Merkel a lone voice from West congratulating Putin
Western reaction muted as allegations of vote rigging and intimidation surround controversial victory
ANGELA MERKEL was one of the few leaders to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his victory in Sunday’s election as Europe split over its reaction amid allegations of vote-rigging.
In a telegram, the German chancellor wished Mr Putin “success in the tasks ahead” and said they should “continue the dialogue with one another and to foster relations between our states and peoples”.
Mrs Merkel is under pressure from German supporters of a gas pipeline deal with Russia, and faces a domestic opposition that is warm to Mr Putin in the form of the nationalist Alternative for Germany party (AFD).
Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, on the other hand, telephoned Mr Putin yesterday, but a readout of the call avoided the term “congratulated”. Instead, it said Mr Macron wished “Russian people” success in modernising their country.
What followed was a laundry list of concerns about Russia’s role in the conflicts in Syria and eastern Ukraine. Mr Macron also urged Mr Putin to “shed all light on responsibilities linked
with the unacceptable Salisbury attack”. After the vote on Sunday, Mr Putin denied Russia had any role in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former double agent.
Other western European states were largely silent on Mr Putin’s re-election, as was the US, which imposed new sanctions on Russian citizens and entities over interference in the 2016 election. Meanwhile, the leaders of Serbia, Belarus, Iran, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba praised his victory. Xi Jinping, China’s president, sent a congratulatory message and said he was ready to bring bilateral relations “to a higher level”.
At a meeting yesterday with the candidates he had defeated the day before, Mr Putin said “no one is planning to accelerate some kind of arms race” and called for developing “constructive” relations with other countries.
Monitors from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe criticised the election for lacking “real choice”, saying many Russians had been pressured to vote and media had failed to cover the race critically.
Alexei Navalny, the opposition leader who called for a boycott after he was barred from running, accused the authorities of electoral fraud and said Mr Putin had actually received fewer votes than in the 2012 election.
An independent analysis of the results reported by all polling stations suggested that nearly 10million votes had been falsified for Mr Putin.
♦ A Ukrainian pilot falsely accused by Russia of shooting down the MH17 airliner has taken his own life. Capt Vladyslav Voloshyn, 29, shot himself at home in the Ukrainian city of Mykolaiv yesterday, local media reported.
Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine in July 2014, with the loss of all 298 people on board. A Dutch-led investigation concluded that the airliner was downed by a surface-to air-missile fired from territory controlled by Russian-backed separatists.
As news of President Putin’s re-election rolled in, I wondered if I could ever have achieved his 76 per cent victory in my old constituency of Richmond, North Yorkshire. On balance, I think I could have. If I had been able, as he was, to have my main opponent disqualified, hand-pick the other candidates to be a “millionaire communist” and a Tv-show host, intimidate the media and stuff some of the ballot boxes, I reckon I could have got 76 per cent, there or pretty much anywhere.
It is a much more cleverly designed system, of course, than the old 99 per cent results of Soviet days. This one allows you to be fooled if you want to be. It is an election but without a choice; legitimacy without observing any rules; a grey area hiding a dark truth – that Russia is really a dictatorship.
Amazingly enough, there are people in other countries who do want to be fooled, and who will watch RT (Russia Today), soaking up the propaganda. As Russian bombs have smashed down on the homes of innocent civilians in Syria, Moscow has insisted that it is only fighting terrorists. After a Russian missile brought down the Malaysian airlines flight over Ukraine in 2014, they tried unsuccessfully to argue that it was not theirs. And Russia conducted massive, state-sponsored abuse of Olympic drug testing for years.
Jeremy Corbyn, after his pitiful performances of the last week, needs to ask himself what exactly it is about a regime of proven liars and cheats that makes him want to bend over backwards to give them the benefit of some doubt, rather than believe our own intelligence services and scientists. The answer, while he is not a fool, is that he wants to be fooled, because a lifetime of hostility to the security services of his own country requires falling for the deceptions of others in order to sustain it.
So we have a Leader of the Opposition who preaches about human rights but averts his gaze as much as possible from atrocities committed abroad – and even attempted murder on our own soil by Russia – because believing that such things happen would logically lead to accepting that we need to defend ourselves.
He can only keep his long-held view of the world, in which the West is always the villain, if he keeps being fooled.
In Corbyn’s case, this has been amply demonstrated in the last week. Yet across Europe there are more mainstream political leaders who want to turn a blind eye to Russian behaviour if they can, rather than face up to the need to do something. Cyberspace is an ideal grey area for Moscow, lending itself to shadowy attacks without the need to admit to them.
The massive cyber attack on Estonia by Russia in 2007, for example, set out to paralyse banks, ministries and broadcasters, but did not involve declaring war. Russian operations in Ukraine have included co-ordination of social media and armed groups as a new way of invading a country without saying so.
Nato has now recognised that this requires some new thinking, and is set to discuss this “hybrid warfare” at a summit in July. It is already well behind the game. Really facing up to this means, first of all, acknowledging the scale of the problem, so that democratic societies can see that they have to act. The head of the UK National Cyber Security Centre said in a speech in November last year that Russia had attacked our “media, telecommunications and energy sectors”. Some other countries, however, still seem reluctant to avow, openly, that Russian hackers are almost certainly doing the same to them.
Collective attribution and identification of cyber attacks, or of secret positioning to launch them in the future, is a crucial step to a common strategy. So is agreement that Nato is the right vehicle for this. French and German officials, I understand, have been arguing for a big role for the European Union – the effect of which would be to dilute, confuse and weaken the Western response, divorcing it from the United States and Canada.
Then Nato leaders should be instructing their experts to evolve a new doctrine of hybrid warfare and contemplate reinforcing the Nato treaty of 1949 to accommodate it. Article 5 of that treaty is the famous clause that commits all 29 members to come to each other’s defence if under armed attack.
But what if the attack takes the form of vital services being disrupted, communications mysteriously cut off, millions of messages on social media discrediting the country’s armed forces, and men without uniforms raiding the border – all while RT pours scorn on the very idea it could be anything to do with Moscow? Does that trigger Article 5 or not? And if it does, do tanks roll and bombers take to the air, starting a full-scale conflict?
Merely asking these questions shows that Nato now needs an entirely new concept of attack and defence and a new treaty article or protocol to back it up: an Article 5B. A new doctrine would make clear that the use of a hybrid and undeclared attack would trigger a collective response from the alliance – a response that can be scaled up or down and, like the attack itself, stop short of all-out war.
It would mean that the 29 allies would state clearly together what is happening, and that all would support each other in defending themselves in cyberspace and the media, and through limited physical force. It would also mean that all would join in retaliation, if necessary – including cyber attacks on Russia.
Military leaders need to integrate all this into their thinking, which they have so far been too slow to do, so that they plan for taking action against an enemy without knowing whether they are, in a conventional sense, at war.
The purpose of this, like Nato doctrine during the Cold War, would not be to start a conflict but to deter one, through making clear that the new murky type of hostilities that technology has now thrown up cannot be exploited without consequences.
The updating of Nato would be a far stronger check on a bullying Kremlin than any number of diplomatic expulsions, correct and well judged though they have been. And it would mean that the Western alliance, so accustomed to the black and white choice of peace or war, would at last be adapting to the new world so beloved of President Putin and displayed in his election victory – a world of permanent grey.