Category Archives: Russia

Arts, Books, Russia, Society

Book Review: Putin’s People

LITERARY REVIEW

Belton

HEGEMONY

IN Russia, the national referendum to extend Vladimir Putin’s stay in office for another 12 years has been postponed.

The proposal that he was to continue for two more six-year terms after his present mandate ends in 2024 was due to be put to the people on Wednesday, 22 April. But due to coronavirus, or Covid-19, the vote was deferred.

Given his vice-like grip on the levers of power of that vast country and the muted opposition to him, there can be little doubt which way it would have gone. He would effectively have been endorsed as president for life.

But now there is a pause – if a brief one – in his relentless pursuit of an unchallenged and supreme autocracy.

That even tough gut Vlad – “The Papa” or “The Number One” as his cronies call him – must bow to the virus is almost a relief. Because in the twenty years since he grabbed the presidency, no one at home has managed to stand in his way without being rolled over, removed, imprisoned, killed, cowed or bribed into submission.

At the same time, he has turned a clapped-out post-communist nation going nowhere into an aggressive and much feared international power. Putin’s Russia now has its insidious fingers in every political, diplomatic, military and financial pie around the world – with deeply worrying implications for all of us.

How this man seemingly from nowhere managed his Napoleonic rise from mere deputy mayor of St Petersburg to absolute power is arguably the biggest story of the 21st century so far.

In forensically unravelling it, journalist Catherine Belton, former Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times, has done a great service, producing a book that western experts on modern Russia acknowledge as vital to our understanding of the Putin phenomenon.

Her study and thesis is chilling indeed. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991 and communism gave way to a makeshift form of democracy, the KGB, Moscow’s underground army of spies, crooks and secret policemen, disappeared from the radar. But they hadn’t gone for good. They weren’t defeated, only biding their time.

Their moment came when the oligarchs, who in effect ran Russia after making vast fortunes from oil, gas and mineral rights amid the economic and political chaos of the Yeltsin years, catapulted the seemingly pliable Putin into the presidency.

They promoted him as their man to sort the country out and bring it to some semblance of liberal democracy. They didn’t expect him to last more than one four-year term.

What they didn’t reckon on was that Putin was KGB to the core. He’d cut his teeth spying on the West in the old communist days, subverting Western businessmen, stealing industrial secrets, and smuggling. And it was with his old pals that his true allegiance lay.

With Putin in the driving seat, Belton argues, the KGB was back in control of Russia and its grip on the country is as strong now as it ever was in the Soviet days.

His agenda – eagerly taken up by the so-called siloviki (the word means “strongmen”) he recruited from the old ranks – was to make the nation all-powerful again, a top-down, state-run force not to be trifled with at home or abroad.

Along the way they would feather their own nests, through money-laundering, bribery, fraud, rake-offs, slush funds and theft. Putin’s Russia would become not just an autocracy but a kleptocracy.

He turned the tables on the oligarchs who’d sponsored him, strong-arming them into acquiescence. They worked for him now, not the other way round.

What emerged, writes Belton, was “a system in which all businesses of any scale were dependent on the Kremlin. Tycoons had to serve the state in order to preserve their standing and wealth”.

Those who resisted found the police knocking on their doors with arrest warrants for tax evasion, fraud or other serious crime. Backed by the state, he had them at his mercy.

Some ran – like media magnate Boris Berezovsky, only to end up dying mysteriously in England. Some went to prison – Russia’s richest man, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, said to be worth £12 billion, was boarding his private jet in Siberia when commandos arrested him. Most caved in and did as they were told – Roman Abramovich, says Belton, purchased Chelsea FC on Putin’s instructions, as a way of enhancing Russian prestige in the West.

CROOKED

EVEN those closest to him weren’t safe, especially if they got too big for their boots. Sergei Pugachev made billions as Putin’s favourite banker before “Papa” turned on him and looted his vast assets.

In exile, Moscow mafia thugs turned up, took him out to a yacht in the Mediterranean and demanded £280 million to guarantee the “safety” of his family.

