Putin, Russia, Europe and Trump

Putin has bet everything on not just traditional defense but on cyber warfare, too. Today’s Moscow is a Mecca for hackers.

Day one of the Democratic National Convention was rocked by the release of innumerable emails in which party leaders were shown to have favored Hillary Clinton to the detriment of Bernie Sanders. Sources close to Clinton let slip their belief that these emails had been “seized” by Russian authorities who proceeded to release them, quite opportunely, on the very day of the convention. The obvious intent behind these actions was to help Donald Trump, who has shown great affinity for the Putin administration. Trump, who never misses a chance to push ahead with his electoral guerrilla warfare, later urged Russia—the mastermind behind this act of information piracy—to release the contents of all the messages. This sparked yet another controversy, which has left both the CIA and the Pentagon in a state of near desperation, reeling from the prospect that Trump may come to sit behind the desk in the Oval Office.

This incident, which might seem merely to be another of Trump’s bizarre, ridiculous exploits, in fact says a great deal about Putin and Russia—much more than you might think. Vladimir Putin first entered Russian national politics as prime minister to the now forgotten Boris Yeltsin, after having enjoyed a solid career within the KGB, the former Russian secret police and intelligence agency, and the St. Petersburg government. At the head of government in 1999 and as president the following year, Putin attempted to introduce economic reforms within Russia. He thought it might be possible to do for Russia what Deng Xiaoping had done in China, instituting state capitalism gradually by maintaining a political iron grip on society while also appealing to the traditional national sentiments of the Russian people.

It was quickly realized, however, that such economic reforms were virtually infeasible in the “great empire,” as they would have rendered the economy dependent on the exportation of primary materials, namely energy. The strong, deeply engrained network of oligarchs, which arose and developed out of the communist Soviet regime, also made such economic reforms unworkable. The reality for Russia was that by having transitioned from a medieval economy during the time of the czars to a collectivist economy during the age of Stalinist communism, it never grew accustomed to, nor learned the rules of, the market or of capitalism. This is quite contrary to China, which, in spite of its 40-year interregnum of Maoist communism, had a pre-existing and ancient commercial and mercantile tradition. China, for its part, has a natural propensity for profit and speculation, a fact reflected in its deep-rooted affinity for games of chance. That is to say, China’s transition—as a nation and a people—toward global capitalism, the financial game and the market economy, has been almost “natural.” It’s the absence of this innate ability that has failed both Russian tradition and the mindset of the Russian people. Without this spirit, Putin’s reforms—even if well intentioned and well directed—went nowhere.

Being unable to overcome the limits of an economy principally based on extracting, producing and exporting primary materials, Putin had to change his strategy. Since economic reforms weren’t showing results, he had to veer toward a sector with which he was already familiar and which was exceedingly proficient: geopolitics—pure geopolitics. Indications of this new political ambition were visible even during his first presidential term, namely, to take back Russia’s greatness through the tried-and-true path of rearmament, control of information and intelligence services on a global scale.

Putin, thus, in fine Russian tradition, began to play his game of European chess. He started off by politically bullying Ukraine and Georgia and inciting unrest in Moldova, in clear provocation of Romania. This “bullying” was then extended to include the Baltic States by taking advantage of Russian-speaking populations, high concentrations of which live in Estonia and Latvia. Yet, he didn’t stop there; he continued to use the military—generally speaking, submarines—to harass Finland and Sweden, neutral countries not part of NATO. Putin, in a decisive move, next advanced on the internal political systems of numerous European states. Russia’s presence within Bulgarian and Serbian politics, for instance, is a long-recognized and now inescapable fact. The alliance made with Viktor Orban in Hungary, based on Russia’s sale of low-priced energy, however, qualifies as something unnatural. Financial support that is being provided openly to Marine Le Pen’s National Front, likewise, has fooled no one. His discrete financial support of Syriza in Greece and of the communists in Cyprus has shown quite well how Putin has his sights set on destabilizing internal politics within European Union member states. It’s common knowledge that he provided help to the United Kingdom Independent Party, or UKIP, to benefit Brexit, while also loaning money to primarily radical right wing parties from Holland, Austria and Sweden. Recently, there has been news of a Portuguese spy, who had been funneling information to Russia, being apprehended in Rome, and of Russian flights inside our airspace. Nothing has been overlooked or left out by Russia—not even Portugal.

It’s at this point that the aforementioned Trump story comes back into view and appears all the more plausible. Putin has bet everything on not just traditional defense but on cyber warfare, too. Today’s Moscow is a Mecca for hackers, possessing the world’s most sophisticated center for information piracy and organized, systematic “hacking.” Any cyber security business, even those modest in size, will attest to this assertion. It is not by chance that Snowden was welcomed in Moscow or that Assange finds himself confined to an embassy belonging to Ecuador, a satellite state of Bolivarian socialism, a system supported by the Russians in Venezuela, which is not by coincidence a financier of the Podemos political party in Spain.

I am a critic of European policy toward Russia, which has provided Putin with many of the pretexts he has needed to carry out his plan. It must not be forgotten that Putin is one of the major figures connected to the crises affecting the European Union and the American elections—a figure who knows us much better than we know him. And, lest it be forgotten, he knows more about us than we could ever suspect or guess.