The Vladimir Putin that No One Saw Coming Sometimes, just sometimes, you should pay attention to annoying things said by tiresome people at worthy conferences. So starts Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at Oxford University, in a recent Sunday Review Opinion Column on the New York Times (see full article in the end). The article describes how Professor Garton Ash first met Mr. Putin, then St. Petersburgs deputy mayor, who he describes as an irritating little man. Maybe size is the reason why Mr. Putin managed to fool everyone up to now. Size and money. The meeting took place at a conference in St. Petersburg in 1994 and Mr. Putin called attention to himself by discoursing at length about the huge territories that Russia had had to give up that had always belonged to Russia, about how Russia could not abandon the 25 million Russians who lived abroad and about how the world needed to show Russia more respect. No one paid attention. No one was really listening. The little man went his own way and five years later became Russias prime minister. Since then, and for the last fifteen years, he has alternatively been Russias prime minister and president but still no one was paying attention. No one thought it strange that in a country claiming to be a democracy one man kept alternating in the seats of power. Mr. Putin was even given membership to the G8 legitimizing his claim of democratic rule in what increasingly looked like an autocracy. Quickly after having been elected, Mr. Putin began consolidating his power by eliminating those who stood on his path. Early in the 2000s he had a go at the oligarchs. Some, like Roman Abramovich, chose to leave while others, like Mikhail Khodorkovsky, chose to join the opposition and fight back. In the early 2000s Mr. Khodorkovsky was the owner of Russias biggest oil company Yukos and was considered to be the countrys wealthiest man. He may have thought that his money and power made him immune to Mr. Putins bullying ways. He was wrong. In October 2003, Mr. Khodorkovsky was arrested and quickly sentenced on bogus charges. His company, Yukos, was taken over by the government without compensation to shareholders and taken apart. Was the West looking? Apparently it was too busy doing business to take a serious look at what was going on. As The Daily Telegraphs financial editor, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard puts it BP and other Western companies bid for Yukos fields teaming with Rosneft and Gazprom, ignoring warnings that they were acquiring stolen assets without legal protection. So the world turned a blind eye and resumed business as always. So long as the spoils were duly shared. This willingness of the West to look the other way may arguably have embolden Mr. Putin to go further. Russian journalists writing against him or investigating his cronies began being persecuted. This culminated in a high profile case; the death in October 2006 of journalist Anna Politkovskaya. But it did not end here. An investigation by the International Federation of Journalists published in 2009 claimed over 300 cases of dead or missing Russian journalists since 1993. Radio and TV stations as well as newspapers that did not aligned by Mr. Putins views were forcibly closed. Still, the world saw nothing wrong. The West was still busy looking the other way. Until Mr. Putin decided to make his moves bolder. In line with his 1994 views on the land rightfully belonging to Mother Russia, Mr. Putin decided that the time had come for Russia to take the Crimea back from the Ukraine. It took him twenty long years but, voila. Maybe he thought that given the amount of business linking the West to Russia and given the Wests willingness to close its eyes on previous occasions, no one would lift an eyebrow. Finally, his calculations turned wrong. Not only did the West not turn a blind eye but it seems set to go ahead with sanctions that have the potential to badly cripple the Russian economy. Sure, it took the West sometime to recognize that the threat had to be met. Possibly, it took a Russian-made antiaircraft missile bringing down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 for the West to really stand up and act. Put decency before profit. But act they did and Mr. Putin has finally fallen into disgrace. He will not come down alone. The recent ruling by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague, the worlds top commercial court, on the Yukos case concluded that there had been legal abuses by President Putin and condemned Russia to pay US$ 51bn in damages. Payments should begin shortly and the plaintiffs have declared that they will pursue Russian state assets in different jurisdictions around the world should Russia default. This puts the Russian people on the line. Moreover, Russian stocks and bonds have since collapsed. The Economist estimates that the Russian market is poorer by some US$ 1.035bn because of Western investors reluctance to invest in the country. Russian bonds are trading at an average of 9.5% compared to around 1% for Germany and 2.5% for Italy. The Economist explains the consequences in a single sentence; the more the government spends on interest, the more it has to tax its citizens and the less money it has available to spend on services. So it is the Russian population as a whole that Mr. Putin is taking down with him. Or to quote The Economist again and for the broader population, the result is a lack of foreign investment that must be contributing to the countrys poor growth: its GDP fell by 0.4% in the first quarter of 2014. Posted 31.VII.2014 nytimes/2014/07/20/opinion/sunday/protecting-russians-in-ukraine-has-deadly-consequences.html?ref=world
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 21:40:28 +0000
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