TIME TO TAKE ON THIS THUG
He’s a gangster worth £20billion running a gangster regime. And his duping of Russians into believing the world’s out to destroy them gives him licence to commit the most appalling atrocities – which he gets away with because the West always blinks first
Next weekend, Russia goes to the polls. We may wish to think that its people will recoil from casting their votes for a president who must have authorised the repulsive attacks in Salisbury. Instead, they will almost certainly confirm Vladimir Putin in office until 2024.
this is not merely because their democracy is a sham, though of course it is. Rather, it is because many — probably most — Russians believe that former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia got exactly what traitors deserve when they were poisoned . . . and what a Moscow TV presenter had warned them to expect.
Soon after the 9/11 attacks on the twin towers, I was researching a book in Russia. My interpreter told me that most of her own friends, never mind those lower down the cultural chain, ‘think the Americans had it coming to them’.
But then, at the root of all modern Russian behaviour, not excluding this week’s Wiltshire outrage, lie pride, resentment, envy. And cruelty.
Many of Putin’s people agree that what they call ‘firm measures’ are justified when it comes to enemies of the state.
Most modern Russians accept the Kremlin narrative propagated by monopoly state media: that Russia is encircled by enemies and must strike out to protect itself from being bullied by Nato, the EU and the U.S.
If it cannot reassert lost greatness by economic, social or cultural prowess, it will do so through fear, whether that is dispensed in Ukraine, the Baltic states, Syria or an english cathedral city. Russians crave respect. Putin pleased his fan club by grandstanding this month with a new Samat ballistic missile, a ‘Status-6’ underwater drone and what was said to be a nuclear-powered cruise missile, though experts say his technical claims are as leaky as the warships with which he stages clumsy demos in the english Channel.
the West (albeit for now with no help from President trump) urges upon Moscow the merits of a rules-based world order in which there is respect for life, property and human rights.
Putin argues that for decades the so-called rules have been rigged against Russia.
TheRe is just enough truth in what he says — especially about rash attempts to expand Nato to embrace Ukraine — to be credible at home.
In addition to his assertiveness abroad, tsar Putin’s narrative of Russia as a beleaguered society is used to justify protective repression at home.
In practical terms, this repression means no property rights are enforceable unless the courts receive a nod from Putin’s creatures. Businesses are owned at the Kremlin’s pleasure, which can be withdrawn overnight.
So it was in 2014 for Vladimir Yevtushenkov, majority shareholder in the Bashneft oil giant until his stake in the firm was seized and he was abruptly arrested, allegedly for buying stolen goods.
Yevtushenkov was held under house arrest until he agreed to surrender Bashneft at a firesale price to Kremlin stooges. When he later thanked Putin for releasing him, he added slavishly — or maybe satirically: ‘And if you want any of my other companies, please feel free.’
Loyalty to the elected dictator offers Russia’s only road to advancement.
In 2016, Putin appointed three of his protection detail and a former KGB officer as regional governors. the FSB security service has absolute power over all commercial activities. It shows no more interest than do the police, however, in identifying and punishing those responsible for the murders of defiant dissidents and journalists.
Like the regime in Beijing, Moscow is becoming ever more skilled both in propagating fake news abroad and in controlling and exploiting the internet — remember that Putin once characterised the internet as ‘a CIA project’.
the Kremlin employs tens of thousands of personnel to monitor digital content and infrastructure. Media outlets operate only under state licence. Some web pages are banned and the government can unplug the internet at will.
Putin is building ever higher online walls to isolate his people from truths that he deems inconvenient — for instance, that a Russian missile killed 298 innocent people in the 2014 shootingdown of Malaysian Airlines flight 017.
It is unthinkable today that a Berlin taxi-driver would have an image of Adolf hitler stuck to his windscreen. Yet in Moscow it is commonplace to be driven by a man cherishing a picture of Josef Stalin, hitler’s closest rival among the 20th century’s mass murderers. Putin himself often avows his admiration for Stalin.
Few Russians grow up with even a remotely objective view of their own modern history. even among the educated, not many know much about the 1991 attempted coup against Mikhail Gorbachev that signalled the end of the Soviet Union and the ascent of Boris Yeltsin.
ALL over Russia new monuments to the murderous Stalin are being erected — a ghastly role model for a 21stcentury society.
Just as the Chinese are told almost nothing about the genocidal crimes of Mao tsetung, few Russians are given any help to understand that their form of government’s only significant success since
the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution was victory in World War II.
They still cannot build a refrigerator or car that anyone outside Russia would willingly buy. Nobody with a choice ever flies in a Russian commercial aircraft, and I speak with the fearful memories of one who has occasionally travelled in Russian-built helicopters.
As for the manipulation of foreign media, Putin’s army chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, asserts with satisfaction that indirect methods, notably information warfare, can ‘enable the opposing side to be deprived of its sovereignty without its actual territory being seized’.
General Andrey Kartapolov, commander of Western Military District (which covers Moscow and Leningrad), likewise argues that ‘information — including using the net to influence mass consciousness — can sometimes make direct military action completely unnecessary’.
Both the FSB and its military intelligence counterpart work closely with criminal organisations, to make cyber-attacks and trolling of targets they want to unsettle all deniable by the Kremlin.
In February last year, Moscow announced the formal creation of army ‘Information operations units’.
