At the end of last week’s note on Russia’s tactic of ‘Maskirovka’ I touched on another favourite of the Kremlin, ‘kompromat’. I was tempted to mention the Ritz Carlton Moscow, the scene – allegedly – of some epic ‘kompromat’, and joke that whenever I stayed there, I was always in bed early, out of trouble as it were.
One reason I got to bed early in Moscow was that I like to make early morning runs through the city, often from Red Square through Gorky Park, which I think locals found amusing as there is not much of a running culture in Moscow.
One run I will not forget came in the aftermath of the murder of the reformer and former deputy prime minister Boris Nemtsov, seeing clusters of flowers on the Bolshoy bridge where he was gunned down. The shocking aspect was how close this happened to the Kremlin, the implication being that Nemtsov had fallen foul of the Kremlin, and it had decided to wipe him out.
I immediately thought of the flowers at the scene of Nemtsov’s death when I heard that Alexei Navalny had passed away (very likely murdered). The effect of his death, coinciding with the Putin interview I discussed last week and the Munich Security conference, is chilling.
If any good comes of it, it will be to disabuse reasonable people of the notion that the Russian government is not a malevolent threat. In this context there is much to do – Germany must rid itself of Russian influence within the state, Austria, the UK and Switzerland should rid their financial systems of the tens of billions of Russian money and countries like Ireland need to take security and defense seriously.
Navalny’s death also sharpens the war on democracy that Russia has led. Here too, there is much to do. I will shorten this note by linking a TEDx talk I was privileged enough to give in Stormont, Belfast recently, where I lay out some of the measures needed to restore the credibility of democracy. One notable element is for governments in democracies to take a more aggressive, active stance against states like Russia who target our democratic processes.
The link is here, I hope you enjoy the Talk.
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