The geopolitical benefit to Russia from all these concessions is very doubtful. But Putin’s real aim in signalling that the Kremlin is willing to take on the role of junior partner to Beijing is to cause alarm in Washington. It has raised the stakes in East–West negotiations, forcing the West to turn a blind eye to some of the domestic and foreign policy misdemeanours of the temporary occupant of the Kremlin. There is real alarm in some European capitals that Beijing will henceforth have a hidden role in determining Moscow’s future policy direction. In my opinion, the alarm has been raised too late – this is now the reality with which we have to live. Indeed, the main problem for Putin is not the reaction of the West, but the potential discontent of the Russian people. Russians are much more wary of Beijing gaining influence over their domestic affairs than they are of Paris or Berlin. Putin’s spin machine has helped to dampen domestic discontent, but it won’t be able to do so forever.
Putin is the victim of a disastrous geopolitical miscalculation. Strategically, China doesn’t need a junior partner, and it will never quarrel with the West in order to side with Russia. Quite the opposite. China’s long-term interest is possibly to see Russia fall apart so it can snap up our Siberian territories. It doesn’t want Russia clinging on to its coattails; and it has no interest in helping to prolong the lifespan of Russia’s unviable centralised state, if that were to become necessary. China will not go to war over this, but neither will they offer to help us.
CHAPTER 19
A BLUNT INSTRUMENT
Despite their nations’ long and recent history of antagonism towards each other, the world was somewhat surprised by the friendship on show between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. There were theories about the Kremlin using compromising material to blackmail Trump into acquiescing in Putin’s international scheming, and other suggestions that Trump felt indebted to Putin in helping him win the presidential election. But the real reason for their mutual affinity was that both men are cut from the same cloth.
Donald Trump looked enviously at Putin’s model of autocracy, his regal style, his contempt for civic institutions and his crude populism. It seems to me that he would have liked to enjoy such powers himself, overriding the democratic checks and balances that maintain democratic continuity in the US. But this was not a model on which future East–West stability could be built.
The noxiousness of such a recasting of the US democratic model and its toxicity for world peace was evident from the January 2021 events in Washington, DC. The storming of the US Capitol and the need for thousands of National Guardsmen to ‘protect law- makers from the American people’ played into Putin’s hands. It allowed Russian state media to decry the US political system as riddled with double standards. ‘The problem is that America’s views of its own democracy … are quite different from when they are applied to other countries,’ reported Russian state television. The theme of US hypocrisy trended on Russian social media, including jokes about alleged American involvement in fomenting political revolts in former Soviet states. ‘Because of international travel restrictions,’ one post read, ‘it has been announced that this year the United States of America will be staging a coup at home.’ ‘Why did the Washington coup fail?’ asked another. ‘Because there wasn’t a US embassy on hand to provide tactical support…’
The departure of Donald Trump in 2021 opened the way for change, and a recognition of the benefits that can flow from a reset in East–West relations. But the undermining of Western liberal democracy seemed to have emboldened Putin. Far from engaging with the new administration, he stepped up his campaign of aggression with a series of damaging cyberattacks on key infrastructure targets in North America and Western Europe. In May 2021, ransomware operations carried out by criminals reportedly linked to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service disrupted the largest fuel pipeline in the United States, leading to shortages across the east coast, the shutdown of fuel stations, panic buying and the cancellation of American Airlines flights. The White House was still debating how to respond to the SolarWinds hack, which stole data from multiple branches of the US federal government, as well as from NATO, Microsoft and the European Parliament, when further cyberattacks in June shut down everything from the Republican National Committee to kindergartens in New Zealand and supermarkets in Sweden.
US Capitol under siege on 6 January 2021
The scale of the onslaught forced the issue to the top of President Joe Biden’s agenda. When he met Putin in Geneva a week later, he gave him a list of 16 areas of critical infrastructure that should be exempt from cyberattacks. Putin nodded, smiled and did nothing. Biden pledged that the Russian attacks would ‘not go unanswered’, but his national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, conceded that options were limited. He hoped a mix of public measures and private cyber- retaliation might force ‘a broad strategic discussion with the Russians’, but acknowledged that stiffer penalties were problematic. Economic sanctions had shown little evidence of success and there were few potentially effective sanctions left to impose. ‘I actually believe that measures that are understood by the Russians, but may not be visible to the broader world, are likely to be the most effective in clarifying what the United States believes is in bounds and out of bounds, and what we are prepared to do in response.’
Sanctions have been the West’s go-to response when the Kremlin transgresses yet another norm of international behaviour, but they are not a perfect solution – and the Kremlin has made a point of thumbing its nose at Western efforts. In the summer of 2015, as a riposte to Western sanctions, Russian state television showed pictures of mountains of French cheese being bulldozed into the ground in Belgorod, near the border with Ukraine. In the village of Gusino, entire legs of smuggled Spanish jamon were burned to a crisp before being thrown into a pit alongside flattened foreign tomatoes, while local officials looked on with satisfied grins usually reserved for the disposal of Class A drugs. That such wanton destruction of high-quality food failed to draw any widespread criticism in a country where pensioners struggle to make ends meet was indicative of the two-edged nature of sanctions as a tool of political pressure. The Kremlin has conditioned domestic public opinion to view Western measures as an affront to Russia’s dignity and a vindictive attack on ordinary Russians; rather than leading to outcries against their president, they tend to strengthen feelings against the West. Putin’s cheese and ham roast was his response to the Western sanctions imposed in the wake of the 2014 Ukraine and Crimea crises. The Russian agriculture minister, Alexander Tkachev, was filmed in a patriotic plea for the nation to ‘do everything in its power to ensure that consignments of [Western] food are … destroyed on the spot’. Mobile incinerators were wheeled into border towns, deployed like Katyusha rocket batteries to protect Russia from this latest foreign menace. The spectacle was intended to appeal to Russian pride, to evoke memories of past conflicts and command a spirit of national unity in the struggle against foreign foes.