How Putin's walking all over us: Six years ago EDWARD LUCAS was branded a scaremonger for warning of the danger posed to the West, but today the threat's more alarming than ever
By EDWARD LUCAS
Russian tanks roll on Tverskaya street to the Red square during the general rehearsal of the military parade in Moscow, Russia
As a naked display of awesome military firepower, its message could not have been clearer.
Yesterday, Russia marked Victory Day — the anniversary of its defeat of Nazi Germany — in Moscow with a parade overseen by President Putin, who watched as tanks, assault helicopters and line upon line of troops reinforced his bellicose behaviour of recent weeks.
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Dragon was dispatched from Portsmouth to shadow a group of seven Russian ships — including a giant aircraft carrier and a nuclear-powered cruiser — that was steaming up the English Channel.
HMS Dragon is escorting the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov through the English Channel
Such manoeuvres were taking place with the backdrop of the ever-more-perilous situation in eastern Ukraine, where bandits wielding Kalashnikovs guard roadblocks, helicopters are shot out of the sky, and pro-Russia protesters are incinerated in a burning building.
Indeed, later yesterday, Putin arrived in the Crimea — recently annexed from southern Ukraine by Russia — to witness a military fly-past and address Russian sailors; an act which the Kiev government called ‘a gross violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty’.
The President boarded a boat to sail past a line of Russian Black Sea Fleet ships anchored in Sevastopol’s bay, and greeted their crews as tens of thousands of residents waving Russian flags flooded the city’s streets to watch.
Vladimir Putin speaking at a Victory Day parade in the Crimean city of Sevastopol
Celebrations also took place in Sloviansk in the east of Ukraine, the scene of gun battles between pro-Russia militia and Ukrainian troops in recent days.
Pro-Russia insurgents in the east are fighting the government in Kiev and preparing to hold a referendum on Sunday on secession.
During the day, as part of his triumphalist rhetoric, Mr Putin hailed the incorporation of Crimea into Russia as a ‘return to the Motherland’.
What more will it take to wake up the world to the threat posed by Russia under its sinister strongman, who’s torn up the rules on which European security has for decades been based?
Putin and his cronies loot tens of billions of dollars from Russia each year — then launder it in the City of London by moving their fortunes into investments and property here, thus corrupting our public life, too.
They bribe and bully to get their way. At home, they jail and persecute their opponents. Those who seriously cross their path end up dead.
One of them was my friend Anna Politkovskaya, a gutsy campaigning journalist who was shot dead in 2006. Another was the defector Alexander Litvinenko, assassinated by Russian agents in London with a radioactive poison in 2007.
It was these killings that prompted me to write a book, The New Cold War, first published in early 2008.
It warned the West that Mr Putin’s regime was a new and terrifying threat in the highly charged struggle for power and wealth between East and West.
The Russian regime was funded by organised crime and big business, and at its heart was the evil of the old Soviet KGB.
The regime was bent on repression at home and aggression abroad, and fuelled by greed, paranoia and deep resentment of the West.
Another event that convinced me to write the book was Russia’s 2007 ‘cyber-attack’ on our NATO ally, Estonia, crippling the Baltic country’s public internet sites — including emergency services — with bogus traffic as punishment for its temerity in moving a Soviet war memorial.
Britain’s GCHQ listening station sees that attack as the first genuine example of inter-state cyber-warfare.
I warned that others would be next, and that we should contain Russia while we still could. If we hesitated, it would prove far more dangerous.
I traced the Putin regime’s roots to the chaos and corruption of Nineties Russia, under the drunken president Boris Yeltsin.
The supposed democracy and capitalism of the new Russia — praised by the West — were a sham: distorted and discredited versions of the real thing.
Ever since Russia’s rebirth amid the Soviet collapse of 1991, Britain and other Western countries have adopted a policy of closed eyes and crossed fingers.
The truth is that Russia’s failure to disband the KGB, and the Kremlin’s refusal to acknowledge the crimes of the Soviet past, fatally tainted Russia.
Vladimir Putin surrounded by former Soviet Union military flags
In 1999, I was based in Moscow when Mr Putin came to power amidst an outbreak of apartment-block bombings unconvincingly blamed on Chechen terrorists.
