From the editor
Keir Giles in his book Russia’s War on Everybody and What it Means for You tells some of the lesser-known stories of the Kremlin’s disruptive activities around the world through interviews with people who have been impacted by them, from as close as the Baltic and Nordic countries to the United States and Australia. Giles previously worked for BBC Monitoring on and off for 13 years, establishing its Moscow unit, and is now an associate of the Russia and Eurasia Programme at Chatham House in London. In an interview conducted via Teams he told me why we all need to care about what Russia is up to in our own countries, not just in Ukraine.
Keir Giles in Moscow in 1989 when it seemed the Cold War was ending
Russia’s methods of attacking the West in recent years have included attempting to influence elections, using criminals to conduct cyberattacks against Western companies and organisations, GPS jamming, herding migrants to borders and of course brazen assassinations on foreign soil. Meanwhile, Giles points out in his book, Western leaders have continued to treat Russia as a normal country rather than a rogue state and tried time and time again without success to improve relations.
Those who had been paying attention knew this would fail. “It was absolutely clear throughout the 1990s when the NATO Partnership for Peace agreements were signed with a country that still saw NATO as the main enemy and wanted to rebuild the Soviet Union,” Giles told me. “It was the wilful ignorance and wilful disregarding of things Russia was saying that actually got us into this problem in the first place. Ignoring all the ways Russia was disgruntled, spoiling for a fight and preparing itself for it. Putin’s speech 2007 in Munich got everybody so shocked and upset. To Russia watchers who had been watching for the past decade, the only surprise was that it surprised everybody.” In the speech Vladimir Putin criticised the US dominance in global relations and claimed that NATO had promised not to expand into Eastern Europe.
Giles points out that some countries have done better than others at preparing for and coping with Russia’s threats. “The front-line states through necessity are better equipped and better willing, and distance is believed to lend comfort,” he said. “So those including the UK and also France and Germany are not nearly as good at recognising the problem, or dealing with it. In the UK there are also the self-inflicted political problems, like the syndrome that led to the parliamentary Russia report being suppressed for as long as possible and few of its recommendations being acted on.” The report highlighted the problems of Russians laundering their wealth in the UK and attempting to influence the Brexit referendum vote, but then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson tried to play down the domestic issues it raised despite his effusive support for Ukraine.
The first step in meeting the challenges posed by Russia is awareness of them, and Giles is critical of excessive government secrecy that keeps the public in the dark about the extent and nature of the threats. “I think it is doing us harm,” he said. “There was a brief period when there seemed to be a move towards greater transparency in terms of what Russia was doing on a day to day basis, but that seems to have passed, it seems to have sunk into oblivion. We’re back in a situation where you learn more from leaks than from official government communiques. That means the public as a whole are not informed about what the problem is, and of course no government can defend itself when the public are unaware.”
The period of more information-sharing came in 2018 in the wake of the poisoning of the Skripals in the UK and the planned Russian cyber-attack on the OPCW in the Netherlands, Giles said. “The archetype was the Skripal investigation, where it was the limited release of information from the criminal investigation that enabled news media around the world, including in Russia, to pick it up and run with it… and that was what caused the damage to intelligence operations in Russia.”
Russia has been hostile to the West throughout its history, and this is highly unlikely to change even after Putin goes, Giles believes. There will not be a transformation of society as there was in West Germany after World War II because Russia is not going to be completely defeated and occupied by democracies that re-educate the population. “That is what would be required in Russia as well, in order to bring about not just a change in state policy, but also a change in the attitudes of society – on a scale and in circumstances which are unimaginable in their case – to stop thinking that launching genocidal wars against your neighbours is a normal and admirable thing to do,” he said.
“The basic challenge is containing the damage,” Giles continued. “Either recognising a Russia somewhere as it is today, relatively stable but somewhat obnoxious, or dealing with the spillover of infighting from a collapse. The basic task is pretty much exactly the same. It’s limiting the amount of damage that Russia can do and the amount of harm that it can cause to our countries and our societies, and still to our people.”
