Groundhog Day in Russia
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s sentencing in a Moscow courtroom on Tuesday came, fittingly, on Groundhog Day. The aptness has nothing to do with large rodents predicting the weather, but with the 1993 film starring Bill Murray, in which the helpless protagonist wakes up to an alarm clock that starts the same day over and over.
A Russian-style Groundhog Day is watching yet another brave ally in the fight for freedom swallowed up in the maw of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship.
The international responses to these events also don’t change much. “Grave concerns” are expressed. Leaders or their deputies “call on the Russian government” to “immediately” release, cease or retreat from its latest abomination.
These statements seldom mention Putin by name, falling into the trap of treating Russia like a normal country with a normal government.
President Joe Biden has a chance to finally get U.S. policy toward Putin’s Russia right.
Engaging with dictatorships always fails. They must be isolated and contained, or else they spread their corruption to the free world, while using the profits from engagement to fund repression at home and aggression abroad.
The traditional recipes of international diplomacy are worthless against a mafia dictatorship that cares nothing for ideology or national interests. Hurting the Russian people doesn’t bother Putin, so sanctions must target him and his gang directly. Putin doesn’t care about left or right; he cares about money.
This is why Navalny’s focus on corruption and Putin’s personal wealth so infuriates him.
Navalny knows what Putin cares about, and the West should learn too, if it wants results.
Existing sanctions, many based on the laudable Magnitsky Act, suffer from piecemeal application. Some of Putin’s billionaire pals can no longer visit their money in Europe or the United States, but their families are welcome to.
Blocking human rights abusers and their families from travel, freezing their assets and blocking their companies from doing business in the free world would finally take the gloves off and send the message that Putin is too toxic to keep around.
Biden was part of the Obama administration, but he wasn’t calling the shots. Now he should establish his own doctrine, a foreign policy based on democratic principles and strategic planning. America remains the only country capable of leading the free world, and the past four years have shown what happens when it doesn’t.
Stopping Putin will be difficult, but it will only be harder tomorrow. The alarm clock has gone off many times; will Navalny’s imprisonment finally wake up Putin’s appeasers?
In “Groundhog Day,” Bill Murray’s character tries everything to break out of the loop, from kidnapping the groundhog to suicide. In the end, what breaks the spell is his becoming a better human being.
Now the United States and its allies must look inside and examine their principles to break the terrible cycle they helped create in Russia. When that happens, and only when that happens, it will be the end of a very long day.