An old kind of new low

Hasan Suroor

The prospect of  Vladimir Putin running Russia for another six years after his victory in Sunday’s election, which will make him the longest-serving Soviet/Russian leader since Joseph Stalin, has been greeted with long faces and mournful sighs in Western capitals. A reflection of the frayed state of Russia-West relations which have touched a new low in recent months as the West has stepped up its attacks on Moscow accusing it of all manners of things from meddling in elections to cyber warfare and using proxies to subvert Western democracy. 

Two of the most destabilising events of the past two years — Brexit and Donald Trump’s election — have been attributed  to Putin-pliant Russian mercenaries though no concrete evidence has emerged so far. Kremlin-backed groups are also alleged to be behind the crisis in Europe reeling from a wave of Euro scepticism and right-wing nationalism. 

Just last week saw Britain expel 23 Russian diplomats over the mysterious poisoning of a former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia on March 4 in the quiet English town of Salisbury where Skripal settled after a spy swap in 2010. Both are battling for their lives after suddenly collapsing, minutes after lunching at a neighbourhood pub.

Britain claims that a “military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia” was used to poison them in what it says was an attempted murder. Theresa May told Parliament that it was “highly likely” that Russia was responsible for the poisoning. Motive: to punish Skripal for spying for Britain while working for his own country’s intelligence agency. Broader purpose: “to spread fear” of Russia, according to self-styled Kremlinologists.

Moscow has called it a “load of nonsense” and announced tit-for-tat expulsion of 23 British diplomats. For all the self-righteous fury in London, however, more than two weeks after the incident the British government has failed to produce any hard evidence of Russian — let alone Putin’s — involvement beyond vague theories. Observers point out that Skripal was a virtually unknown figure — unlike other more prominent former double agents — and Putin stood to gain nothing from his death. He was simply not worth risking an international scandal, days before the presidential election and on the eve of the World Cup. 

“I’m no fan of Putin but it makes no sense for Russia to do such a thing at this moment,” a former Russian Opposition MP said. Another expert, likening it to a political suicide, said “whatever his faults Putin doesn’t want to commit political suicide”. More credible is the theory that it might have been the work of a mafia or someone trying to settle an old score — the classic spy vs spy story.

The row is an almost frame-by-frame re-run of the 2006 Alexander Litvinenko case. A former Russian security agent, who defected to Britain, he died of suspected poisoning after meeting some Kremlin-friendly Russians. As now, his death was blamed on Putin and several Russian diplomats were expelled leading to retaliatory action by Moscow.

Interestingly, for all the moral grandstanding in London, the ruling Conservatives have no qualms accepting Russian money. The Tory party has accepted some £8,00,000 in donations  from UK-based Russian oligarchs and their associates, some with alleged links to Kremlin/Putin. A lot of this money has reportedly come to the party since May became Prime Minister less than two years ago. The donations are in addition to the funds raised at special events offering participants access to senior ministers. 

Meanwhile, Russia is facing the combined wrath of Britain’s European allies on the one hand and America on the other. They put out an unprecedented joint statement calling the incident an “assault on UK sovereignty”. Separately, America slapped a range of sanctions on Russian intelligence services and more than a dozen Russians for alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections. 

NATO, a Cold War-era relic whose very existence became a subject of debate after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has bounced back amid a wave of anti-Moscow hysteria. Its description of Moscow as the “biggest” threat to Europe glosses over its own attempts to undermine Russia with its relentless expansion into former Soviet states in Eastern Europe. Then, there’s NATO’s controversial missile defence system in Europe which Moscow sees as a deliberate provocation, prompting it to respond with its own “invincible” nuclear weaponry.

In all but name, the Cold War is back. This time, however, it’s not about ideology. In that sense, “history” did end with the fall communism. This time it’s all down to Western arrogance. As the victor of the Cold War, it expected a defeated and truncated Russia (contemptuously dismissed by Obama as a mere “regional” power) to play the second fiddle to the mighty Americans and Europeans. Russia was so down and out, they assumed, that it would watch helplessly while its historic backyard was poached and vandalised by groups mentored, and often funded by Western intelligence agencies in the name of promoting democracy. 

The West had not reckoned with the power of Russian nationalism which doesn’t countenance national humiliation. And that’s where Putin came in — a personification of a “strong” leader with the mission to make “Russia great again”. He may not have made Russia great but he has certainly put it back on the world stage and made it a serious player in international affairs. And this is what has made him popular at home where he’s credited with restoring self-respect to Russia by standing up to the West. The more the West tries to demonise him, the more his domestic popularity gets a boost. Russophobia has proved to be counterproductive. 

Ironically, once upon a time — at the height of American global supremacy — it was Moscow and its allies that suffered from an extreme form of US phobia seeing America-inspired conspiracies everywhere. Any dirty deed — from bloody coups and political assassinations in Asia and Africa to counter-revolutionary plots in Latin America and Eastern Europe — was blamed on the CIA. In India, Indira Gandhi’s tendency to invoke a “hidden” foreign hand whenever faced with a difficult situation spawned countless jokes. Piloo Mody, the unabashedly pro-American Swatantra Party MP, famously went around Parliament ostentatiously sporting “I’m a CIA agent”, prompting the Congress to retort that at last he had spoken the truth!

Returning, however, to the present crisis in Russia-West relations, irrespective of who’s to blame, it makes the world a more dangerous place at a time of heightened tensions in the Middle East and many parts of Asia, including the Indian subcontinent. Sadly, self-professed guarantors of peace themselves have gone rogue and threaten peace.

The writer is a London-based commentator