them to attend Davos. About 20 members are Russian, Mr. Zopf said.

Russia’s absence was visible on the main Davos artery for public and private events. In previous years, the Roscongress Foundation, which bills itself as a nonfinancial development institution and organizer of nationwide and international conventions, organized Russia House at Davos, where it hosted events promoting Russian initiatives in a prominent venue. This year, a Ukrainian philanthropic organization and the Ukrainian government backed what they called “the Russia War Crimes House,” with an exhibition of photographs of what the sponsors said are documented war crimes committed by Russian soldiers during the war in Ukraine.

“Everything Davos was created to do is under attack” by Russia, said Alona Shkrum, a Ukrainian member of parliament. She said she saw the forum as a promoter of democratic values and dialogue to develop consensus and find ways to make the world better.

Denis Denisov, a partner and head of Russia for EM, an international communications consulting firm focused on clients from emerging markets with offices in Moscow and Beijing, said the absence of the Russian delegation presented a missed opportunity for communication.

“There is an overarching lack of dialogue at a time when this is needed more than ever,” he said.

Write to Stephen Fidler at [email protected] and Ann M. Simmons at [email protected]