BRET STEPHENS: STARING BACK AT PUTIN
http://www.wsj.com/articles/bret-stephens-staring-back-at-putin-1424733509?tesla=y
A report from a committee of Britain’s House of Lords released Friday offers a scathing indictment of British and European policy toward Russia. Europe went “sleep-walking” into the crisis in Ukraine, says Lord Christopher Tugendhat, the committee chairman. “The lack of robust analytical capability” in Western foreign ministries “effectively led to a catastrophic misreading of the mood in the run-up to the crisis.” Matters were made worse by an “optimistic premise” in Britain and the European Union that Russia was moving in the right direction when it came to democracy and the rule of law.
It’s a bald and brutal judgment. But the truth about U.K. policy toward Russia is so much worse.
That truth is buried with the remains of the late Alexander Litvinenko. The one-time KGB agent defected to Britain after credibly accusing his former masters of orchestrating the 1999 bombings of Russian apartment buildings—death toll: 293—as a pretext to restart the war in Chechnya and bring Vladimir Putin to power. In November 2006, Litvinenko ingested a fatal dose of polonium-210. He died three weeks later, naming Mr. Putin as the man who ordered his murder.
Following Litvinenko’s death, British investigators retraced a radioactive trail corresponding to the movements of one Andrei Lugovoi, a former KGB bodyguard who had met with Litvinenko on the day of his poisoning. Polonium was detected in the hotels where Mr. Lugovoi stayed, a restaurant where he ate, plane seats he sat on.
In May 2007 the Crown Prosecution Service issued an extradition request for Mr. Lugovoi, who has always denied involvement in Litvinenko’s death. Moscow refused the request and Mr. Lugovoi was elected to the Russian Duma later that year, thereby gaining parliamentary immunity. He told a Spanish newspaper that anyone harming Russian state interests “should be exterminated.”
All of this is known to everyone. All of it offers an insight into exactly who, and what, the British government faces in the Kremlin. After Litvinenko’s death, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair promised there would be no “diplomatic or political barrier” into the investigation. The pledge didn’t survive his tenure in office.
Instead, the inquiry into the assassination of a British subject by means of nuclear poisoning went nowhere. “It is true that international relations have been a factor in the Government’s decision-making,” Theresa May, Britain’s Home Secretary, admitted in a 2013 letter explaining why she refused to conduct a formal government inquiry into Litvinenko’s death. A more modest “inquest,” she added, which would not have the power to subpoena secret evidence, “is more readily explainable to some of our foreign partners.”
Note the delicacy of Ms. May’s language. “International relations.” “Foreign partners.” The euphemisms of hush-up and move on, of dishonor and appeasement.
And greed. Russian money is the profit margin for English boarding schools, Mayfair real-estate brokers, Bond Street clothiers, and legal engineers (who sometimes perish in unexplained accidents) adept at moving funds from St. Petersburg to Gibraltar, the Isle of Man or the British Virgin Islands. The “Russian premium” is the term of art for the legal fees charged to Russian oligarchs—about £1,500 an hour. Last March, as the Crimea crisis unfolded, the Economist noted that 28 Russian firms, with a market value of £260 billion, were listed on the London Stock Exchange . The New York Stock Exchange lists only two.
All of which is to say that Lord Tugendhat is wrong. The U.K. government was neither a sleepwalker nor a dreamer when it came to Russia. It was at best a seducee, arguably a prostitute. Nor did Britain lack for analytical capability. What was chiefly missing was the moral clarity and political courage to state the obvious and act on it.
Perhaps that’s beginning to change. David Cameron has been widely criticized for being almost entirely absent from European efforts to negotiate an end to the war in eastern Ukraine. But it isn’t clear what Britain stands to gain by participating in the de facto dismemberment of a country the territorial integrity of which the U.K. guaranteed with its signature to the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. If Mr. Cameron isn’t going to thwart the Kremlin, at least he won’t join Angela Merkel and François Hollande in serving as another of its useful idiots.
More important, Britain has at last allowed an inquiry into Litvinenko’s death to go forward, secret evidence and all. The inquiry will not lead to any extraditions or send anyone to prison. It will not satisfy the claims of justice. But it might satisfy those of memory.
That’s a start. The hallmark of Western policy toward the Kremlin has been its eagerness to forget: forget the atrocities of the second Chechen war, the show trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the invasion of Georgia, the military aid to Bashar Assad, the corruption of the Sochi Olympics, the ballot stuffing of Mr. Putin’s re-election, the seizure of Crimea, the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. All this has been done for the sake of diplomatic pragmatism, of getting along with unavoidable Russia. The result has been the multiplication of outrages.
To confront Vladimir Putin, know what he is. To know him, remember what he has done. The Litvinenko inquiry may yet be the beginning of Mr. Putin’s undoing.
Write to bstephens@wsj.com
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