Russia has lost an empire and not yet found a role. As we approach the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we should pay tribute again to the fact that a nuclear-armed superpower surrendered its vast continental empire with scarcely a shot fired in anger. Unfortunately, though not surprisingly, many Russians have been regretting that act of historic magnanimity ever since. What Russia’s new role will be is something that Russians have to work out for themselves. That will take time.

It would be ridiculously short-sighted to assume that the mixture of authoritarian capitalism and assertive, 19th century-style great power politics that we have seen under Vladimir Putin, is the end point of Russian history. The Putin I saw at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week was both defiant and defensive: gloating in public over the decline of US hegemony, begging in private for more foreign investment in Russia.

With his people protesting on the streets, a stockmarket that has lost more than

70 per cent of its value and foreign currency reserves draining away at a rate of knots, he has reason to be worried. Great power authoritarian capitalism doesn’t look so dandy now. But there will be many more twists and turns before Russia arrives at even a semi-stable state.

There’s only a limited amount we can or should do to affect the internal evolution of Russia. Sovereignty is not unlimited in the 21st century, either in law or in fact, but it remains both an important principle and an important reality. Which way Russia goes is up to the Russians. But while that post-imperial drama is played out inside Russia’s borders, over decades rather than months, we in the rest of Europe do have every right and every reason to protect our own vital interests. These include not only secure energy supplies to EU member states but also secure international frontiers, respect for the sovereignty of even the smallest states, and a commitment to the non-violent resolution of disputes.

Putin’s Russia has not respected those principles and interests. Indeed, much of the Russian foreign policy elite treats the European Union as a kind of transient, postmodern, late 20th-century anachronism: flawed in principle and feeble in practice. What matters, they say, in the 21st century as in the 19th, is the muscle and determination of great powers. And so Russia has been trying to restore the country’s dominance over its neighbours by hook or by crook - whether by sending in the troops (as last August, in Georgia) or by turning off the gas (as, last month, in its dispute with Ukraine).

Russia is unlikely to adjust its external behaviour unless the rest of Europe sets clear limits and changes the incentive structure. What reason has Moscow to alter course so long as the EU remains as weak, divided and hypocritical as it has been in relation to Russia over the last decade? If I were sitting in the Kremlin, I would be jeering at the EU too.

And let’s be clear: this is Europe’s business. There will be no European foreign policy unless there is a European Russia policy. There will be no European Russia policy unless we have a European energy policy and a European strategy for Ukraine.

Now the emergence of such a European policy depends above all on Europe’s central power: Germany. The country’s Social Democratic foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, has continued the “realist” special relationship with Russia developed under Chancellor Schröder. Their “Moscow first” approach has been underpinned by the corporate intertwining of the German and Russian energy giants E.ON Ruhrgas and Gazprom.

The country’s Christian Democratic chancellor, Angela Merkel, a Russian speaker who grew up in East Germany, favours a more sceptical, nuanced approach, balancing short-term German national interests with European values and solidarity. German policy may now be shifting slightly her way, under the double impact of the Georgian and gas crises. It will be interesting to see what the German representatives have to say at this weekend’s annual Munich Security Conference, whose main plenary session is intriguingly called “Nato, Russia, Natural Gas and the Middle East”.

Not for the first time, the future of a larger Europe depends on the direction of German Ostpolitik. I spent more years than I care to remember in the scholarly dissection of Ostpolitik, culminating in a monograph titled In Europe’s Name, and looking back over that history I see a curious reversal. Forty years ago, when Willy Brandt launched a version of Ostpolitik that contributed significantly to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Russian communist empire, he and his colleagues worked on the assumption that the key to a benign long-term evolution in a divided Berlin lay in a change of policy in Moscow. Today, the key to a benign long-term evolution in a divided Moscow lies in a change of policy in Berlin. — The Guardian