We must stand up to Putin’s gangster state

Edward lucas

As Russia uses military force and dark arts with impunity, it’s time to hit the kleptocrats where it hurts: in their pockets

For more than two decades the British establishment has brushed off warnings about the threat from Russia. People like me and my friends in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and elsewhere were dismissed as paranoid and stuck in the past. Russia, the conventional wisdom went, was at most a nuisance but certainly not a threat.

Few people in Whitehall or other European capitals argue that now. Countries such as Sweden, unexcitable to the point of torpor in their security thinking, are scrambling to meet what military planners regard as a genuine, even imminent, threat. Conscription is back on the agenda. Coastal rocket defences are being brought back into service, including launchers recovered from a military museum.

Russia has rearmed, to the point that we would be hard-pressed to defend our allies on Nato’s front line against a military attack. The Kremlin has also mastered the new arts of war: propaganda, cyberattacks, economic pressure and the targeted use of bribery.

All these have been on display in eastern Europe for a decade or more. We ignored that.

Now these weapons are being deployed against us, and we are struggling to cope. Anyone who said a year ago that Russia would brazenly interfere, perhaps decisively, in the US presidential election, and that America would be too confused and timid to respond, would have attracted derision.

Russia is, on paper, much weaker than the West in terms of GDP, military might, population and alliances. The Putin regime has failed to diversify the economy, modernise infrastructure or provide decent public services. Most of the oil and gas revenues have been squandered or stolen.

But Russia has big — and possibly crucial — advantages. Vladimir Putin is decisive; we are not. He is willing to accept economic pain; we are not. He is willing to break the rules; we are not. He is willing to use force; we are not.

Russia’s aim is no secret. It wants to upend the multilateral rules-based European security order, which it regards as hypocritical and unfair. Instead it wants a world of bilateral deals — on energy, on security, on defence — in which Russia as a big country will have the upper hand.

Its strategy is simple: divide and rule. Reward some countries — Hungary under Viktor Orban now, perhaps France under President Fillon next year — for playing along. Conversely, Russia will punish others — Georgia and Ukraine so far, perhaps Estonia or Poland soon — for daring to resist.

It’s working. The glue that holds the West together is weakening. As The Times reported on Saturday, the National Security Council is hurriedly reassessing Britain’s vulnerabilities in the run-up to a session to be chaired by the prime minister early in the new year. This is all too little, too late. The realisation dawning, belatedly, among the guardians of our security is that Russia is winning, and will continue to win.

The first step is to realise the plight we are in. We can no longer rely on America to defend us. Indeed, if our worst fears about the Trump administration prove true, we may find America is harming, not helping, our security. It is easy to imagine the US arm-twisting its European allies to “get with the programme”, demilitarising the frontline states, abandoning Ukraine and dropping sanctions, all in the name of combined Russian-American efforts on counterterrorism.

Such benefits would be illusory. Nothing is stopping Russia co-operating with the West on counterterrorism right now. The sacrifices made in such a “grand bargain” would be real.

We should fight to prevent such an outcome. But we should also prepare for the worst: a post-Atlanticist Europe, where the tentacles of Russian influence will have gripped many of our Nato allies. That will be difficult, but it is not necessarily disastrous. We still have all the means to defend ourselves. The frontline states in Europe — the Nordic and Baltic nations plus Poland — have a combined GDP bigger than Russia.

The defence spending of those nine countries is half Russia’s. But Russia has to run a superpower-style military apparatus, with global pretensions. The frontline states need only defend themselves.

Add Britain into the mix, nuclear-armed, and an intelligence and cyber-superpower, plus a few other allies such as Canada, and we can still outgun Russia on every front.

But we need to start playing to our strengths. The biggest of these is financial. We cannot stop Russia’s kleptocrats stealing billions from their own people but we can make it harder for them to launder their money through our banking system.

An amendment to the Criminal Finance Bill working its way through parliament offers just such a chance. It is named after Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer who was beaten to death after uncovering a £150 million fraud against the taxpayer, the proceeds of which were partially laundered in London.

If Theresa May is serious about defending this country, adding government support to this cross-party initiative and ignoring the self-interested squawks of the City will be a good start. The amendment will allow the government or other interested parties to ask a court to freeze assets in this country belonging to those connected with human rights abuses.

This sort of measure hits the Putin regime where it hurts. Those involved in the persecution of Crimean Tatars or the maltreatment of Ukrainian prisoners might think again if they knew their personal finances were at risk.

More broadly, we need to join up the different elements of government and society touched by the Russian threat. Cybercrime, for example, is not just a matter for the criminal justice system when Russians are involved. The same people may also be working on behalf of the Kremlin’s intelligence services.

Our bankers, lawyers and accountants need to think far harder about the clients and the instructions that they accept. Our universities are vulnerable too, as the furore over alleged Russian sponsorship of the Cambridge University weekly intelligence seminar indicates.

As we have seen elsewhere, Russia pumps money into other countries’ public life, through media, think tanks, politics or academia. The aim may be intelligence collection, influence-peddling or other mischief-making. The Soviet Union tried to do the same. But we are much less wary now.

We need clear mechanisms for sharing information about Russian meddling in our societies, and taking joint action against the threat. It’s not impossible. Our allies in the frontline states see the Russian threat far more clearly than we do, and are ahead of us in countering it. We should try listening to them.

Edward Lucas writes for The Economist. He is author of The New Cold War

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