The Netherlands | Familiar Foe

The country is spearheading a head-on clash between Europe and Russia.

Of the 298 who perished on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, 196 were Dutch nationals. Phil Nijhuis / AP Photo
01 November, 2014

AS THE SUN SET on the calm summer evening of 22 July, a line of forty funeral coaches slowly rolled out from the airport at Eindhoven, a city in the south of the Netherlands. Inside each of the charcoal-coloured vehicles was a wooden coffin containing the remains of a victim of flight MH17, which had crashed five days earlier in eastern Ukraine en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. None of the 283 passengers and 15 crew members survived. Of the victims, 196 were Dutch nationals, making the Netherlands the country most afflicted by the disaster. A crowd of mourners had flocked to the airport to witness the repatriation of this first group of the deceased.

In the minds of large numbers of the Dutch public, there is little doubt that Russia is at least partly to blame for the deaths of their compatriots. Almost immediately after the crash, various sources claimed the flight was brought down by a surface-to-air missile of Russian origin, launched by separatists in the Donbas region. Russia denies any link with the insurgents, and, hampered by the fighting in the area, investigators have been unable to secure evidence that confirms this reading of events. A recent report by the Dutch Safety Board, which has been charged with investigating the incident, carefully avoided the word “missile,” but noted that the aircraft was “penetrated by a large number of high energy objects,” and that “there are no indications that the MH17 crash was caused by a technical fault or by actions of the crew.”

As the procession made its way to a military base where the agonising task of identifying the victims began, it passed even larger crowds of onlookers. Some applauded cautiously as the cars drove by. Others threw flowers, and a few sobbed. It was a rare expression of collective grief in a country not known for public displays of emotion. “This is the only thing I can do to demonstrate my sympathy for the victim’s families,” Sini Reijm, a stout retiree with short blond hair, told me. I asked whether she shared the anger towards Russia. “It is the politicians at the top who are responsible,” she responded, “but you cannot blame an entire country.” Johan Mammen, a warehouse worker also standing at the roadside, accused Russia of murder. “This is a terrible consequence of a war that Russia is obviously fuelling,” he said.

The fate of MH17 has radically altered the Netherlands’ stance towards the conflict in eastern Ukraine, which, according to José Manuel Barrosso, until recently the president of the European Union, threatens to unleash “a new Cold War.” The country was initially reluctant to support sanctions against Russia, fearing it would amount to shooting itself in the foot. But on the day the first MH17 victims were brought home the Dutch foreign minister told a meeting of his EU counterparts there are “no taboos” in retaliating against Russia for its alleged stoking of violence in Ukraine. It marked a clear end to the Dutch political class’s recent bout of Russophilia, which saw trade between the two countries grow to be worth tens of billions of dollars. Now the Netherlands seems determined to exploit those ties in a concerted strike by the EU against the Russian economy.

This new episode of protracted conflict between the West and Russia began in March, when Russia annexed Crimea and organised a referendum that resulted in the peninsula’s de facto secession from Ukraine. Shortly afterwards, I interviewed Edward Lucas, a former Russia bureau chief for The Economist and now an editor at that newspaper’s commodities, energy and natural resources section. He was adamant that Europe should apply firm economic sanctions in response to Russia’s expansionist ambitions. At the time, his call to action fell on deaf ears in the Netherlands. The country was not ready to jeopardise friendly relations, since Russia was, and is, responsible for a significant share of the international trade that the Dutch economy relies on.

In 2013, the Netherlands, a country of 17 million inhabitants, exported €7 billion worth of goods to Russia—mostly agricultural produce and chemicals. And despite its diminutive size, the country is the second largest investor in the Russian economy, in part because of the many Russian companies listed in the Netherlands for tax reasons. Money earned abroad is transferred to these shell companies, from where it can be invested back into Russia. Last year, investment in Russia from the Netherlands totalled over €50 billion—more than 11 percent of the total foreign investment in the country. This puts the Netherlands in an ideal position to strike against the Russian economy.

But the Netherlands also has much to lose from sanctions. Besides the flow of Russian capital, the Dutch economy is deeply intertwined with the trade in Russian mineral fuels. Russia provides almost 40 percent of Europe’s annual natural gas consumption, and the Netherlands functions as Europe’s distribution hub. The country brought in more than $20 billion worth of Russian goods in 2013, making it the top destination for Russian exports. Most of these consist of oil and gas, which the Netherlands then resells to other countries.

