Growth of Russia as a pariah state under Vladimir Putin

Under Putin, Russia has turned its back on civilised standards.

Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad

Respected US senator John McCain succinctly sums up Russian President Vladimir Putin as “a KGB thug”. After publication of the report by the World Anti-Doping Agency, with its evidence of agents of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) — the KGB’s successor agency — operating at the heart of Moscow’s main anti-doping lab, who can deny the accuracy of that description?

Who can avoid the conclusion that, 21 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and what was touted as the end of the Cold War, and 15 years since Putin, a colonel in the KGB, became the Kremlin strongman, the world is confronted by the menace of a delinquent Russia operating as a rogue state?

Russia repeatedly shows total contempt for accepted international standards of behaviour, be it in Crimea and Ukraine, or in the Middle East, where Moscow is allied with the regimes in Damascus and Tehran.

After Putin’s shameful, obstructionist conduct following the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 over Ukraine last year, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond sounded alarm bells. He warned that “Russia risks becoming a pariah state if it does not behave properly”.

At the same time, John Kampfner, a widely experienced former news bureau chief in Moscow, concluded in an article for London’s Daily Telegraph that “Putin is a pariah. He must be treated as such.”

For two decades, Kampfner argued, “many around the world have been in denial. Russia was changing, they insisted. And so it has. It has embraced money, private jets and super yachts. For a fleeting few years in the early 1990s it toyed with democracy, only to conclude that this course was synonymous with chaos. Out of this new experiment of bling with brutishness came Vladimir Putin.”

Hammond and Kampfner are far from alone in their assessments of Putin’s Russia.

It is a country in which the sports minister, Vitaly Mutko, a close friend of Putin, was complicit, according to the WADA report, in doping shenanigans that recall the darkest days of the old Soviet Union and East Germany.

Then, the most outrageous use of drugs by athletes — sanctioned and provided by the state — was justified with the absurd assertion that cheating was in the national (Communist Party) interest.

So, too, is a similar mindset being revealed among FSB agents in their management and intimidation of Russia’s anti-doping laboratory — actions the WADA report says effectively sabotaged the 2012 London Olympics.

That, alas, is what Putin’s increasingly sinister Russia has become. Repeatedly, actions by Moscow put it beyond the pale of accepted international standards.

It is no surprise that Russian commentator Oleg Kashin concluded after the shooting down of flight MH17 that “for the West Putin has come to occupy the same place as Muammar Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein … he’s become a kind of Doctor Evil who shoots down planes.”

Kashin is not wrong; Putin has become a global villain. Neither is New York University’s professor of global affairs Mark Galeotti wrong: he has expressed a similar sentiment by telling Newsweek magazine “it is becoming very difficult not to regard Putin’s Russia as essentially an aggressive, subversive and destabilising nation”.

The indictment in the 393 pages of the WADA report is, however, only the latest in a long list of outrages committed by Putin’s Russia. Following the shooting down of flight MH17, last year’s annexation of Crimea and the invasion of eastern Ukraine, and in recent weeks Moscow’s cynical military moves in Syria, where it is acting in alliance with Iran’s ayatollahs, it fits the pattern.

Perhaps more than any other single incident, MH17 stands out as testimony to the sort of person Putin is and the pariah nation Russia has become. When the tragedy occurred, the President could have condemned the rebels in eastern Ukraine responsible for firing the missile. He could have expressed shock, sympathised with the victims’ families, and called other world leaders to express dismay. The world might have listened. Instead, he behaved like the thug McCain considers him to be.

Hasty cover-up operations were launched to remove evidence of Russian involvement. The Russian BUK rocket launcher was transported clandestinely across the border. Putin showed total disregard for the feelings of those who had lost loved ones in the tragedy and cried out for answers.

The Russian leader’s response when Tony Abbott as prime minister promised to “shirt-front” him on the issue was to guffaw and heap scorn. Instead of ensuring full co-operation with the international investigation, Putin blatantly lied and obfuscated.

Moscow’s brazen annexation of Crimea in January last year in defiance of global pressure remains, too, an example of Russia’s growing delinquency. Not since World War II have Europe’s frontiers been changed in this way, through unilateral force.

Yet Putin, driven by what many regard as his increasingly megalomaniacal ambition to rebuild the glory days of a revanchist Russian empire along the lines of the old Soviet Union, marched into Crimea in defiance of Washington and much of the rest of the world. He was not prepared to countenance an independent, democratic Ukraine that was not shackled and obedient to Moscow.

Highly strategic Crimea was his first target. The normal conduct of international affairs was flagrantly cast aside. All US President Barack Obama’s supine and meaningless huffing and puffing about “Russian aggression” came to naught. And today, to the shame of Obama’s White House as well as European nations, Russia’s takeover of Crimea has become a fait accompli. Putin’s strategic piracy is accepted as a fact.

