Category Archives: Russia

Britain, Europe, Government, Russia, Society

The prospect of an escalating global war is terrifyingly real

THE WEST AND RUSSIA

THERESA MAY made perhaps the most momentous statement of her political career at Westminster when, in a dramatic scene in the Commons, she effectively accused the Russian state of an act of war. She said the Kremlin had instructed its military intelligence agency, the GRU, to assassinate the defector Sergei Skripal in March.

Backed up by a wealth of irrefutable evidence about the two Russian intelligence agents who carried out the assignment, which ultimately resulted in the death of a British citizen and three other serious poisoning cases, Mrs May’s assertion has huge implications, not only for Britain’s relations with the rogue Russian regime, but also for European and Western foreign policy as a whole.

The Salisbury incident is truly shocking. It is the first time that a Briton has been killed on our home soil by a chemical weapon deployed by a foreign power. Yet until it happened, Britain seemed utterly indifferent to the brutality of Vladimir Putin’s government.

 

AFTER Putin sanctioned and authorised another well publicised assault on British soil in 2006, when ex-Russian secret policeman Alexander Litvinenko was murdered with a radioactive poison in London, the initial shock and anger soon ebbed away to apathy, thanks in large part to the feebleness of our Government’s response.

Whilst it is true that the British authorities were quick to name the Russian suspects, the speed of this early announcement was not matched by resolute action from the Government.

The huffing and puffing in Whitehall produced half-measures. That can only have reassured the Russian spymasters that they could get away with assassination.

Sine then we have all become aware of the litany of charges against Russia, like its seizure of Crimea, its blood-soaked intervention in Syria in aide of President Assad’s tyranny and its shooting down of the Malaysian airliner MH17 over rebel-held Ukraine in 2014.

But all those atrocities happened abroad, it was argued. They were nothing to do with us, so a proverbial slap on the wrists would surely do.

In contrast, from the start of the Skripal case, the Prime Minister has been far tougher, imposing sanctions, expelling Russian diplomats, galvanising NATO, and even winning the support of Donald Trump’s White House and the EU for her actions.

Admittedly, this was partly because the potential consequence of the Salisbury poisoning was even more serious than the Litvinenko case, given that Novichok put hundreds of lives at risk.

Nevertheless, the British Government has, despite all its problems with Brexit, displayed a commendable spirit of resolution that has been all too absent until now.

Through her clear-sighted resolution, Theresa May has mounted a direct challenge to Putin’s regime.

And although it has taken six months to name the alleged perpetrators, it has been worth the wait. Thanks to the thoroughness of the investigation, the sheer weight of incriminating material she was able to announce in the Commons means that the Russian state cannot slide away from its responsibility for this crime.

What her Commons statement also did was to blow apart the absurd conspiracy theories about the Salisbury assault that have been circulating, many of them promoted by Putin’s regime or by Kremlin sympathisers.

The evidence, gathered by 250 detectives from 11,000 hours of CCTV footage, shows incontestably where the blame lies. This raises the question as to why the Kremlin resorted to such an act. The answer lies in Putin’s security policy, which is so important to his macho political persona and the image of his regime’s invincibility.

As a former KGB officer himself, he has made ruthlessness a central part of his strongman reputation. It thereby enhances his appeal among the Russian people.

When he first came to power in 2000 on his election as Russian president, there were profound weaknesses in the country’s security apparatus, epitomised by the defections of agents like Litvinenko and Skripal.

 

SO much information was leaked after the fall of communism that Western intelligence thought they had crippled Russia’s GRU agency, giving MI6 and the CIA a window directly into Russian policymaking which helped them to predict the Kremlin’s actions.

But Putin changed all that through a pitiless crackdown. Internal security was vastly improved and leaks closed.

The CIA has privately admitted that many of its contacts in Moscow have gone silent. Some have disappeared. Others simply do not respond to efforts to contact them.

Dealing mercilessly with the defectors became an essential part of that security crackdown.

Since March, it has often been asked why Skripal, a former double agent, should still be a target, so many years after Putin let him out of the Gulag and allowed him to retire to Britain. It appears that Putin’s intelligence services have decided that letting defectors sleep soundly at night offers too much temptation for others to follow suit.

Kill one, frighten 10,000 is an old tactic, and one that the Russians seem to have adopted. Washington certainly believes that putting the fear of God into potential double-agents was the real reason for poisoning Sergei Skripal.

The Salisbury attack may also reflect Putin’s wider, geopolitical strategy, with its focus on dividing the West through surprise, propaganda and intimidation. Years ago he decided the West, particularly America and Britain, wanted to get rid of his regime.

Instead of asking what he could do to allay Western concerns, he adopted the opposite course by using Russian wealth from the country’s energy resources, plus the long experience of Soviet spycraft, to mount campaigns of disinformation and denial.

Until Salisbury, that strategy appeared to be working. The Novichok assault, however, led to an unprecedented act of unity – due in part to the British Government’s resolve.

The West hung together and backed Britain. The question now is whether this accord will last. The Prime Minister has said that she will be trying to mobilise the EU to harden sanctions on Russia and co-ordinate counter-measures against Russian intelligence operations in Europe.