Such beneficial economic ties also bred a chumminess between Dutch and Russian political leaders. In 2004, Amsterdam was chosen to host an outpost of St Petersburg’s famous Hermitage Museum. To mark four centuries since Tsar Peter the Great came to Holland to learn shipbuilding, 2013 was labelled the four-hundredth anniversary of Russo-Dutch friendship. At the beginning of this year, when many other state leaders boycotted the Winter Olympics in Sochi to protest Russia’s violations of human rights, Dutch leaders attended with all pomp and ceremony. The prime minister, king and queen were all present, and the royal couple was photographed merrily raising glasses of frothy Heineken beer with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, much to the displeasure of many Dutch citizens.

But looking back, the bond between Russia and the Netherlands was already beginning to crack. In October last year, Russia arrested several Dutch Greenpeace activists trying to hinder oil drilling in the Arctic Sea, and then refused to engage in international arbitration over their fate. That same month, police in the Netherlands arrested the Russian diplomat Dmitri Borodin on a charge of mistreating his children, breaching the immunity that foreign officials enjoy under the Vienna Convention. Putin responded furiously. Two weeks later, a senior Dutch diplomat was beaten up in his heavily secured Moscow home by a gang of unidentified thugs. The attack bore every mark of a retaliation, and although Moscow promised to investigate the crime no one has yet been found responsible.

The crash of flight MH17 definitively darkened the mood. Almost overnight, the Netherlands became the spearhead in the campaign to squeeze Russia economically in response to its involvement in eastern Ukraine. “This is no longer about economy and trade,” the Dutch foreign minister told his EU peers on 22 July. “This is about safety and justice for almost two hundred Dutch that came to their end in a gruesome manner.” With Dutch approval, the EU recently expanded a blacklist of Russian businessmen whose European bank accounts have been frozen, and who are now denied access to EU member states. In addition, Russian arms manufacturers, and energy companies such as Rosneft and Gazprom, have been shut out of European capital markets. This affects the Netherlands, as many of these companies have subsidiaries listed here. In a tit-for-tat response Russia slapped an import ban on European agricultural produce in early September, again hurting the Netherlands. Russia is a key market for Dutch factory-farmed pork and greenhouse vegetables.

Adding to the trade war is the rise of a palpable anti-Russian mood reminiscent of the days when Russia was still a Cold War enemy on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Pieter Broertjes, a newspaper editor turned city mayor, recently called for expelling Maria Putin, the daughter of the Russian president, from the Netherlands—a comment for which he later apologised. Maria Putin was reported to be living in Voorschoten, near The Hague, together with her Dutch boyfriend. She is now believed to have fled the country. The Netherlands-Russia Centre, an organisation for promoting bilateral ties, reported receiving virulent hate mail. Bas Heijne, a prominent commentator in the newspaper NRC Handelsblad, uses his widely read op-eds to paint Russia as a country “rotten to the core.”

These sentiments are worrying the Russian community in the Netherlands. A new Russian consulate opened its doors in April in Maastricht, a university town in the southern tip of the country. It is headed by an honorary consul, the Dutch entrepreneur Constantijn van Vloten, who started the restaurant in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Two months ago, Van Vloten organised a gathering for concerned Russians to discuss the growing anti-Russian sentiment. “These are hard times,” he told a group of about fifty expats and students that had flocked to the consulate, housed in a fine neoclassical building that was formerly a theatre. “Russia is cast in a bad light by a Western propaganda campaign. I am happy to see that Russia does not shirk from taking counter measures. The Netherlands should understand that Russia is an important country that deserves all respect.”

And yet, some manage to find a comic note in the conflict. On 14 September, a crowd of two thousand gathered on Dam Square, in front of the Royal Palace in the Dutch capital of Amsterdam. For €15 each they could participate in a food fight involving ten thousand kilograms of tomatoes. Under normal circumstances, the produce would have been exported to Russia. Joep Verbunt, one of the event’s organisers, explained that this was an “elegant way to support the growers that are struck by international politics.” Minutes later, a melee of people covered in pulped tomato turned Dam Square blazing red.