Belton draws on published sources and deep-throat contacts to plot a course through the maze of crooked financial manoeuvres – the sleights of hand, the backroom deals, the “loans” from state banks, the kick-backs on contracts – that Putin and his courtiers got up to as they systematically drew the wealth to themselves as inexorably as iron fillings to a magnet.

They stashed their ill-gotten gains overseas, their so-called “black cash” amounting to a staggering £640 billion in all, according to one estimate, while at home they flaunted their riches, kitting themselves out with yachts and private planes and vast palaces. One of these had a garage for 15 cars and a storeroom for fur coats.

All the while, human rights, freedom and the rule of law went increasingly by the board. Local governors were stripped of their authority. Dissent was suppressed. The courts acted as an arm of the Kremlin. Judges toed the line.

Though Russia was ostensibly a democracy, the reality was that power emanated from the top down, with Putin as a feudal monarch, a tyrant, a tsar like Peter the Great, surrounded by his henchmen, his boyars, who owed their fealty and their vast riches to him.

Belton finds it shameful that the West – which had worked for and then welcomed the demise of communist rule in Russia – connived in this return to autocracy.

Bankers and brokers in London, in particular, fell over themselves to get a slice of the financial action, happy to look the other way as fortunes were hidden in offshore havens.

Peers of the realm lined up to lend their apparent respectability to the boardrooms of Russian ventures. Russian money swirling around London earned the capital the nickname of “Londongrad” or Moskva-na-Thames. In the United States, Donald Trump, before he became president, did deals with the Russians to bail out and expand his property empire.CROOKED

WEALTHY POWER-BROKER

GREED triumphed over principle, with the result that the West, by slavishly following its own money-making instincts, has allowed itself to be infiltrated. Belton warns: “The weakness of the Western capitalist system, in which money ultimately outweighs all other considerations, has left it wide open for the Kremlin to manipulate.”

Making matters worse is that the siloviki were on a mission, not just to get very rich, but to use that wealth to undermine the West. Under communism, the KGB had seen the West as its enemy. Its successors, led by Putin, feel the same way.

Under him, Russia, once a busted flush on the world stage, has become the world’s power broker again, whether openly, as in Ukraine and the Middle East, or covertly.

In its new guise, the KGB has adopted the tricks of the old KGB, causing disruption in the West wherever it can.

Its money backs political extremists, Right or Left – the cause isn’t important, only the confusion they cause. It gets up to all sorts of mischief to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Europe. It encourages unrest and dissension just to stir the pot.

In the eyes of Putin and his cronies, the Cold War has never ended, just moved into a new phase. We have clearly been warned.

– Putin’s People by Catherine Belton is published by William Collins, 640pp

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Britain, Europe, NATO, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, United States

The nuclear détente withdrawal makes the world far more dangerous

ARMS CONTROL TREATY

TENSIONS between the world’s two nuclear superpowers have reached a level not seen since the early 1980s.

During an election rally in Nevada, President Trump said that Russia was cheating on the 1987 arms control treaty. The treaty banned land-based cruise missiles in Europe.

An agreement had been made back in 1987 between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev – leaders who trusted each other enough to take a decisive step in ending the arms race which had been a key feature of the Cold War for the previous four decades.

Now Trump, in response to Putin’s cheating, is saying he will pull out of the treaty altogether. And the world is back to the hair-trigger situation faced before détente introduced arms control between East and West.

The fact is that the new highly-mobile missiles which Russia have developed undoubtedly make the world a far more dangerous place. And Donald Trump’s aggressive chest-beating response risks making an already fraught situation worse.

To understand why, we must look at how Putin has broken his treaty obligations.

The Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty banned Russia from having any land-based intermediate nuclear missiles with a range of more than 300 miles. Sea-launched missiles were allowed, however – the theory being that they were more difficult for Russia to hide because the submarines and warships from which they were launched could be tracked and monitored by the West.

