PUTIN’S AIM IS TO MAKE THIS THE RUSSIAN CENTURY
BY ANDERS ÅSLUND
http://www.newsweek.com/putin-aim-make-russian-century-503571
The publication of Putin’s Master Plan: To Destroy Europe, Divide NATO, and Restore Russian Power and Global Influence (Encounter, 2016) by veteran democratic pollster Douglas E. Schoen and Evan Roth Smith is most welcome: It puts the current events around Trump’s election campaign into a broader context.
The authors of this book argue convincingly that Putin has a global strategy and it is to break up the NATO alliance and potentially defeat the West.
Five out of nine chapters are devoted to the Kremlin’s techniques of aggression. Schoen and Roth Smith subscribe to the idea of hybrid warfare, offering an overview of what it amounts to. They discuss its many aspects: military action as seen in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria; espionage; propaganda and cyberwarfare; support to rogue regimes and terrorists; energy policy; and financial support to proxies in Europe and now the U.S.
Their ambition is not to offer readers any new revelations, but to provide a clear picture of how many and extensive the Kremlin’s activities are. They express respect for Kremlin successes. “Putin’s sudden strike in Syria was a master class in interventionism and a stark counterpoint to failed Western efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.” (p. x).
The authors devote two chapters to criticism of current Western policy. “In the face of Putin’s naked aggression in Europe, the West has shown a level of incompetence that approaches impotence.” They lament “the shameful inadequacy of the Western response to Putin, as well as the embarrassing state of America, NATO, and EU military preparedness” (p. 123).
Most of all they criticize the EU, which “is growing more wobbly by the day, with the U.K.’s shocking Brexit vote an ominous harbinger of future European disintegration” (p. ix).
But they also scold the Obama administration for being far too complacent, focusing especially on Obama’s prediction that Russia’s intervention in Syria was “just going to get [Russia] stuck in a quagmire and it won’t work” (p. x). The authors claim that “Putin is ready for war and nobody else is. And he’s not going to stop until he is rebuffed. So far no one and nothing is standing in his way” (p. xii).
The book concludes with a clarion call for Western mobilization around NATO to deter Russia and defeat its hybrid warfare efforts, arguing that NATO must get serious and America needs to lead.
The authors believe in Western economic and military strength and are convinced that the West is strong enough to stand up to this real and clear danger, but Europe and the U.S. need to mobilize politically.
March 24, 2017....."In the plush, crimson-decked lobby bar of Kiev’s five-star Premier Palace Hotel, Denis Voronenkov, a Russian lawmaker who had defected to Ukraine, knew he was in danger.....“For our personal safety, we can’t let them know where we are,” he said Monday evening as he sat with his wife for an interview with The Washington Post.....Less than 72 hours later, he was dead, shot twice in the head in broad daylight outside the same lobby bar. It was a particularly brazen assassination that recalled the post-Soviet gangland violence of the 1990s. His wife, dressed in black, sobbed as she stooped down to identify Voronenkov’s body, which lay beneath a black tarp in a pool of blood....Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko, just hours later, called the attack an “act of state terrorism by Russia.” As of Thursday evening, police had not identified the assailant, who died in police custody after being shot by Voronenkov’s bodyguard. Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, called the accusation a “fabrication.”"
"He is just the latest Kremlin opponent to wind up dead.....The most famous among them include Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian FSB agent who was poisoned with a radioactive isotope in London in 2006. Political opponents of the Kremlin in Moscow have also been targeted, including Boris Nemtsov, the opposition politician who was gunned down in sight of the Kremlin in 2015.....In Kiev in 2012, before the Russian annexation of Crimea drove a wedge between Russia and Ukraine, a leftist Russian activist named Leonid Razvozhayev, who was fleeing an investigation into whether he was plotting a revolution, was kidnapped off a city street....
In the three years since Ukraine’s pro-Western revolution, Kiev has become something of a refuge for Russian opponents of the Kremlin. In a way, the city has taken on the role of a modern Casablanca or post-revolutionary Paris."
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