Dangerously wrong to see abusive kleptocracy like Russia as alternative to US

It was with dismay that I read Brian Wilson’s apology for contemporary Russia in your online edition on 22 June (“World Cup show Russia is getting stronger. It is time for Britain to start engaging”).

As he urges us to leave behind our Cold War mentality and stop seeing Russia as the enemy, he sang the praises of a “brilliant festival of football and friendship”, rejoicing that “the big winner has been Russia itself ”, where “light-touch security and the warmth of welcome have confounded stereotypes”.

I wonder if Brian Wilson has heard of Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian filmmaker and one of 70 Ukrainian political prisoners held in Russian prisons today? Sentsov, who was abducted from Crimea by Russia’s secret services, tortured, and sentenced to 20 years on fabricated charges of terrorism, is in his 40th day of hunger strike in a high security prison in the Russian Arctic.

The harsh climate (the temperatures at this time of year are barely above freezing) and hunger strike have devastated his health. For football fans from abroad, “light-touch security and the warmth of welcome” but not for those who object to Vladimir Putin.

Brian Wilson dismisses those who see the World Cup as a propaganda coup for Putin, making an equivalence between the tournament in Russia and Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games – “one man’s propaganda is another’s justified pride”, he writes.

This statement represent san irresponsible white washing of abuses and crimes. At the time of the Commonwealth Games, Scotland was not locking up political prisoners (as Russia is) or allowing gay men to be tortured and murdered (as Russia is in Chechnya); Scotland had not illegally annexed any territory (as Russia did with Crimea), and was not fuelling a conflict in a neighbouring state that had claimed over 10,000 lives (as Russia has in eastern Ukraine). It hardly needs pointing out that the situations are not the same.

The thrust of Brian Wilson’s article was that the UK should stop kowtowing to the US and Trump, forget its Cold War stereotypes, and build new bridges with Russia. He warns us against the principle of “my enemy’s enemy is my friend’” Yet he is following precisely this logic – Brian Wilson objects to US hegemony in the world, and, like many on the left who themselves have their roots in a certain kind of Cold War mentality, he seems to believe that Russia represents some kind of alternative.

Russia is not the antidote to the West’s neo-liberal regimes and increasing nationalism. It is a corrupt kleptocracy that robs its own people while promoting the kind of right-wing, nationalist-religious conservativism that most left-wingers would be appalled by in their own back yards.

I hope Brian Wilson enjoys the rest of his stay in Russia. He won’t be able to read much that is reliable about Oleg Sentsov in the Russian media, but when he gets back, I recommend that he does some homework.

UILLEAM BLACKER Lecturer in comparative Russian and East European culture, School of Slavonic and

East European Studies, University College London