As a result, instead of the lumbering land-based SS20 missiles which worried the West so much in the 1980s, Russia has concentrated over the decades on developing much smaller missiles that can be launched from the sea. Such missiles, albeit without nuclear warheads, were used to devastating effect against rebels in Aleppo in Syria.

What Putin’s technicians have now done is to adapt these Kalibr sea-launched systems to make land-based cruise missiles capable of being transported by small trucks. They can be moved across country at 50mph and it would be impossible to track every one of them – making a surprise attack technically possible.

And the missiles, which fly under the radar, have been fitted with supersonic boosters which makes them practically impossible to intercept. This puts a vast swathe of NATO countries, including Britain, theoretically in the firing line.

 

WHY this is so disturbing is that it fits into Putin’s tactical strategy. Today’s Kremlin chief is ruthless, but worse he runs a Russia much less moribund than the wheezing Communist colossus of the 1980s. Putin’s armed forces are much leaner and meaner than in those days.

War in the 21st century has been practised already from Syria to Ukraine and in cyberspace. Putin knows he doesn’t need two million badly trained soldiers to be sacrificed in the trenches.

If it comes to war, he’ll need the best cyber-sabotage, the most effective special forces and, crucially, unstoppable medium-range nuclear missiles. Which he now seems to have acquired, despite the treaty.

This is why Trump has reacted so vigorously. Playing the tough guy also plays well to his core supporters, and he faces mid-term elections in two weeks’ times.

The trouble is that by dropping the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty now might suit Russia better in the coming years than the US. While for America the INF treaty has been a useful bulwark against nuclear escalation and proliferation, Putin’s strategists have chafed at the restrictions INF imposed on them.

By ripping it up, Trump will be criticised by European leaders – Germany was the first US ally to do so, with foreign minister Heiko Maas urging Washington to consider the consequences both for Europe and for future disarmament efforts.

All of this will delight Putin because it plays into his divide-and-rule approach to Europe.

More worryingly, if Trump does dump the INF agreement, there will be nothing to stop Putin’s generals from building and refining as many of these new faster-than-sound land-based nuclear missiles as possible.

Other nuclear powers, especially China and probably India and Pakistan, will want to buy them if they can’t build their own.

This technology is so easy to hide, swift to deploy and difficult to stop that it steeply increases the chances of a successful surprise nuclear attack. Worse still, without the trust between the US and Russian leaders that existed in Reagan and Gorbachev’s day, diplomacy is on a hair trigger – as in the worst days of the Cold War.

President Trump has declared he wants to make America safer, but we should fear he has made the world an even more dangerous and tense place. According to Mikhail Gorbachev, pulling out of the historic US-Russia arms treaty now “endangers life on Earth”.

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Britain, Government, National Security, Russia, Society, United States

The Kremlin’s power to paralyse

WESTERN SECURITY

RUSSIA’S tentacles of sinister cyber operations are snaking out across the globe and pose the gravest of threats to Western security and democracy.

Recent revelations expose the sheer scale, breadth and audacity of the Kremlin-backed plots – and our vulnerability to this new brand of warfare.

Among those who were targeted were a British television network, the Democratic Party in America, public transport hubs in Ukraine, the US engineering giant Westinghouse, and the World Anti-Doping Agency based in Montreal – apparently hacked in a brazen act of revenge for showing Russia’s systematic abuse of the testing regime at the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2014.

Perhaps the most disturbing of all, however, was the unsuccessful attacks on our own soil – at the Foreign Office and Porton Down – and the foiled attempts by four Russian agents to hack the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in the Hague.

The OPCW is continuing to conduct investigations into the Salisbury novichok poisonings and the use of banned weapons by the Russian-backed Assad regime in Syria.

About a dozen or so “cyber-actors” have been identified as responsible, but they are all fronts for the GRU – the Russian military intelligence unit also implicated in the attempted assassination of former Russian agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

Given are dependence on computers, its coordinated attacks have huge implications. Everything from cash machines to home heating systems, from electricity generators to mobile phones, and to the health service which is relying more on cyber technology. We have seen many times in recent years the enormous disruption caused by a temporary breakdown in service, as happened during the botched IT upgrade at the TSB bank.