I was half-amused, half-appalled, to be told by a friend in the intelligence world that most of the comments allegedly penned by British readers on Mailonline beneath a recent piece of mine that was critical of Russia were, in truth, the work of Russian trolls.
Think of the huge effort the Kremlin must be committing to such activity, to play such games with media worldwide!
over the past five years, Putin has meddled in a u.S. presidential election, annexed Crimea, threatened nuclear war and mandated individual killings of which the Salisbury attacks are suspected of being the latest, always confident that he is smarter and tougher than us; that the West will blink first.
Thus far he has always been right: each outrage simply paves the way for the next.
Western leaders are convinced, almost certainly rightly, that Putin’s objectives are limited to retaining and extending his own power and wealth; and asserting Russian will across the Soviet union’s old sphere of influence.
He is willing to see countless thousands of hapless Syrian men, women and children die to show Russia’s determination to prevail. But he does not want a big war.
Nonetheless, the danger of an accident or miscalculation, most plausibly through a Russian grab for the Baltic states, remains very real.
Like all street bullies, Putin will keep bullying — and killing — until somebody makes him stop.
The challenge is for the West to achieve this with a wild man occupying the White House, and without triggering a hideous conflict.
Modern Russia is governed by a network of mafias, Sopranos with balalaikas.
Putin has been able to make mischief and even murder at home and abroad while accumulating a personal fortune minimally estimated at £20 billion.
His associates have prospered likewise.
Some of us have always thought it mistaken that Britain has allowed a host of rich Russians, — and how many acquired their wealth by honest toil? — to establish bases here. Such people have done much to advance London’s grisly reputation as money-laundering capital of the world. They regard violence as being like a laser printer — a business tool.
A friend in the boat business sometimes diverts me with tales of Russian-owned superyachts, which sail the Mediterranean and Caribbean carrying squads of bodyguards armed to the teeth.
Many years ago I expressed dismay to Douglas Hurd, when he was foreign secretary, about the influence on Britain of importing Russia’s gangster culture.
He responded with wry humour: ‘Calm down, Max. They will all send their sons to Eton, and in a generation they will be law-abiding citizens. It has always been like that.’
Yet I fear the evidence shows that the oligarchs comfortably enconsced in Esher and Sunningdale, Kensington and Chelsea are not in the slightest degree modifying their values.
Some remain thugs, whose presence we are extremely foolish to indulge.
It is highly likely that if, or when, the Salisbury assassins are identified, they will prove to be surrogates working on contract for the FSB, rather than direct employees.
McMafia, BBC TV’s highly praised drama about Russian gangsters in the West and especially in Britain, was fiction but based on real life. Essentially, it tells things as they really are, dripping with blood.
OF CouRSE, the vital question is: how should the West respond to systemic, institutionalised Russian mischief-making, aggression, gangsterism abroad?
The answers are not easy, because Putin exploits sanctions and boycotts to sell his own narrative to the Russian people, of their nation unjustly abused and victimised by foreign enemies.
The British refusal to send a high-level delegation to the 70th anniversary commemoration of the end of World War II in Moscow in 2015 was viewed by many Russians as a gratuitous insult, though, of course, it was provoked by Putin’s aggression in ukraine.
Today, however, suspicions over the Salisbury atrocity make it impossible to persist with business as usual.
The attacks reflect Putin’s determination to show Russia’s will and ability to strike at Moscow’s enemies abroad by the most horrible means.
If he mandated his agents to try to kill a former spy and his daughter, he has chosen to insult Britain in the most direct and brutal fashion.
only a direct, high-profile response can be credible.
Boris Johnson foams nonsense as usual by suggesting the withdrawal of the England team from the football World Cup in Russia, which few but English fans would notice. Much tougher action is needed.
It is certainly tempting to expel the Russian ambassador, as should have been done after the 2006 murder in London of the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.
But General Sir Richard Shirreff, former deputy Nato Supreme Commander and author of a bestselling 2016 thriller about the Russian threat, argues that we need more dialogue with Moscow.
HE SAYS: ‘At present, at every level including operational military, we are talking less to the Russians than we have done for decades — which can be very dangerous in a crisis.’
Shirreff argues, however, for the toughest possible retaliation, ‘the only language Putin understands’.
one good precedent was the 1971 expulsion of 90 Soviet intelligence personnel, which prompted expressions of outrage from the Kremlin — but earned respect.
We need far more drastic sanctions against leading Russians linked to Putin who hold assets in Britain, along with their families.
We do not need or want these people here. They should be obliged to go and not permitted to return. In some cases, there is an incontrovertible argument for freezing their assets.
over recent years and through our own weakness, Britain has become home, or at least secondhome, to some of the ugliest inhabitants of the modern world, more than a few of them Russians, many of them state-licensed crooks and some of them killers.
It is a fine thing to declare this country ‘open for business’ but a ghastly mistake to make it open to organised crime — even if some of the perpetrators indeed fulfil dear Douglas Hurd’s hopes by sending their sons to Eton.
Many British people, much of the time, shrug their shoulders about Russian aggression and repression as ‘none of our business’.
But what has happened in Salisbury makes it our business.
only the Russian state has the means to supply a sophisticated nerve agent, and declared malice against the former Kremlin spy Sergei Skripal.
When the police investigation is complete in Salisbury, it is the duty of the British Government to respond to this act of savagery as decisively as rightful public revulsion demands.