Western values? They enthroned the monster who is shelling Ukrainians today

 Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian
 
However repressive his regime, Vladimir Putin was tolerated by the US, Britain and the EU – until he became intolerable
 




Six days after Vladimir Putin ordered his soldiers into Ukraine, Joe Biden gave his first State of the Union address. His focus was inevitable. “While it shouldn’t have taken something so terrible for people around the world to see what’s at stake, now everyone sees it clearly,” the US president said. “We see the unity among leaders of nations and a more unified Europe, a more unified west.”

In the countdown to the invasion, the Conservative chairman Oliver Dowden flew to Washington to address a thinktank with impeccable links to Donald Trump. “As Margaret Thatcher said to you almost 25 years ago, the task of conservatives is to remake the case for the west,” the cabinet minister told the Heritage Foundation. “She refused to see the decline of the west as our inevitable destiny. And neither should we.”

Western values. The free world. The liberal order. Over the three weeks since Putin declared war on ordinary Ukrainians, these phrases have been slung about more regularly, more loudly and more unthinkingly than at any time in almost two decades. Perhaps like me you thought such puffed-chest language and inane categorisation had been buried under the rubble of Iraq. Not any more. Now they slip out of the mouths of political leaders and slide into the columns of major newspapers and barely an eyebrow is raised. The Ukrainians are fighting for “our” freedom, it is declared, in that mode of grand solipsism that defines this era. History is back, chirrup intellectuals who otherwise happily stamp on attempts by black and brown people to factcheck the claims made for American and British history.

To hold these positions despite the facts of the very recent past requires vat loads of whitewash. Head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, claims Vladimir Putin has “brought war back to Europe”, as if Yugoslavia and Kosovo had been hallucinations. Condoleezza Rice pops up on Fox to be told by the anchor: “When you invade a sovereign nation, that is a war crime.” With a solemn nod, the former secretary of state to George Bush replies: “It is certainly against every principle of international law and international order.” She maintains a commendably straight face.

None of this is to defend Putin’s brutality. When 55 Ukrainian children are made refugees every minute and pregnant women in hospital are shelled mid-labour, there is nothing to defend. But to frame our condemnations as a binary clash of rival value systems is to absolve ourselves of our own alleged war crimes, committed as recently as this century in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is to pretend “our” wars are just and only theirs are evil, to make out that Afghan boys seeking asylum from the Taliban are inevitably liars and cheats while Ukrainian kids fleeing Russian bombs are genuine refugees. It is a giant and morally repugnant lie and yet elements of it already taint our front pages and rolling-news coverage. Those TV reporters marvelling at the devastation being visited on a European country, as if its coordinates on a map are what counts, are just one example. Another is the newspapers that spent the past 20 years cursing eastern Europeans for having the temerity to settle here legally and now congratulating the British on the warmth of their hearts.

And then there is the unblushing desire expressed by senior pundits and thinktankers that this might end with “regime change” – toppling Putin and installing in the Kremlin someone more congenial to the US and UK and certainly better house-trained. Spotting the flaw here doesn’t require history, it just needs a working memory. The west has already tried regime change in post-communist Russia: Putin was the end product, the man with whom Bill Clinton declared he could do business, rather than the vodka-soused Boris Yeltsin. 

Indeed more than that, London and New York are not just guilty of hosting oligarchs – giving them visas, selling on their most valuable real estate and famous businesses – they helped create the oligarchy in Russia. The US and the UK funded, staffed and applauded the programmes meant to “transform” the country’s economy, but which actually handed over the assets of an industrialised and commodity-rich country to a few dozen men with close connections to the Kremlin.

In 1993, the New York Times Magazine ran a profile of a Harvard economist it called “Dr Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapist”. It followed Sachs as he toured Moscow, orchestrating the privatisation of Russia’s economy and declaring how high unemployment was a price worth paying for a revitalised economy. His expertise didn’t come for free, but was bankrolled by the governments of the US, Sweden and other major multinational institutions. But its highest cost was borne by the Russian people. A study in the British Medical Journal concluded: “An extra 2.5-3 million Russian adults died in middle age in the period 1992-2001 than would have been expected based on 1991 mortality.” Meanwhile, the country’s wealth was handed over to a tiny gang of men, who took whatever they could out of the country to be laundered in the US and the UK. It was one of the grandest and most deadly larcenies of modern times, overseen by Yeltsin and Putin and applauded and financed by the west.

The western values that are being touted today helped enthrone the monster who is now shelling Ukrainian women and children. However corrupt and repressive his regime, Putin was tolerated by the west – until he became intolerable. In much the same way, until last month Roman Abramovich was perfectly fit and proper to own Chelsea football club. Now No 10 says he isn’t. There are no values here, not even a serious strategy. Today, Boris Johnson claims Mohammed bin Salman is a valued friend and partner to the UK, and sells him arms to kill Yemenis and pretends not to notice those he has executed. Goodness knows what tomorrow will bring.