Similarly, 18 months ago the NHS was hit by a major cyber problem, prompting the mass cancellations of appointments and operations. Then the North Korean government of Kim Jong-Un was cynical enough to take the blame and the fear inspired by that. But it is clear, from the wealth of mounting evidence, that the Russians certainly have the capability and determination to launch similar attacks.

If patients’ lives were put at risk by such a cyber-attack, it would create a real global panic – the cyber equivalent of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

That is why we should be worried. What is happening now in cyberspace is even more dangerous and certainly more unpredictable than the darkest days of the Cold War.

For all the anxieties back then about a nuclear stand-off, at least the hostility between the West and the Soviet Bloc was governed by respected boundaries. The rules – such as a prohibition on assassinations – were generally upheld. Both sides communicated with each other, partly from the need to avoid a nuclear apocalypse through a catastrophic misunderstanding.

That culture has disappeared. We live in a much more fluid world where restrictions on movement – especially in Europe – hardly exist at all. At any given moment there are probably more than 100,000 Russians in Britain, most of them wholly innocent and here to work, study or by enjoying a break. Yet that transient mass also provides cover for hostile intelligence agents.

Moreover, technology makes it much easier for someone to cause mayhem. During the Cold War, if the Soviets wanted to hit a water pumping station or sabotage an aircraft, they had to send in armed agents. Today, that could be accomplished from an office in Moscow or Kiev – just as computer programs can churn out millions of emails to damage businesses, influence elections and propagate fake news and untruths.

Then there are the armies of hackers in “troll” factories who spread and disseminate destabilising information, such as Hillary Clinton’s emails or the intricate medical details of Olympic cyclist Bradley Wiggins’ asthma prescriptions. The aim is to undermine public respect for Western politicians and heroes alike.

The fall of the Berlin Wall almost three decades ago was a remarkable triumph for freedom and capitalism over totalitarianism. But that ascendency lulled Western politicians into a false sense of security.

Russia, which has an economy no bigger than that of Britain or France, is showing almost by the day that if resources are focused on a certain area – in this case cyber warfare – then a nation can still have lethal power.

And we are only just coming to terms with it. Lord Ricketts, who served as Britain’s National Security Adviser until 2012, has warned that the recent plots are just the start, “pilot projects” to test defences in advance of a full-blooded cyber assault to bring anarchy to the West.

As President Putin’s invasion of Crimea and his support for the blood-soaked Assad regime in Syria has shown, he is not a man constrained by normal democratic values. Throughout his presidency he has been pushing at boundaries, seeing what he can get away with, what will provoke the West to act.

Now his dwindling popularity at home over his domestic agenda – particularly his attempt to raise the retirement age – makes it all the more imperative for him to wrap himself in the nationalist flag with high-profile attacks on the West.

 

AT least the complacency in Europe and America is beginning to lift and we are starting to fight back – such as when the Dutch defence minister, Ank Bijeveld, and Peter Wilson, the British ambassador to the Netherlands, explained how the OPCW conspiracy was foiled.

In the context of cyber warfare, the West has unparalleled expertise. The staff of both the US National Security Agency and our own formidable base at GCHQ in Cheltenham have world-beating abilities in hacking computers and other electronic devices.

So far, the West has proved far more restrained than Russia in deploying that expertise. There is only one documented case of Western agents using a computer against an enemy state’s infrastructure. That occurred when the Israelis and the Americans worked together to release the Stuxnet virus into the computers that operated Iran’s nuclear programme. It proved what the West can do if necessary.

But any escalation in cyber warfare is fraught with risk. A miscalculation by any rogue agents, anxious to ingratiate themselves with the Kremlin, could have disastrous consequences.

The reality of the new world disorder is one in which Putin is not only promoting, but relishing. We would do well to remember that.

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