Only a few brave voices argued that they were, in fact, a cynical stunt by Kremlin provocateurs.
The aim was to use terrorism to panic Russians so that they would accept an ex-KGB regime which stole their freedoms while offering safety.
The book was a best-seller, translated into 20 languages — but many dismissed it as scare-mongering. Distinguished diplomats and eminent Russia experts lined up to pooh-pooh my fears.
Russia, though not perfect, was now capitalist and democratic, they said. It was part of the West, and Putin’s regime was no worse than many others.
Besides, the business opportunities for foreigners were good.
Some of my critics were merely naïve. Others were cynical, bearing in mind that Britain was — and still is — awash with Russian money.
Only last week it was reported that this country’s most expensive flat had been sold in London for £140 million, most likely to a Russian buyer.
Any criticism of modern Russia — my book, included — was countered by an influential pro-Kremlin lobby of bankers, lawyers, accountants and businessmen, whose comfortable lifestyle depends on lavish fees and contracts earned from the suppurating mess of Kremlin crony capitalism.
They ignored the growth of a dangerous cocktail of autocracy and nationalism in Russia, where Putin and his ex-KGB cronies brook no opposition and share a sinister, superstitious belief in their own destiny.
They want to restore Russia’s former greatness — and believe that God is on their side.
Bizarrely, they combine those beliefs with Soviet nostalgia — not for Lenin’s failed communist experiment, but for the power and influence of the old empire.
In truth, that empire was built on the bones of tens of millions of innocent victims, including countless Russians. But the Putin regime has no time for such quibbles.
Russian Military Parade
For pointing this out, I was accused of Russophobia.
But in truth, the real Russophobes are those who collude with a regime that loots its own country — a country whose language I am proud to speak, whose literature I adore, and whose people I admire.
Far from scare-mongering, I now believe I actually understated the danger.
I said then that the ‘New Cold War’ was about banks not tanks, subterfuge, bluff, propaganda and the use of cash for political ends.
What I did not foresee was the terrifying way that Russia would modernise its armed forces.
In 2008, it was just about able to invade its neighbour, Georgia, in a conflict it cynically provoked, and then — with characteristic Kremlin chutzpah — blamed on its defeated victim.
The result was the dismemberment of that small pro-Western country, and the humiliation of its backers — chiefly, the United States.
Russian Army advancing in Georgia (2008).Some of Russian troops still occupy parts of Georgia
A fair amount of Russia’s military is still in a woeful state, but enormous increases in the defence budget have improved equipment, training and readiness.
Five years ago, Russia staged huge military manoeuvres on NATO’s borders — next door to Poland, and the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Western military officials were aghast when intelligence reports came in of the scenario for that exercise. Russia was rehearsing the invasion and occupation of the Baltic states. It also carried out a dummy nuclear attack on Warsaw.
Russian soldiers drive self-propelled artillery units during 2009 military exercises rehearsing the invasion and occupation of the Baltic states
Last year, when it repeated the exercise, Western military observers were deeply alarmed by the huge improvements in Russia’s ability to move large quantities of men and equipment long distances in a short space of time.
While Russia has been investing massive sums in its military, NATO has been cutting its defence spending.
Only a handful of countries — Poland, Estonia and Britain among them — spend the 2 per cent of national income on defence that the alliance mandates.
Russian military base near Karelian border performed an air force drill last year pulling several Russian jets to the region and few violeted air space of neghbouring countries
A study in Sweden, commissioned after a dummy Russian air raid last year, says that the country could not last a week against a Russian attack.
Russia has also fiercely stoked anti-American sentiment, which is now rampant in Europe.
The spurious and sensationalised revelations of the fugitive American intelligence contractor Edward Snowden, who has now found refuge in Moscow, have persuaded some Europeans — preposterously — that the United States is the main threat to world peace.
America is understandably furious about this. It is already borrowing money to pay for Europe’s defence, and yet scarred by fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans are war-weary.
For the first time since the Thirties, a majority now think their country should mind its own business in world affairs.
Although the U.S. has rushed some troops to Europe as a symbolic gesture since the beginning of the Ukraine crisis, the general trend is the other way.
For the first time since the Normandy Landings of 1944, there are no American tanks in Europe. The remaining ones left last year!
