Skripal attack: Putin knows he can get away with murder

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke.

Vladimir Putin’s overwhelming victory in Russia’s presidential election was not a triumph of democracy, but it illustrates one central fact in the geostrategic environment. The attempted assassination of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury and the controversy when the British government accused the Russians of responsibility have not done Putin any harm.

But first let me take you back a few years. When the former agent was handed over to London as part of a prisoner swap in 2010, Putin commented that Skripal would not be able to enjoy “his 30 pieces of silver”.

(Incidentally, the only other senior figure I’ve heard make such an obvious and offensive Judas reference in recent years was federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham. He was so offended at the Victorian Catholic education authorities objecting to his discrimination against the Catholic school system that he accused them of “selling out for a few pieces of silver”. Let me hasten to say I am not remotely equating Birmingham with Putin. Whatever his sins, Putin is strategically shrewd, whereas Birmingham appears to be the politically stupidest, most counterproductive education minister the federal Liberals have produced. But I digress.)

The attack on Skripal with the nerve agent novichok is the first chemical weapons attack in Europe since World War II, just as Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea was the first such territorial conquest in postwar Europe.

The British government believes Moscow ordered the operation against Skripal, and the US has endorsed this finding, as have other NATO allies. A band of Putin apologists in the West points to the obviousness of the attack as evidence that it wasn’t an operation mounted by the Russians, who are immensely sophisticated in these things.

It is worth pausing for a second to note the extraordinary nuttiness of the extreme pro-Putin apologists in the West. I do not mean here sophisticated realists such as Tom Switzer, for whom I have the greatest respect but with whose views on Russia I disagree. I refer instead to that hardy band of nutters on the far right in the West who see Putin as a champion of the West, presumably because he kills Muslims, empowers the Russian Orthodox Church and uses nationalistic rhetoric.

This bizarre vision of Putin is not really grounded in reality, however. It recalls more the John Birch Society conviction that conservative Republican president Dwight Eisenhower was really a communist, or the Lyndon La­Rouche movement’s view that the Queen is involved in the international drugs trade. These are ideas so dotty that they are beyond rational refutation.

But back to Putin. Why would Moscow conduct such an easily detected operation?

A critic of Putin, Alexander Litvinenko, was killed by radioactive poisoning with polonium in London in 2006. It took brilliant forensic work by the Brits, assisted by the fact Litvinenko survived for some days after the poisoning and as he was dying told the British authorities everything he knew, to establish that polonium was used at all. It is very hard to trace. The British government, after exhaustive inquiries, concluded Litvinenko was poisoned on Moscow’s orders. Richard Kerbaj, formerly of this newspaper, produced a superb television documentary on the case, making public some of the evidence.

Whereas polonium is a stealth poison, novichok is a blaring, screaming public announcement.

There are three compelling reasons Putin’s government might have been motivated to authorise such an operation, in the almost certain knowledge it would become public.

First, to terrorise the regime’s Russian critics. Not only Litvinenko and Skripal have been attacked in Britain. A substantial number of Russian dissidents and regime opponents living in Britain have died mysteriously and sometimes violently. There is no reason to assume they were all assassinated. There is no reason to assume that none of them was assassinated.

Consider the psycho-political effects of this. If the hand of Moscow state terror can reach out and kill a dissident or declared enemy of Russia even in London or ­Salisbury, how much more terrifying must that be for any dissident or regime opponent living in Russia? All autocracies need to terrify their opponents, especially their potential opponents.

Carrying out such operations in the West demonstrates an ideological proposition the regime holds — that the West has nothing to offer Russians. Britain occupies a special place in the affections, almost the mythology, of Russians, especially middle and upper-class Russians. Britain is seen as the most successful European nation. Its popular culture — from Manchester United to Downton Abbey — has immense appeal to Russians, who often harbour a romanticised conception of British traditions, a conception that embodies a kind of mourning for lost Russian traditions. So does Britain’s reputation for orderliness, for the rule of law.

The Litvinenko and Skripal cases carry a powerful message to Russians — do not think for a moment that any of this, under any circumstances, can ever put you beyond the reach of Russian state power.

The second powerful reason for Moscow to conduct the Skripal operation is to humiliate the West. Britain’s reaction — of expelling a few diplomats and threatening some vague sanctions against a few rich, pro-regime Russians in London — was kind of pathetic. And yet I am not really critical of the May government. It has very few options short of potentially provoking a more dangerous confrontation.

The Russian economy is doing poorly under Putin. Despite its vast land mass, large population and huge natural resource endowments, Russia has an economy about the size of Italy.

When he first came to power in 1999, Putin certainly did arrest the free fall of the economy and restore order, which was the basis of much of his early legitimacy. Since then, Russian living standards have risen. Russia did particularly well during the resources boom.

Now, its economy is stagnant and there has been little or no meaningful economic reform. But like all resource economies, it is somewhat insulated against any but the grossest of sanctions, and these sanctions inevitably hurt the nations that apply them, as western Europe is such a big consumer of Russian energy exports.

Ivo Daalder, who was a senior US official under Barack Obama, argues that Moscow has brilliantly evolved a variety of “hybrid warfare” tactics, heavily reliant on cyber capabilities and information warfare as well as kinetic operations, which are typically deniable in their early phases. This is exceptionally difficult for the West to deal with.

For Moscow, humiliating the West as it has done in the Skripal case adds to Putin’s lustre and reputation as a hard man who doesn’t lose.

Which brings us to reason three. Autocrats who have reversed previous trends of liberalisation, such as Xi Jinping, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Putin, have used hyper-nationalism very effectively as their primary ideological drive.

Moderate nationalism, balanced by other civic virtues, is constructive. It embodies social solidarity and meaningful accountability. Nationalism has been the dominant ideological force for the past 200 years. But hyper-nationalism needs enemies. The rhetorical confrontation with the West over Skripal has surely helped Putin at home and may well encourage Moscow to do more of the same.