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Russian strike kills 11 in Sloviansk, two in Snigurivka, one in Kherson
A Russian missile strike on a five-storey residential building in Sloviansk, eastern Ukraine, last Friday killed 11 people including a toddler and injured 21 others. On Sunday, Orthodox Easter, two teenagers were killed in a Russian strike on the town of Snihurivka, Mykolayiv Oblast. An Easter basket they had been carrying was found with their bodies. And on Tuesday one person was killed and nine were injured when Russia shelled the central market in Kherson. Meanwhile Vladimir Putin claimed to have visited troops in occupied regions of Ukraine and was shown on TV presenting commanders with an Orthodox icon, which he said was once owned by one of the Russian Empire’s most successful defence ministers.
Vladimir Kara-Murza sentenced to 25 years
A court in Moscow has sentenced dual Russian-British citizen Vladimir Kara-Murza to 25 years in prison for treason for criticising the war in Ukraine. In his closing statement at his trial, which was held behind closed doors, the longtime Putin critic who previously survived two poisonings said: “I only blame myself for one thing – I failed to convince enough of my compatriots and politicians in democratic countries of the danger that the current Kremlin regime poses for Russia and for the world… The day will come when the darkness over our country will dissipate.” Kara-Murza’s lawyer Vadim Prokhorov has fled the country, fearing prosecution himself.
Also this week WSJ Moscow correspondent Evan Gershkovich appeared in court to appeal against his pre-trial detention on an espionage charge. The appeal was denied despite the paper’s owner Dow Jones offering to pay bail of more than $600,000. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova suggested exchanging Kara-Murza, Gershkovich and US citizen Paul Whelan for jailed WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, commenting that “they won’t give [Assange] up for less than three”.
Two anti-war protesters get long sentences
A court in Moscow has sentenced two men from Omsk, Vladimir Sergeyev and Anton Zhuchkov, to eight and 10 years in prison after finding them guilty of planning a terrorist act with a prior conspiracy. Zhuchkov was also found guilty of illegal production or distribution of drugs in significant quantities. The pair were arrested in the capital on March 6 last year during an anti-war protest. Police asked to search one of their backpacks and allegedly found Molotov cocktails. Meanwhile the two took methadone capsules in an apparent attempt to commit suicide. After their arrest Sergeyev was found to have a head injury.
Jehovah’s Witnesses jailed in Astrakhan Oblast
A court in Astrakhan Oblast has sentenced three Jehovah’s Witnesses to seven years in prison each for belonging to the banned group. Sergei Korolev, Rinat Kiramov and Sergei Kosyanenko were found guilty of organising the activities of and financing an extremist group. The three had been in jail awaiting trial since November 2021.
US citizens charged over Russian malign influence operation
A federal grand jury in Tampa, Florida, has indicted four US citizens and three Russians over working with the Russian government and in conjunction with the FSB to conduct a multi-year malign influence campaign in the United States, according to a statement from the Department of Justice. In a separate case in the District of Columbia a criminal complaint was unsealed charging Russian national Natalia Burlinova with conspiring with an FSB officer to act as an illegal agent of Russia in the United States, the statement says.
The indicted Russian intelligence officers are accused of participating in covertly funding and directing candidates for local office in the United States. “Aleksandr Viktorovich Ionov, a resident of Moscow, was the founder and president of the Anti-Globalization Movement of Russia (AGMR), an organization headquartered in Moscow, Russia, and funded by the Russian government. Ionov allegedly utilized AGMR to carry out Russia’s malign influence campaign. Ionov’s influence efforts were allegedly directed and supervised by Moscow-based FSB officers, including indicted defendants Aleksey Borisovich Sukhodolov and Yegor Sergeyevich Popov,” the statement says.
Between 2014 and 2022 Ionov allegedly recruited members of political groups in the United States, including the African People’s Socialist Party and the Uhuru Movement (collectively, the APSP) in Florida, Black Hammer in Georgia, and an unnamed political group in California. “One focus of Ionov’s alleged influence operation was to create the appearance of American popular support for Russia’s annexation of territories in Ukraine,” the statement says. Omali Yeshitela, Penny Joanne Hess, Jesse Nevel and Augustus C. Romain Jr., aka Gazi Kodzo, all from St. Petersburg, Florida and all members of the APSP, are the US citizens who were indicted in the case.
In the separate case Burlinova is accused of conspiring with an FSB officer to recruit US citizens from academic and research institutions to travel to Russia to participate in a public diplomacy programme called Meeting Russia. The programme was allegedly operated by PICREADI, a Russian organization led by Burlinova, funded by the Russian government and devoted to promoting Russian national interests.