You may have missed this story, so I am repeating it as a public service:
MOSCOW,
Special to The New York Times, Oct. 1 — A previously unheard-of group
called Hackers for a Free Russia released a treasure trove of financial
records online today indicating that President Vladimir Putin owns some
$30 billion in property, hotels and factories across Russia and Europe,
all disguised by front organizations and accounting charades.
The
documents, which appear to be authentic, include detailed financial
records and emails between Mr. Putin’s Kremlin office and a number of
his Russian cronies and Swiss banks. They constitute the largest hack
ever of Mr. Putin. Russian censors are scrambling to shut down Twitter
inside the country and keep the emails out of Russian-language media.
At
a news conference in Washington, C.I.A. Director John Brennan was asked
if U.S. intelligence services had any hand in the cyberleak of what is
being called “The Putin Files.” With a slight grin, Mr. Brennan said:
“The U.S. government would never intervene in Russian politics, just as
President Putin would never intervene in an American election. That
would be wrong.” As Mr. Brennan left the podium, though, he burst out
laughing.
No,
you didn’t miss this story. I made it up. But isn’t it time there was
such a story? Isn’t it time we gave Putin a dose of his own medicine —
not for juvenile playground reasons and not to instigate a conflict but
precisely to prevent one — to back Putin off from what is increasingly
rogue behavior violating basic civilized norms and increasingly vital
U.S. interests.
Putin
“is at war with us, but we are not at war with him — both the U.S. and
Germany are desperately trying to cling to a decent relationship,”
remarked Josef Joffe, editor of Die Zeit, a weekly German newspaper and a
leading strategic thinker in Europe. No one should want to start a
shooting war between great powers “in the shadow of nuclear weapons,”
Joffe told me.
But
we also cannot just keep turning the other cheek. Putin’s behavior in
Syria and Ukraine has entered the realm of war crimes, and his
cyberattacks on the American political system threaten to undermine the
legitimacy of our next election.
Just
read the papers. Last week a Dutch-led investigation adduced
irrefutable video evidence that Putin’s government not only trucked in
the missile system used to shoot down a Malaysia Airlines plane flying
over Ukraine in 2014, killing all 298 civilians onboard, but also
returned it to Russia the same night and then engaged in an elaborate
cover-up.
On
Sept. 19, what U.S. intelligence officials say was almost certainly a
Russian Su-24 warplane bombed a U.N. convoy in Syria carrying relief
supplies for civilians. The Red Cross said at least 20 people were
killed. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called the bombing “savage
and apparently deliberate.”
For
a long time, Putin’s excesses were just a tragedy for the Russian
people and for many people in Ukraine and Syria, so President Obama
could plausibly argue that the right response was economic sanctions and
troop buildups in Eastern Europe. But in the last nine months,
something has changed.
Putin’s
relentless efforts to crush both the democratic and Islamist opposition
to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria; his rejection of any real
power-sharing solution there; and his joining with Assad in mercilessly
bombing civilians in Aleppo are not only horrific in and of themselves,
but they also keep pushing more refugees into the European Union. This
is fostering an anti-immigrant backlash in Europe that is spawning
right-wing nationalist parties and fracturing the E.U.
Meanwhile,
Russia’s hacking of America’s Democratic Party — and signs that Russian
or other cyberwarriors have tried to break into American state voter
registration systems — suggests that Putin or other cyberdisrupters are
trying to undermine the legitimacy of our next national election.
Together,
these actions pose a threat to the two pillars of global democracy and
open markets — America and the E.U. — more than anything coming from
ISIS or Al Qaeda.
“The
Soviet Union was a revolutionary state that sought a wholesale change
in the international order,” observed Robert Litwak, director of
security studies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
and author of “Deterring Nuclear Terrorism.”
Putin is ostensibly not seeking a revolution of the international
order, Litwak added, but Putin’s departure from standard great-power
competition — encouraging a flood of refugees and attacking the
legitimacy of our political system — “is leading to shifts in global
politics that could have revolutionary consequences, even if Putin is
not motivated by revolutionary ideology.”
Obama
believed that a combination of pressure and engagement would moderate
Putin’s behavior. That is the right approach, in theory, but it’s now
clear that we have underestimated the pressure needed to produce
effective engagement, and we’re going to have to step it up. This is not
just about the politics of Syria and Ukraine anymore. It’s now also
about America, Europe, basic civilized norms and the integrity of our
democratic institutions.
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