Londongrad oligarchs are being forced back to Russia’s embrace

Max Seddon in The Financial Times

As the west’s relations with Moscow plumb ever lower depths, the UK is abuzz with calls to do something about its oligarch problem. “We are going after the money,” Boris Johnson, foreign secretary, vowed after former double agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned. 

A group of MPs recently singled out law firm Linklaters for its work on the London float of En+, owned by sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and called for a crackdown on “corrupt” Kremlin-connected tycoons. 

But the ones in real trouble may be the oligarchs themselves. They were once ideal go-betweens between Russia and the west. The real life models for the mafia money launderer in espionage novelist John le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor saw no contradiction in sending their children to Eton. UK politicians had no qualms about staying on their yachts or serving in their boardrooms. 

Now, feeling equally at home in London’s Soho and Moscow’s Soho Rooms — the nightclub so exclusive that, according to legend, Roman Abramovich once did not pass “face control” — is a liability. Mr Abramovich, who epitomised “Londongrad” bling when he bought Chelsea football club and a house on a street known as “ Billionaire’s Row”, struggled to get a UK visa. Suddenly, oligarchs are too Russian for a west eager to clean up its act and too western for a Russia hunting for “enemies of the people”. Or, as the Russian saying goes: if you sit on two chairs, something vulgar will happen to you through the crack in the middle. 

“Even if you’re not sanctioned yourself, it still affects you,” a close friend of one of Russia’s richest oligarchs told me this week. “You go to a bank and the compliance department doesn’t want anything to do with anything Russian.” 

Today, oligarchs are like hipsters with even worse dress sense: nobody will admit to being one, even if you know them when you see them. 

Part of the problem is the nature of oligarchy, which has changed dramatically since Vladimir Putin took power 18 years ago. The classical definition is someone who acquired vast wealth, often through dubious political connections, by privatising state assets on the cheap, thus giving them huge power over the penniless political class. 

In the 1990s, it was widely held that the real power in Russia lay not with Boris Yeltsin, but the oligarchs backing him. The late Boris Berezovsky liked to give the impression he ran the country during Yeltsin’s frequent absences due to heart problems and that he had handpicked Mr Putin as the next leader. 

Mr Putin shifted the power dynamic in his first few years in office. Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, who challenged him through their TV channels, were forced to flee. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who dared to take him on politically, was jailed for a decade. 

That turned most of the other oligarchs into supplicants working under an unwritten rule: they were allowed to keep their wealth in exchange for staying out of politics. 

The new set of prime movers were figures from Mr Putin’s childhood. They amassed huge fortunes after he became president — often through winning lucrative contracts from state companies such as Gazprom. After Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, the US sanctioned these individuals first in the hope they would convince Mr Putin to change course. 

Instead, they circled the wagons around him. Yuri Kovalchuk, a billionaire banker who once owned a dacha outside St Petersburg next to Mr Putin’s, made a bizarre TV appearance in which he said that Russia had a “nationally oriented elite” that knew “what side of the barricades it was on”. 

He went on: “I’m not against having a flat abroad or a villa on the Cote d’Azur, be my guest. But the question is: where’s your home?” 

The more recent US sanctions have cast a wider net that has perplexed its potential targets. “Before, they were going after people who really made money with the regime. Now we don’t get what it is for. If you think we can go to Putin and tell him what to do, you don’t understand Russia,” one oligarch told me this week. If anything, he continued, the western attack on oligarchs benefits the Kremlin. First, moves against Russian capital push them to repatriate cash stashed abroad in western companies — a goal Putin has struggled to achieve for years. Second, many in the elite increasingly see little reason to leave key businesses in private hands, especially if they require state support. 

And now that several sanctioned oligarchs cannot pay off dollar loans to the state banks to whom they pledged major assets as collateral, they may not be tycoons for much longer. 

“Putin loves this,” the oligarch said. “The regime is winning. The people like it because nobody likes oligarchs, and the state consolidates.” 

The pressure the tycoons face at home and abroad has put the entire UK oligarch service industry at risk. I recently had dinner with my first Russian teacher, who now runs a consultancy helping oligarchs and assorted pretenders get their children into exclusive schools. When I mentioned that I had heard one businessman with a prominent UK presence was facing trouble after the state nationalised a company he part-owned, the teacher nearly spat out his food. “You’re joking!” he said. “He’s one of my best clients!”

Why can anyone shovel cash into the UK without any enquiry into its provenance?

Mary Dejevsky in the Independent.

