Leonid Bershidsky, Columnist

Putin Wants Business as Usual. So Do Western Businesses.

Speaking to international businessmen, Putin signaled he is done with direct interference in Ukraine. While trying to appear his usual sarcastic self, he was in fact hoping it would soon be business as usual between Russia and the West.

May 23, 2014 at 5:13 PM UTC

By Leonid Bershidsky

Leonid Bershidsky, formerly Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe columnist, is a member of the Bloomberg News Automation Team. He recently published Russian translations of George Orwell’s “1984” and Franz Kafka’s “The Trial.”

Not much outrage over Ukraine here. Photographer: Andrey Rudakov/Bloomberg

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Vladimir Lenin famously lambasted "bourgeois intellectuals" for taking "one step forward and two steps back." Vladimir Putin believes in the opposite formula: Having taken two steps forward in Ukraine, he is now taking a step back.

The Russian president used his speech at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum and the subsequent Q&A to indicate that he's done rattling his saber and ready for business as usual -- that is, as before the Ukrainian crisis -- with the West. Putin's proposal to Western governments and business, not formulated in so many words but easily read between the lines, is that they forget the annexation of Crimea and resume normal economic ties, accepting in exchange his willingness to recognize Sunday's presidential election in Ukraine.