Russia's New Cold War

The Kremlin threatens the West again, but most of all it hurts the Russian people.

By Edward Lucas

Feb. 19, 2014 3:37 p.m. ET

http://online.wsj.com/

 

It is pleasant to be proved right—up to a point. With the body count rising and Kiev's Independence Square in flames, illusions about Vladimir Putin's Russia are smoldering too. I have been decrying the Putin regime since its inception. As Moscow bureau chief for the Economist until 2002, I was one of a handful of foreign journalists who did not welcome the new era of stability and decisiveness at the top. I feared where it might lead. The current fanfare over the Sochi Olympics masks the fact that fears about the rise of Vladimir Putin were entirely justified.

Where President George W. Bush looked into Mr. Putin's eyes and got a "sense of his soul," others could look into his background and see a man steeped in the values of the KGB, who had held high office in St. Petersburg, the most gangster-ridden city in Russia. The chances of his making Russia democratic, law-governed or friendly were next to nil. But such views were unfashionable in the days when Mr. Putin was feted in every Western capital.

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Russian President Vladimir Putin at the 2014 Winter Olympics, Feb 16. Mikhail Klimentyev/Associated Press

 

In 2007, people began to wake up. Anna Politkovskaya, the dissident journalist, was murdered on Mr. Putin's birthday. The London-based émigré Aleksander Litvinenko was poisoned with a sophisticated radioactive weapon; British authorities suspected the Kremlin's hand but drew back when Russia refused to cooperate in the investigation. Estonia came under cyberattack. Russia cut natural gas to Ukraine. Mr. Putin gave a venomous anti-Western speech at the Munich Security conference. I started writing a book.

When "The New Cold War" was published in 2008, I argued that Russia under Vladimir Putin was a danger to itself and others. Inside Russia, there was the erosion of media freedom, the hollowing out of institutions, the neo-Soviet approach to history, the economy's over-dependence on natural resources. The book also outlined the deep anti-Westernism of the Kremlin's thinking, its use of bluff, subterfuge, energy blackmail and divide-and-rule tactics against an inattentive West. It pointed out that Russia is adept at using the West's biggest weakness: money. Russia's biggest export is corruption; its biggest effects are in our financial and political systems.

Reaction was mixed. Many people wanted to believe that the arrival in the Kremlin in 2008 of Dmitry Medvedev, nominally as president but in fact as Mr. Putin's sidekick, marked a new era of liberalization. Russia's invasion of Georgia in 2008 rattled the West, but many people blamed both sides. The Obama administration tried to "reset" relations—a much-hyped gambit that brought negligible results.

Six years later, the Medvedev era is forgotten. Russia has showed a formidable knack for diplomatic stunts, such as midwifing the deal on Syria in which the Obama administration and others agreed not to try to stop Bashar Assad's war on the Syrian people in return for his promise (unfulfilled) to get rid of chemical weapons. Then there is Russia's new alliance with the authoritarian regime in Egypt that replaced the elected government. But nobody mistakes deal-making for friendship.

The architect of the "reset," U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul, is leaving Moscow battered by the regime's hostility. The idea that the Kremlin is misruling Russia rather than modernizing it, and that other countries have every reason to be worried, finally counts as common sense.

Amid the gauzy media coverage of the Sochi Olympics, there have been at least some attempts to focus attention on the corruption and incompetence surrounding the construction for the Games, and on Russia's abysmal human-rights record—regarding homosexuals, political opponents or almost anyone who gets in the way of the Kremlin's power. On Sunday, CBS's "60 Minutes" ran a lengthy piece on Russian corruption and the case of Sergei Magnitsky, the whistleblower who died in prison after exposing a $230 million fraud perpetrated by Russian officials against taxpayers.

So my diagnosis of the threat from Russia is now broadly shared. But my prescriptions are not. Past complacency about Russia was bad, but inconsistent outrage today isn't much better. Those who bemoan Russia's human-rights record need to be sure that they are just as strict regarding Saudi Arabia or China. The West did not (to put it mildly) take a tough stance on China's continuing brutality in occupied Tibet in the run-up to the Beijing Olympics. The Kremlin's propagandists argue that Western human-rights accusations are self-interested and selective. The Russians have a point—the West's inconsistency has given them an opening.

The Russian opposition also has grounds for complaint when it accuses the West of complicity in the grotesque, multibillion-dollar looting of Russia by the Putin regime. Shamefully, British, American and European banks, lawyers and auditing firms have enabled this—for instance, by allowing shadowy energy-trading firms to disguise their beneficial ownership in Western jurisdictions, and to launder the proceeds of their murky deals in our banks. Russian opposition leaders say that if and when they win office and topple the Putin regime, they will have hard questions for the West.

Our complicity in the Russian elite's looting spree blunts the edge of our criticism of the Kremlin's other misdeeds. Russians could be forgiven for thinking that Europe and America are in favor of good government—except when it is in our commercial interest to shut our eyes and cash in.

Another jarring note comes when foreigners conflate opposition to the Putin regime with anti-Russian sentiment, for example, by the jeering of Russian Olympic athletes in recent days. The Russian competitors in Sochi are not responsible for Mr. Putin's misdeeds.

Unthinking hostility plays into the regime's hands. Its propagandists love to write off their critics as "Russophobes." We should not make life easier for Mr. Putin and his cronies. The real Russophobes are the people who steal from Russians, lie to them, bully them, beat them, jail them and even kill them.

What the West should do is beef up the sanctions that Russian people themselves support—such as money-laundering investigations and visa bans against their tormentors. Congress has already passed legislation banning senior figures involved in the Magnitsky case from visiting the U.S., and freezing their assets. The Obama administration, though, has been dragging its feet in following the law's direction to expand the list as needed.

The West should also give much more attention to the countries directly threatened by the Kremlin's revisionism. Talk of geopolitics may be unfashionable in the postmodern world of Washington and Brussels policy makers. But geopolitics is being practiced on the EU's doorstep.

The events in Kiev are a brutal demonstration of this. Mr. Putin regards the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 not as liberation, but as humiliation. Now the former captive nations of the Soviet empire are in the front line of the Kremlin's revanche—with Ukraine foremost among them. European and American leaders should hold Russia to account for its role in forcing the Ukrainian leadership to beat and kill its own people. We should reject any talk of Russia playing a role in brokering a deal to end the chaos that it has stoked. Ukraine's future is for Ukrainians to decide.

NATO is beginning to take its core mission of territorial defense seriously again. Contingency plans to defend the countries on Russia's border—including the Baltic states and Poland—are now in place, and exercises to rehearse those plans are now routine. The change comes not a moment too soon. Russian military saber-rattling has become a serious nuisance: In the spring of 2013, its warplanes staged a dummy attack on Sweden, highlighting that country's lack of military preparedness. The "attack" took place at Easter, when the Swedish air force had the weekend off.

In short, the New Cold War is upon us. We are fighting not just to defend ourselves against a militant Kremlin, but also for ordinary Russians, who have paid the greatest price so far: the loss, at the hands of Mr. Putin and his cronies, of a unique chance to modernize their country and give Russia its rightful place in the world.

Mr. Lucas's latest book is "The Snowden Operation," a Kindle Single available from Amazon.