World Cup boycott would send message to Putin
WORLD CUP BOYCOTT PREFERABLE TO BOOTING DIPLOMATS
Winston Churchill once said of the Russians he was convinced there is nothing they admire so much as strength, and nothing for which they have less respect than weakness, especially military weakness.
The hand-wringing and hypocrisy among Western governments in recent years when faced with flagrant Russian abuse of the agreed rules of the geo-political game explain why Vladimir Putin continues to make ever bolder gambles.
Canada’s decision to expel four diplomats, as part of a co-ordinated international response to the Kremlin’s alleged involvement in the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in England, is a typically anemic response that will simply embolden the Russian leader.
There will be some of a permissive nature in this country who agree with one of the booted diplomats, Kiril Kalinin, that “silencing the official spokesman of the embassy … for voicing an alternative opinion or giving a different analysis of a situation is very un-Canadian.”
There were even senior bureaucrats who argued that a Russian disinformation campaign was not an attempt to undermine Canadian democracy. An Access to Information request revealed one public servant had argued a photo tweeted out by the Russian embassy of monuments to Ukrainian SS members was almost benign. “Framing them as ‘destabilizing western democracies’ seems a step too far,” the public servant said.
Lest we forget, we’re not dealing with the Boy Scouts here. The Russian embassy has not been fomenting controversy about Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland’s grandfather — and his editorship of a pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic newspaper during the war — in the interests of truth and good governance.
Russia is a country that does not play by the rules. It sees itself as threatened by an expansionist NATO, which justifies diplomatic and military gouging, biting and scratching.
Churchill’s quote about Russia being “a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma” is often quoted. Less familiar is the rest of the sentence, which continues, “but perhaps there is a key — that key is Russian national interest.”
As countries like the Czech Republic, Poland and the Baltic States joined NATO, after the break-up of the Soviet Union, Russia watched closely for signs that Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine would follow. Ukraine, in particular, is viewed as a buffer zone that guards the North European Plain, which has so often been used as an avenue of invasion by Poles, Swedes, Germans and the French.
When Ukraine veered westward and exhibited ambitions of joining the European Union — viewed by Putin as a stalking horse for NATO — the Russian leader gambled that nobody would block him from seizing Crimea, home to Russia’s Black Sea port. “Russia found itself in a position it could not retreat from. If you compress the spring all the way to its limits, it will snap back,” he said, by way of explanation.
Putin gambled correctly: nobody was prepared to risk war for a region that had been part of Russia for two centuries before being given to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954.
As Tim Marshall wrote in his excellent Prisoners of Geography: “Geopolitics still exists in the 21st century …. Unless you are in NATO, Moscow is near and Washington, D.C., is far away.”
The Kremlin does have a law allowing it to protect “ethnic Russians” that could be used to interfere in the Baltic States, but NATO has signalled an intention to fight, rather than be rendered obsolete. Putin, a student of history, is wary of over-reaching.
So we are left in a new Cold War where Putin makes rational gambles about how far he can go to further what he views as Russia’s national interest, without inciting a co-ordinated military response.
In Syria, that means defending President Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people at the United Nations through use of its veto on the Security Council.
Putin’s Russia should be a pariah state — pilloried at home and abroad for sullying the reputation of a country that gave the world Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.
That he has not been chased from power is in part because of the craven response by the West to atrocities like the downing of the Malaysian Airlines flight over Ukraine in 2014, or the incursion of Russian forces into eastern Ukraine. Putin has denied involvement in both.
The fact that 25 per cent of Europe’s oil and gas comes from Russia may have something to do with the muted response.
“Barefaced lying in the great chamber of the UN Security Council is simple if your opponent does not have concrete proof of your actions, and more importantly, doesn’t want concrete proof, in case he or she has to do something about it,” wrote Marshall.
At home, Putin remains popular because living standards continue to rise. GDP per person has risen six-fold since he came to power.
The 18-24 demographic is the least likely to support far-reaching change, according to the Carnegie Moscow Centre. It is more likely to say the country is heading in the right direction; more approving of Putin’s performance and more likely to prefer the current system of Russian government over Western-style democracy.
While expelling diplomats may reduce levels of deadly radioactive polonium in the West, it does not smack of steely resolve.
A complete boycott of the soccer World Cup, scheduled to kick off in Moscow this June, would have been a much more forceful statement — one neither Putin nor Russia’s complacent millennials would have been able to ignore.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who recently compared the Moscow World Cup to the Berlin Olympics in 1936, was then at pains to point out his government did not endorse teams pulling out.
But they should.
The man who, at the very least, acceded to the dropping of a nerve agent on the northwestern Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun last year will hand over the World Cup in Moscow on July 15. The stains won’t wash off easily.