Vladimir Putin in Kazakhstan on Tuesday. Pool photo by Alexei Druzhinin
You may have missed this story, so I am repeating it
as a public service:
MOSCOW, Special to The New York Times,
Oct. 1 — A previously unheard-of group called Hackers for a Free Russia
released a treasure trove of financial records online today indicating that
President Vladimir Putin owns some $30 billion in property, hotels and
factories across Russia and Europe, all disguised by front organizations and
accounting charades.
The documents, which appear to be
authentic, include detailed financial records and emails between Mr. Putin’s
Kremlin office and a number of his Russian cronies and Swiss banks. They
constitute the largest hack ever of Mr. Putin. Russian censors are scrambling
to shut down Twitter inside the country and keep the emails out of
Russian-language media.
At a news conference in Washington,
C.I.A. Director John Brennan was asked if U.S. intelligence services had any
hand in the cyberleak of what is being called “The Putin Files.” With a slight
grin, Mr. Brennan said: “The U.S. government would never intervene in Russian
politics, just as President Putin would never intervene in an American
election. That would be wrong.” As Mr. Brennan left the podium, though, he
burst out laughing.
No, you didn’t miss this story. I made it up. But
isn’t it time there was such a story? Isn’t it time we gave Putin a dose of his
own medicine — not for juvenile playground reasons and not to instigate a
conflict but precisely to prevent one — to back Putin off from what is
increasingly rogue behavior violating basic civilized norms and increasingly
vital U.S. interests.
Putin “is at war with
us, but we are not at war with him — both the U.S. and Germany are desperately
trying to cling to a decent relationship,” remarked Josef Joffe, editor of Die
Zeit, a weekly German newspaper and a leading strategic thinker in Europe. No
one should want to start a shooting war between great powers “in the shadow of
nuclear weapons,” Joffe told me.
But we also cannot just keep turning the other cheek.
Putin’s behavior in Syria and Ukraine has entered the realm of war crimes, and
his cyberattacks on the American political system threaten to undermine the
legitimacy of our next election.
Just read the papers. Last week a Dutch-led
investigation adduced irrefutable video evidence that Putin’s government not
only trucked in the missile system used to shoot down a Malaysia Airlines plane
flying over Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 civilians onboard, but also
returned it to Russia the same night and then engaged in an elaborate cover-up.
On Sept. 19, what U.S. intelligence officials say was
almost certainly a Russian Su-24 warplane bombed a U.N. convoy in Syria
carrying relief supplies for civilians. The Red Cross said at least 20 people
were killed. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the bombing “savage and
apparently deliberate.”
For a long time, Putin’s excesses were just a tragedy
for the Russian people and for many people in Ukraine and Syria, so President
Obama could plausibly argue that the right response was economic sanctions and
troop buildups in Eastern Europe. But in the last nine months,
something has changed.
Putin’s relentless efforts to crush both the
democratic and Islamist opposition to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria; his
rejection of any real power-sharing solution there; and his joining with Assad
in mercilessly bombing civilians in Aleppo are not only horrific in and of
themselves, but they also keep pushing more refugees into the European Union.
This is fostering an anti-immigrant backlash in Europe that is spawning
right-wing nationalist parties and fracturing the E.U.
Meanwhile, Russia’s hacking of America’s Democratic
Party — and signs that Russian or other cyberwarriors have tried to break into
American state voter registration systems — suggests that Putin or other
cyberdisrupters are trying to undermine the legitimacy of our next national
election.
Together, these actions pose a threat to the two
pillars of global democracy and open markets — America and the E.U. — more than
anything coming from ISIS or Al Qaeda.
“The Soviet Union was a revolutionary state that
sought a wholesale change in the international order,” observed Robert Litwak,
director of security studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars and author of “Deterring Nuclear
Terrorism.” Putin is
ostensibly not seeking a revolution of the international order, Litwak added,
but Putin’s departure from standard great-power competition — encouraging a
flood of refugees and attacking the legitimacy of our political system — “is
leading to shifts in global politics that could have revolutionary
consequences, even if Putin is not motivated by revolutionary ideology.”
Obama
believed that a combination of pressure and engagement would moderate Putin’s
behavior. That is the right approach, in theory, but it’s now clear that we
have underestimated the pressure needed to produce effective engagement, and
we’re going to have to step it up. This is not just about the politics of Syria
and Ukraine anymore. It’s now also about America, Europe, basic civilized norms
and the integrity of our democratic institutions.
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