European nations, led by Germany, despite all their own grand words, have been unwilling to take the measures that might have deterred Putin or punished him in a way that would have made him think again. Their reliance for 25 per cent of their energy needs on the Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom has meant too much to them.

Thus, almost two years after Putin grabbed Crimea and marched into Ukraine to support Russian-speaking separatists, Russia has survived the limited sanctions that were imposed.

Its economy is in trouble, but that is due mainly to the fall in the global price of oil, the country’s main export. The confident forecasts heard from the White House and at the repeated “emergency” meetings of European leaders have not had the anticipated effect. Putin marches on — annoyed, perhaps, by his sidelining from global meetings such as the G20 — but nonetheless welcomed warmly by world leaders at bilateral meetings, including several with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

And far from being ostracised for his global outrages, Forbes magazine has just named him as the world’s most powerful leader for the third year in a row — ahead of Merkel and Obama, who, unsurprisingly, after being played off a break by the Russian leader, has been demoted from second to third.

Putin, as the Economist has pointed out, is a judoka, a practitioner of judo, and, as such, knows the art of exploiting an opponent’s weaknesses: when the US steps back, he pushes forward, and nowhere is this strategy being played out more remarkably than in the Middle East. In line with his quest to restore the sort of influence the old Soviet Union once had across the globe, Putin has injected himself militarily into the region’s affairs in a way that has left the US looking on, stunned, from the sidelines.

In the two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has had little influence anywhere in the Middle East apart from Syria, where it has long had a military alliance with the Assad regime. Again, the judoka saw his chance in Obama’s failure to do anything much about the Syrian civil war. Brazenly, Putin is presenting his military intervention as a desire by Moscow to join the fight against the evil of the Islamic State caliphate.

But in so doing it has aligned itself with Bashar al-Assad’s despotic regime in Damascus as well as Iran’s ayatollahs, and the Hezbollah terrorists whose headquarters are in Lebanon. Russia is concentrating on airstrikes — notably, for the most part, not on Islamic State strongholds but on the bases of other militant groups opposed to the Assad regime.

Russia has 3000 soldiers in the country to protect the Russian naval base in the Syrian port of Tartus and to assist Assad’s embattled forces and those from Iran and Hezbollah fighting alongside them. Thus, at a stroke, the wily Putin has outflanked US strategy, such as it is; and while supporting the tyrant Assad, he has dangerously deepened the region’s Sunni-Shia divide in a way that will contribute to the growth of Islamic State and its recruitment of jihadists from across the world.

Putin has much to answer for in the growth of Islamic State and the unmitigated evil that has been unleashed by the caliphate. He poses now as a well-intentioned ally in Syria, trying to help the US-led coalition. But for two years at the UN, Russia has blocked every move aimed at achieving a political solution for the civil war.

Such a solution, had it succeeded early enough and without Moscow’s interference, might have forced a compromise on Assad that could have cut the ground from under the Sunni extremists and headed off Islamic State’s establishment.

The Russian leader has behaved, as usual, with transparent irresponsibility. Given the extent of the human tragedy the Syrian civil war represents, with hundreds of thousands killed in the past two years and upwards of eight million people forced to flee their homes, it might have been expected that Putin would use his influence with Assad to force a solution to the conflict.

Instead, he is stirring the pot further and outmanoeuvring Obama at every turn.

For the former KGB colonel, the glory days of the Soviet empire clearly still mean much. It was what he was weaned on as a Soviet secret agent. The outrageous doping practices revealed in the WADA report, it has been pointed out, are a systemic hangover from the Soviet era when all methods, whatever they were and however dishonest and corrupting they were, were regarded as legitimate in the quest for victory.

The scale of the corruption that has been revealed, with a Moscow laboratory destroying a staggering 1417 blood and urine tests, results, the report says, from “an inherited attitude from the old Cold War days” and involved “direct intimidation and interference by the Russian state”.

Yet Russia, at least for now, remains on course to compete in next year’s Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and to host the soccer World Cup in 2018.

There is uproar, just as there was over Ukraine, and Crimea, and MH17, and now Syria. But the world — and that means the Obama White House — appears impotent. The Russian leader is thumbing his nose at the world, clearly undaunted by his country’s categorisation as a “rogue state” alongside the likes of North Korea and Iran.

With different leadership in the White House, it might all have been very different. As much as Putin has to answer for, so, too, does Obama for his failure to rein in the Russian President and for allowing him to get away with his defiance of the accepted norms of international behaviour. The world is paying a very heavy price for that lack of leadership.