That could be easier said than done. The wall of unity is already showing signs of cracking. Apart from the awkwardness created by Brexit, Putin’s policy of divide and conquer is also having an impact, for the Russian president has been soft-talking allies in the EU.

Last month, for instance, he was a guest at the Austrian foreign minister’s wedding, and Vienna’s Right-wing government is one of the loudest voices in the EU clamouring for improving relations with Moscow.

In Italy, the new government is led by a critic of sanctions against Russia, so imposing new ones is unlikely to win Rome’s support.

Yet, Britain cannot possibly let the Salisbury attack slide away into unpunished oblivion as it did the Litvinenko case.

The need for action is all the more important because, worryingly, the balance of global power is sliding away from the West. The U.S., Britain and the EU are still economically potent, of course, but the rise of China as both an economic and military superpower adds to the challenge posed by Russia and other states.

Even Turkey, a member of NATO, is moving away from the West under President Erdogan. The fact is that the Salisbury outrage is a graphic indicator that the world is becoming a less stable place. It was a rare but disturbing episode that exposed the nature of the escalating global war between spy agencies.

In its aftermath, that war is likely to intensify.

Which makes it all the more imperative that the Government is robust and vigilant. The West needs to be resolute and united in the face of Putin’s ruthlessness.

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Britain, Government, Russia, Society

The UK is being dragged into new Cold War with Russia by the truth

BRITISH-RUSSIAN RELATIONS

THE Kremlin continues to dismiss accusations that its agents were behind the Salisbury chemical weapons attack with a mixture of threats, bad satire and misinformation, including the idea it is all an anti-Russian conspiracy.

Meanwhile, the police in Britain have been doing their job, trying to find out who attempted to murder former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, and who was responsible for the death of Dawn Sturgess and the poisoning of her partner Charlie Rowley with the same Novichok nerve agent, in nearby Amesbury.

Now detectives have identified several suspects who they believe to be Russian, a move that seems certain to ramp up tensions with Moscow.

Anyone taken in by the bizarre notion that the UK was behind the sinister poisonings in an attempt to discredit Moscow only needs to take a vague look at the ongoing chaos at Westminster to realise the Government is in no fit shape to plot such a grandiose scheme, even if it wanted to be.

What is certain, however, is that Britain is being dragged, against its will, into a deepening diplomatic crisis with Russia by evidence and truth, while the Kremlin continues to respond with obfuscation.

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Arts, History, Russia, Society, Soviet Union, United States

Short Essay: The Start of The ‘Cold War’

(1946-1948)

AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR the responsibility for supervising the defeated Germany was divided among the Allied victors. West Germany was occupied by British and American troops, while East Germany was occupied by Russia. Berlin, the capital of Germany, was also divided into East and West, but embedded within East German territory.

On 24 July 1948, Soviet troops set up a blockade, severing the road and rail links between West Germany and Berlin. It was a calculated act of aggression against the West, and was felt as such. The West came close to declaring war on Russia and was only put off by the thought of Stalingrad. In fact, it later turned out that Stalin did not have sufficient troops or equipment in the Russian sector (later East Germany) to launch a war on the British and American sectors (later West Germany). If the British and American troops had fought their way through the Soviet blockade, there would probably have been no further military action from Moscow, but at the time the level of risk was unknown.

The day after the Berlin blockade started an airlift began, with British and US aircraft flying in food and supplies for the people living in West Berlin – some 2million of them. The blockade continued and by September the aircraft were ferrying in 4,500 tons of supplies a day. The blockade was maintained for almost 18 months.

Relations between the West and the Soviet Union naturally cooled over the Berlin blockade. The US Presidential adviser Bernard Baruch described the situation as a “Cold War”, coining the phrase that would characterise the state of the world for the next half-century. The Soviets were not firing guns at anyone, but their behaviour was certainly hostile and intimidating.

This state of frozen hostility went on for over 40 years. It led directly to a dangerous arms race in which the latest atomic weapons were stockpiled. As the science of rocketry developed, America and the Soviet Union equipped their arsenals with rockets and missiles that could carry nuclear warheads right across the Arctic Ocean or from one side of Europe to the other. The cost of these intercontinental ballistic missiles (IBMs) was enormous, a huge drain on the economic resources of the countries involved.

A climate of fear was generated. Both sides wanted to test their latest nuclear bombs, and the bomb test explosions were in themselves intended to deter the enemy. By the late 1950s it was evident that dangerous levels of radiation were being pumped into the atmosphere by these test explosions, and anxious people were concerned their life expectancy was being shortened by the increase risk of serious illness. In the West, there was also a heightened fear that real, full-scale war would break out, a Third World War that might be shorter but far more violent than the two previous world wars, a war that could and probably would destroy both sides.

Perhaps in the knowledge that an old-style military war would probably annihilate everything and everyone, America and the Soviet Union played out their fierce rivalry in a Space Race. The competition to launch satellites, space probes and land men on the Moon was a kind of displacement activity, an acting-out of the Cold War in a contest of supremacy over space technology.

. Appendage

Cold War

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