Super power games
How russia sports ban feeds putin’s siege mentality
Why does Vladimir Putin do it? Why does he do obviously illicit things so crassly, almost as if he wants to be caught?
Think of the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury, when Ealing comedy-like Russian spies left a tell-tale trail that quickly identified them as the attempted killers.
We saw it this week with the hack and leak of the NHS trade documents between the US and the UK, which look as if they were thrown online in a manner consistent with previous Russian “covert” info-ops. It was as if the perpetrators were begging to be identified. Or there’s yesterday’s news about Russian sports teams being done for doping in a fashion so crass it’s flabbergasting.
As a result Russia is set to miss the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar after being handed a four-year ban from all major sporting events by
Pro-russian separatist in Ukraine
on operations that constantly push the West, or the thing once known as the West, into dilemma situations: large enough to generate attention, small enough to make sure the response remains non-military. So far he’s usually successful. Even his most violent actions, such as in Syria, came after a long period of testing the waters to ensure there would be no direct confrontation with a superior power.
Now he can undertake a bombing operation that is low-risk for him but makes Russia look like a giant in the Middle East.
At home the sanctions and verbal push-back from the “international community” help Putin argue that the West is all words and no real action. Meanwhile he