Posted on December 2, 2010 - by Venik
US and Russia: Cosa Putina | Editorial
The picture of Russia presented by US diplomats reinforces the need to press the reset button on US-Russian relations
The day on which the words “Putin” and “mafia state” reached tens of millions of readers on the internet, Rossiya, Russia’s state-controlled television channel, reported the following in its mid-morning broadcast: the Moscow river was freezing over, two Russian tourists had been attacked by sharks in Egypt, and US truck drivers had got drunk while transporting nuclear weapons. Rossiya did carry Larry King’s interview with the Russian prime minister, and report Mr Putin’s riposte to Robert Gates’s remark that the Russian government was run by the security services – being a former CIA man, Mr Gates should know. But on the substance of the US embassy cables themselves, nothing. Russia’s supine television channels, from which 70% of the country get their news, were silent.
This does not mean there will be no reply, but it will probably be something along the lines of WikiLeaks being manipulated by the Pentagon to defame and weaken Russia. The US embassy cables, if anything, understate the extent to which the Russian government amounts to a giant protection racket. The closer you are to the seat of power, the more money you can extort and the more immunity you enjoy. But this system was not Mr Putin’s alone. He industrialised a process that Boris Yeltsin started. The difference is that in Mr Yeltsin’s case the US embassy in Moscow did their level best to aid and abet. For a variety of reasons: they regarded Mr Yeltsin as their man; he was still, usefully from their point of view, demolishing Soviet structures; that demolition was done in the name of privatisation, and the grand theft of the state’s resources was conducted by people who called themselves democrats. But when it is done in the name of a nationalist autocracy rather than a young pro-western democracy, US diplomats express outrage. Their words would carry more weight if they had piped up a decade earlier.
The problem of describing a government in which officials, oligarchs and organised crime are bound together in a virtual mafia state – one, moreover, that has just won the World Cup – is how you deal with it. Do you ignore its views and tear up the treaties, as Bill Clinton and George W Bush did? Do you place missile defence batteries on its borders? Do you suck up to it, as Silvio Berlusconi is suspected to have done for personal profit? Or do you engage with it in the knowledge that you do not have the luxury of choosing your partners? The picture of Russia presented by US diplomats does not undermine the policy of pressing the reset button on US-Russian relations. It reinforces the need for it. Most cases being heard by the European court of human rights are Russian. So much so that a better name for the Strasbourg court would be the Russian court of human rights. But that is the last reason for suspending Russia from the Council of Europe.
The US embassy cables will not deal a terminal blow to the 16 working groups established under the commission that Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev set up to improve their relationship. But failing to ratify the Start treaty in the lame-duck session of Congress could. So, too, could ignoring the warning contained in Mr Medvedev’s recent state of the nation speech and Mr Putin’s CNN interview – that if the US went ahead with a missile defence programme which excluded Russia, Russia would respond by moving short-range tactical nuclear warheads closer up. If there is a lively debate in Russia about how to modernise it, those voices campaigning for accountability and transparency are still all too easily silenced by the perception of an external threat. It could still take a generation before Russia is run by an accountable government. The duty of its neighbours is not to exacerbate the process, as they did in the 1990s. To do anything else would be to make ordinary Russians hostage to the system that preys on them.
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