THE REAL OUTRAGE? WE ALWAYS LET PUTIN’S GANGSTERS GET AWAY SCOT FREE
EARLIER this year, in a fashionable basement nightclub in central Moscow, I spotted the man accused of murdering the Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko in 2006. he may be the chief suspect in the poisoning of Litvinenko in London – but former KGB officer Andrei Lugovoi was hardly keeping a low profile.
he wore a blue patterned silk shirt and expensive-looking linen trousers. In one hand he held a cocktail, on the other was a pretty, blonde young woman.
Indeed, far from hiding away, Lugovoi has become a well-known figure in Moscow high society. he has been a member of the Russian parliament since 2007, and on his frequent television appearances he is treated as a national hero for his role in eliminating a traitor to the Motherland.
‘If someone has caused the Russian state serious damage, they should be exterminated,’ Lugovoi has told journalists. ‘I would give the order myself.’
In the aftermath of Litvinenko’s gruesome death, the British government promised retaliation. Diplomats were expelled, the Russian ambassador to London was ticked off.
But despite all this, despite the professed outrage of our politicians at the time, Lugovoi and his alleged accomplice Dmitry Kovtun, got off scot-free.
And given their celebrity status following Litvinenko’s death, is it any wonder that more Russian spooks felt free to try to murder yet another ‘traitor’ on British soil – this time former military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, along with his daughter.
Just as with the Litvinenko hit, Skripal’s alleged assailants came to the UK armed with sophisticated, deadly assassins’ poisons.
And just like Lugovoi and Kovtun, they left a tragicomically inept trail behind them. The Crown Prosecution Service’s detailed case against two Russians calling themselves Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov is painstaking in its detail, reconstructing their movements from Gatwick to London to Salisbury and back to Moscow in minute-by-minute detail.
And just like the last lot of Russian hit-men, there’s zero chance of them ever facing a British court.
Because the sorry fact is that we have miserably failed to learn the lessons of the Litvinenko murder. In the face of a ruthless Putin, the British government has been utterly pusillanimous.
During the decade since Litvinenko’s murder, we have allowed Russia’s corrupt elite to continue to pour money into luxury British property, list their companies on the London Stock Exchange, sue each other for billions of pounds in British courts, and send their children to top British schools. All with complete impunity.
With the exception of a handful of named individuals implicated in various Russian-sponsored outrages – from the annexation of the Crimea and the shooting down of a civilian airliner over Ukraine in 2014, to the hacking of US elections in 2016 – the Russian state, its leaders and their cronies remain fully integrated into the Western economy.
If we are to prevent Putin henchmen from murdering at will in this country, we have to get serious. Russia’s gangsterism has to be stopped .
ThE United States has already shown the way to do it. On August 22 the U. State and Treasury Departments invoked a little-known law that requires the President to act against any country that has ‘used chemical or biological weapons in violation of international law’.
The latest round of US sanctions – invoked specifically as punishment for the Skripal operation – bans the export of high technology to Russia, hitting its vital oil and military sectors hard. Internet providers that facilitate Russian hacking tools and ‘botnets’ that relentlessly promulgate malicious antiWestern propaganda across cyberspace are also being targeted.
The US has given the Kremlin 90 days to allow international inspectors into top-secret chemical weapons installations before harsher sanctions kick in. These could include a ban on Russian airlines flying to the US, or banks doing business with the Russian state. Effectively, the US is now on course to brand Russia a state sponsor of chemical weapons terrorism alongside North Korea and Iran. And this, ironically, for a murder committed not on US soil – but here in Britain.
What is so depressing is that, despite all the tough talk in Britain in recent days, we have shown none of this kind of mettle and determination.
For too long our government – along with an army of well-paid facilitators, from London estate agents to bankers to luxury goods retailers – have turned a blind eye to the origins of the billions stolen from the Russian people that have poured into London.
The lesson to be drawn from all this could not be more clear. While Russia’s top politicians declare themselves patriots and denounce the West, they keep their money abroad.
Some £27.3billion left Russia in 2017 alone, according to Russia’s Central Bank – a 160 per cent increase from the previous year. And that’s just the official figure.
Last April the Panama Papers – the leaked records of Mossack Fonseca, the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm – revealed a bewilderingly complex network of offshore companies used by Russian oligarchs and Putin cronies, among others, to hide their money.
Not only is this a striking demonstration of the Russian elite’s greed and venality, it also demonstrates how vulnerable the country’s economy really is.
And it offers the British Government a serious opportunity to hit Putin’s circle where it hurts.
Far tougher measures are needed to crack down on the tens of billions of pounds of Russian investments in Britain. Assets should be seized, bank accounts ruthlessly frozen.
In addition the Russian economy has to be squeezed relentlessly. To date, the rounds of EU and US measures have been hopelessly ineffective. They have neither dented Putin’s popularity – which remains a steady 80 per cent – nor changed his contempt for international law in Ukraine, Syria, or Salisbury.
Yet between them, the US, Britain and the EU have the power to devastate Russia’s economy.
Without access to international financial markets or bank clearing systems like the Brussels-based SWIFT, its banking system would collapse.
State-owned energy giants such as Rosneft and Gazprom are dependent on foreign capital and expertise. Major infrastructure projects like the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Germany depend on European financing and engineers.
The original rounds of sanctions drawn up in 2014 in the wake of the annexation of Crimea ‘were designed to remind [Putin] how dependent Russia’s economy is on the West’, says one of the key Obama-era US officials who drew them up.
But the brazen attempt to murder the Skripals – a British citizen targeted on British soil – shows that this warning shot has not been heeded. It’s time to take sanctions to a level that Putin and his circle will actually notice.
PUTIN could retaliate, of course, with the only truly effective weapon still available to him – cyber warfare. Already Russian hackers have shown their terrifying ability to shut down electricity grids in whole regions of the Western Ukraine.
The devastating NotPetya computer virus – designed by state-sponsored Russian cyber criminals – was launched in 2017 as an attack on Ukrainian banks and businesses, but ended up spreading across the world, shutting down the entire global logistics operations of shipping giant Maersk and dozens of other Western companies. It caused an estimated £10billion worth of damage.
Clearly, the West has to defend against this kind of international cyber-terrorism just as aggressively as it has responded to more traditional terrorist threats.
For years, Russian television has been telling its viewers that the country is at war with the West – battling a ‘multifaceted global plot to destroy Russia’ as Franz Klintsevich, a member of the defence committee of Russia’s upper house of parliament, said last week.
Given the irrefutable evidence of Putin’s involvement in the Skripal attack, it is time to take such comments seriously. We must take the war to the Kremlin.