Putin’s new opponent
The russian president And his criminal elite Are in Biden’s crosshairs
Unlike Trump, putin isn’t going Anywhere Anytime soon.
— terry glavin
Now that the several crude and brutish stratagems to keep donald Trump in power have each in their turn failed — the dozens of vexatious court filings, the arm-twisting of election officials to “find” votes, the mob incitements, the insurrectionist Jan. 6 assault on the u.s. Capitol Building — the real-estate magnate and former reality-television star has finally vacated the White house. he’s no longer president of the united States. Trump has left the building.
russia’s Vladimir Putin, with whom Trump harboured a bizarre fantasy-life friendship — they’d met, then they’d never met, “Putin likes me,” they had a good relationship, there was no relationship — is still securely entrenched, however, in the Kremlin. By employing an amalgam of gangland methodology and cunning constitutional monkeywrenching, Putin has managed to remain in power for more than 20 years. unlike Trump, Putin isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.
On Sunday, Putin archrival Alexey Navalny returned to Moscow from Berlin, where he’d been transported for emergency medical treatment last August. he’d nearly died after being poisoned with Novichok, the same Soviet-era nerve agent russian agents used in the attempted assassination of russian defector Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, England, in 2018. Navalny was immediately arrested at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport along with 70 of his supporters who’d come to welcome him home.
A key foreign policy initiative sketched out by newly-elected u.s. President Joe Biden and his senior advisers calls for a united front of the world’s democracies to protect what little remains of the international rule of law and the integrity of democratic institutions, to “renew the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the free world.”
The incoming Biden administration has made it plain that Xi Jinping’s China presents the most daunting and direct threat to the integrity and resilience of the world’s democracies. But there are also mobster oligarchies of the kind Putin oversees that will have to be dealt with. Moscow’s “comprehensive strategic partnership” with Beijing serves to co-ordinate the two regimes against the democratic world.
So the democratic world needs a partnership all its own, and russia’s globe-trotting criminal elite shows up clearly in Biden’s crosshairs. “I will lead internationally to bring transparency to the global financial system, go after illicit tax havens, seize stolen assets, and make it more difficult for leaders who steal from their people to hide behind anonymous front companies.”
Those illicit tax havens are sheltered in democratic states. Those stolen assets are ferreted away in democratic states. Those anonymous front companies are registered in democratic states.
To make sense of Biden’s resolve, it’s useful to remember the near-fatal damage Putin did to the American republic. It’s all very interesting to speculate about whether hillary Clinton would have lost the 2016 presidential election to Trump anyway. What matters is what is known, which is to say what several u.s intelligence agencies concluded: Vladimir Putin personally ordered an operation code-named Project Lakhta that sought to sabotage Clinton’s campaign to Trump’s advantage.
Operating in the same cable-news and social-media landscape that allowed Trump’s fact-absent demagoguery to flourish, Moscow subjected disoriented American voters across the political spectrum to a barrage of disinformation campaigns from 2013 to at least 2017. russian hackers broke into the democratic Party’s communications systems, stole files and leaked emails, while russian operatives courted Trump and his associates with a mix of tantalizing business deals and damning political information.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation eventually indicted more than two dozen russian individuals and organizations. While direct collusion and conspiracy were never proved, several Trump campaign officials and their associates were indicted and convicted on various charges. Trump insisted all along that the whole thing had been a “hoax.” he said he believed Putin’s denials, preferring Moscow’s version of events to the findings of American intelligence agencies and the FBI.
The damage done to American self-confidence and the radically diminished capacity of millions of Americans to discern truth from fiction should help explain the disarray of russia’s democratic opposition. Putin’s circle of oligarchs enjoy the added advantage of controlling practically all the news media and all the tools of the state. Two years ago, the International Federation for human rights concluded a study that found 50 separate laws that the Putin’s united russia party has enacted since 2012 to “strangle opposition voices.”
It was back into that nightmare world that Navalny travelled over the weekend, and his brief and colourful career as an unpolished, populist anti-corruption campaigner and would-be politician provides a glimpse into that world’s rules. A lawyer by training, Navalny has spent several stints in prison over the past decade, on a variety of transparently trumped-up charges in trials that European investigators have consistently found to have been politically motivated. Show trials, in other words. More than half a dozen of them.
In one 2014 case, Navalny and his brother Oleg were charged with defrauding the French cosmetics firm yves rocher, even though the company insisted it hadn’t been defrauded and had no claim against the pair. To avoid the mass protests that Navalny’s convictions and jail terms usually spark, the courts sentenced Navalny to probation, and sent Oleg to a prison camp. The European Court of human rights investigated and found that no fraud had been committed.
After being taken from the airport in handcuffs on Sunday, Navalny was sent to jail where he will remain for a month, before facing a charge of violating the terms of his 2014 suspended sentence and probation, which means he’ll likely face jail time again.
As for Putin’s cunning ability to stay in high office, the former KGB officer’s manoeuvres began in 2008. First elected in 2000, Putin worked around presidential term-limit rules by simply switching places with his close associate dmitry Medvedev, the prime minister, after serving two fouryear stints as president. By engineering a constitutional amendment, Putin served again as president in 2012, and was re-elected in a wildly rigged election in 2018. Last August’s omnibus constitutional-amendment referendum has cleared the way for Putin to remain in power and stay in any one of his several presidential palaces until 2036.
There’s going to be a reckoning with this sort of thing during the Biden presidency. At the very least, Putin and his oligarchs are going to have a difficult time stashing away their stolen billions in British banks and Canadian real estate.
If we’ve learned anything in the Trump interregnum, it’s that democracy is a fragile thing. And defending democracy means you have to pick a side. With Biden’s summit of democracies expected sometime later this year, Washington’s freeworld allies, from Ottawa to Berlin, would be wise to remember that.