Today is the day when English justice delivers its verdict on the oligarchs. After seven months spent poring over the evidence, Mrs Justice Gloster returns to London's Commercial Court to hand down her judgment in the case of Berezovsky v Abramovich – Boris Berezovsky being a one-time Kremlin adviser now in exile in Britain; Roman Abramovich being the owner of Chelsea Football Club. Berezovsky claimed Abramovich cheated him in a share deal, and demanded £3bn in damages. Abramovich said he did nothing of the kind.

The huge sums of money, the intricacy of the arguments, and the ever-shifting political context in which the disputed events took place, all make this a landmark case. But there will be many Britons, myself shamefacedly included, who have already given up and pronounced a plague on both their houses. Whoever wins – and having sat in the courtroom a couple of days, I admit to flailing hopelessly in the rights and wrongs of it – here are two men of a certain age and uncertain wealth seeking to settle old scores through the British courts. Which of them emerges victorious troubles me very little.

It may be that one can afford to lose more than the other, and I would hazard who that might be. But each exploited the turmoil of immediate post-Soviet Russia to his own – considerable – advantage. Acumen came into it, but so – I suspect – did bluff, acquired street wisdom and not a little chance. Whether one behaved honourably and one less so, I would hesitate to wager, but the likelihood is of at least 50 shades of grey.

Corruption was endemic in the Soviet Union; it is endemic in Russia today. In between, there was corruption plus chaos. The times were brutal, and I almost doubt that it is worth raking over old coals in any court at all. Let any aggrieved oligarchs fight it out, in the old-fashioned way, and let the cannier, more ruthless man win. If there is blood on the floor, or the doors, or the car bumper, so be it.

The trouble is that Berezovsky v Abramovich, and the parade of other oligarchs resorting to the London courts, says something not just about a very particular period in Russia (which is now gone), but also about Britain today. And I do care about that, as should the UK Government and the country at large. If Russians cannot get it together to run an honest state, then that reflects at least in part their state of development and their chequered history.

It is no good for us to try to impose our civic standards on them, as various do-gooding NGOs have long tried to do. If there is no domestic power or consensus to sustain change, no improvement will last. A quorum of Russians has to demand a less corrupt state, and there are signs – in recent protests and the rise of internet exposés – that they will.

No doubt that is why Berezovsky and his compatriots have petitioned the English courts to rule on events that have only the most tangential connection with this country – a meeting here, a hotel room there. In a way, that shows a flattering confidence in British justice and a distressing lack of faith in Russia's own. But has the arrival of so much Russian money in Britain, with high-profile members of its privilegentsia not far behind, really been an untrammelled good, or even neutral in its effects?

Someone who believes it has a downside is Alexei Navalny, the frontman for Russia's populist anti-corruption campaign. He has speculated that, while much of the Russian money oiling the wheels of London society is honestly acquired, some of it – obviously – is not. And he asked the question that we Britons should have been asking for a decade or more. Why is it so easy for someone with no obvious ties to Britain to set up shop here and shovel in the cash without any enquiries being made into its provenance? The image of a Russian paying for a Mayfair flat with a suitcase of cash became almost a cliché of the late 1990s. But why did we laugh it off, rather than ask how that could be acceptable or even legal?

Navalny notes that all a rich, or even modestly well-off, Russian had to do – if he chose not to invest £2m in a business to acquire a resident's visa – was to buy a flat, produce his ID and a utility bill, and lo he could set up a bank account and start transferring his billions. In his book, the process was too easy. In my book, as a Briton, opening and operating a bank account and transferring money across borders is too difficult. The very same procedures – the address, the ID, the utility bill – that make it so simple for a foreigner to import his ill-gotten gains cause endless hassles for us natives. Plus the UK bank must declare to the taxman outgoing transfers above a certain amount – but not those coming in.

You can only laugh really about error-prone ID checks that cause us untold delays in the name of preventing money-laundering, yet give foreign shysters a fast-track to legitimacy – so long, that is, that any actual fraud has not been committed here. As HSBC's admitted involvement in Mexican drug money-laundering showed, you have to be a big fish not to get caught in the anti-corruption safety net of a British bank.

It is not just Russians, of course, who feed dirty money into Britain. But it is their millions that have had some of the most obviously pernicious consequences. At the less harmful end are those flats paid for in cash and all the "bling"; at the opposite extreme are some mysterious killings and attempted killings. In between is the court time taken up by internal Russian squabbles – how many homegrown cases have to wait? – and the damaging effect on diplomatic relations of the UK's generous political asylum policy towards economic, if not criminal, exiles.

It might be said that every country gets the emigrés it deserves. In being more interested in the money than how it was acquired, we have brought many of these difficulties upon ourselves. But they are not ours alone. We can fulminate against corruption in Russia as we like, but unless the UK does more to stop dubious Russian money coming to London, we need to recognise that our own greed and regulatory laxness have also played their part.