NATO’s first big exercise in Eastern Europe last autumn, Steadfast Jazz, was the alliance’s first attempt to respond to Russia’s threatening military drills.
It rehearsed how NATO would defend its most vulnerable members, Poland and the Baltic states.
Yet America sent only a token force. And Germany — always over-sensitive to Russia’s feelings — tried to block it happening at all.
UK Typhoon aircraft escorting a Russian bomber Tupolev Tu-95 out of British air space
The decline of the Atlantic Alliance is grim tidings for Britain, whose Army will soon be at its smallest since the Napoleonic Wars.
Our Navy and Air Force, meanwhile, are hollowed out by skill shortages and defence cuts.
Perhaps most dangerous of all, our intelligence services are denuded, too.
For years we have focused too much on the ‘War on Terror’, and particularly on the Middle East. Hawkish, well-informed spooks with an interest in Russia were sidelined or fired.
Their views — indeed, their warnings — went out of fashion in the years when Tony Blair enjoyed nights at the opera with Mr Putin, and when George Osborne and Peter Mandelson hobnobbed with Oleg Deripaska, a Kremlin crony.
While our spycatchers looked elsewhere, Russian agents ran rampant in London, including the red-headed sexpot Anna Chapman.
She ran a mysterious money-transfer company based on the stolen identity of an innocent Kent electrician and using a fraudulently obtained address in Dublin — before moving to America, where she enjoyed intimate relations with a senior administration official.
The other front on which Moscow is fighting very effectively is propaganda, into which it throws hundreds of millions of pounds. Its slick, jazzy RT TV channel pumps out pro-Kremlin broadcasts all over the world.
Such outlets highlight Western decadence, double standards and weakness.
Not only do we fail to fight back by allowing the virtual collapse of the BBC World Service, which was once a valuable counterblast to the Soviet propaganda machine, we barely realise that the Kremlin is once again waging an information war against us.
One reason we flinch from reporting the growing threat is Britain’s fearsome libel courts.
Senior figures in the Russian regime think nothing of spending hundreds of thousand of pounds on fighting a libel suit.
For most news outlets, publishers or authors it is a crippling threat. It is hardly surprising that the Putin regime sees our talk of the rule of law, human rights and fair business dealings as a lot of hot air.
Perhaps the most shameful example of regime sympathy is BP, once one of Britain’s most highly respected companies.
It has taken a 20 pc share in Rosneft, an oil company which epitomises the greed and lawlessness of the Putin regime.
Rosneft’s rise from obscurity to riches came when it acquired, at a nominal price, the remains of Yukos — the oil company founded by Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who fell foul of Putin.
Billions of pounds in Western shareholders’ money evaporated overnight. Yet BP saw nothing wrong in taking a stake in Rosneft, the company responsible.
Nor did our financiers see anything wrong in listing Rosneft on the London Stock Exchange.
Yet the days of cosying up to the Russia lobby are numbered. The sudden annexing of Crimea and the assault on eastern Ukraine have alarmed even the most complacent European policymakers.
Many of the arguments I made in The New Cold War have become impossible to ignore.
Mr Putin is a formidable enemy. He has shown he is prepared to do three things that the West still finds unpalatable.
He will accept economic pain if he believes it’s in Russia’s national interest. He is prepared to use force. And he is prepared to lie — blatantly and repeatedly.
We, by contrast, still think we can wish the threat away. We do not want to impose real sanctions, and we would like to keep rich, crooked Russians and their companies funnelling money into our financial systems and property markets.
We do not even want to stop their ability to come to London to shop and party.
We are not prepared to spend more on defence, and flinch at the idea that we might have to use force to defend ourselves — which, frankly, calls the future of NATO into question.
And we are not willing to call Putin what he is: the gangster leader of a gangster state.
I was pleased when my publishers asked me to update The New Cold War to include the latest developments from Ukraine.
But it is little comfort that the book’s original argument — dismissed first-time round as hysterical scare-mongering — has been vindicated.
I pray that our brave Estonian, Czech and Polish allies will not pay the price for our foolishness. As the Kremlin’s shadow lengthens across Europe, it is little comfort to be able to say: ‘I told you so.’
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