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      Russia: the spectre that loomed over Trump's presidency

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      When historians look back at Donald Trump’s presidency they are likely to pick out two defining themes. One is the coronavirus pandemic. It dominated his last year in office, and saw the president become the virus’s most celebrated victim cum White House super-spreader.The other is Russia, a subject that consumed American public life for four long years. The question first came up when Trump was a long-shot candidate for president. In a Republican party that had once regarded Vladimir Putin as a cold-eyed KGB killer, why was Trump’s behaviour towards Russia’s leader so ingratiating?There were Trump’s flattering public statements about Putin on the campaign trail. And his blatant appeal in July 2016 for Moscow to locate emails that he claimed Hillary Clinton had deleted. “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he told a press conference in Florida.As it turned out Russia was indeed listening. That evening a group of hackers working for GRU military intelligence returned after-hours to their office in central Moscow. They tried to break into the accounts of senior Clinton aides, unsuccessfully. A rival spy agency once headed by Putin, the FSB, launched its own electronic attacks.Across 2016 the Russians ran an aggressive and multifaceted operation to help Donald Trump win. In spring the GRU stole tens of thousands of Democratic party emails, including from Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta. These were fed to WikiLeaks and given to reporters via a GRU persona, Guccifer 2.0.Meanwhile trolls working out of St Petersburg launched an unprecedented anti-Clinton social media operation. The Russians – employed by Putin’s ally Yevgeny Prigozhin – impersonated Americans, organised pro-Trump rallies, and even hired an actor to dress up as Clinton and sit in a cage.Moscow rumoursDuring the 2016 campaign there were swirling rumours concerning Trump and Moscow. No media outlet could quite stand them up, but the topic burst into the public domain in January 2017 when BuzzFeed published a dossier by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, commissioned by the Democratic party. It would torment Trump for the rest of his presidency.The dossier alleged the Kremlin had been cultivating Trump for five years at least. It claimed Putin’s spies had collected kompromat, secretly filming Trump and two sex workers inside the Ritz-Carlton hotel during his 2013 visit to Moscow for the Miss Universe beauty pageant.Trump vehemently denied the seedy allegations. He and his Republican supporters on Capitol Hill and within the Justice Department sought to discredit its British author and to out his sources. Steele was a “failed spy” and “lowlife”, and collusion allegations a “witch-hunt” and a “hoax”, Trump insisted.‘Russia thing’Hoax or not, Trump’s efforts to make the “Russia thing” go away backfired. In May 2017 he sacked James Comey as FBI director. This resulted in the appointment of the former FBI chief Robert Mueller as special prosecutor. Mueller’s brief was to investigate whether Trump and his inner circle had conspired with Moscow during the election. To answer yes, a criminal standard of proof was necessary.For almost two years the workings of Mueller’s team stayed secret. The prosecutor was both Washington’s most present personality – endlessly discussed – and a ghost. From time to time his office issued indictments. These were against 26 Russians including GRU hackers. And against Americans: Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, national security adviser Michael Flynn, attorney Michael Cohen, and others.When it arrived in spring 2019, Mueller’s report was a disappointment to liberal Americans who hoped it might sweep Trump from power. It identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign but did not find a criminal-level conspiracy. Nor did it rule on whether the president had obstructed justice. Mueller said he had not considered collusion, which was not a “legal term”.Trump, we learned, had been secretly negotiating in 2015-16 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow while simultaneously praising Putin. Cohen had even written an email asking Putin’s press spokesman Dmitry Peskov for help and spoke to Peskov’s assistant. When asked about this by Congress, Cohen lied. The cover-up led to a feud with Trump – and, for Cohen, to federal jail.Back-channelsThe most significant back-channel to Moscow involved Manafort and his one-time Russian aide Konstantin Kilimnik. In a series of clandestine meetings Manafort gave Kilimnik internal polling data, including from the rustbelt states that proved crucial to Trump’s 2016 victory. The two men used burner phones, encrypted chats, and a secret email account, with messages shared in drafts.Mueller identified Kiliminik as a career Russian intelligence officer. His employer was the GRU. What Kilimink did with the information he got from Manafort is unknown. He refused to cooperate with the FBI and fled to Moscow.Critics said the Mueller investigation was hobbled by an excess of legal caution and a failure to meet face to face with Trump. Its biggest shortcoming, arguably, was a lack of Russian witnesses.Much of the Trump-Russia story is still unknown. For example, does the Trump Organization have financial ties with Moscow? After a series of bankruptcies in the 1990s Trump was only able to borrow cash from one lender: Germany’s Deutsche Bank, which gave him lavish credit. At the same time its Moscow division was facilitating a $10bn money-laundering scam for the benefit of Kremlin VIPs.The US public never found out when Putin ordered the DNC hacking operation and why. Nor did it discover what the Russian and American presidents discussed in their private meetings, including during a notorious 2018 encounter in Helsinki. A good guess is that Putin flattered rather than threatened Trump. He fed Trump’s ego and stoked his resentment of the US “deep state” and other “enemies”.‘Grave counter-intelligence threat’In August 2020 the Senate intelligence committee published its own Trump-Russia report. It said Manafort’s willingness to pass confidential material to Kilimnik was a “grave counter-intelligence threat”. And it gave some credence to Steele’s Moscow allegations, noting that an FSB officer was stationed inside the Ritz-Carlton hotel. Putin’s spy had a live video feed from guests’ bedrooms, the report said.In the end Russia did not interfere in the 2020 election in the same sweeping and systematic way. But Moscow was busy in other ways. Beginning in spring it carried out a massive cyber-raid against US federal government institutions. Russian state hackers inserted malicious code into a software update made by a Texas-based company, SolarWinds. At least six US government departments were affected, as well as the Department of Defence’s sprawling communications network, and the body that manages the US nuclear weapons stockpile. The hackers worked for Russian SVR foreign intelligence, and possibly the FSB. It was the same Cozy Bear outfit that previously hacked the DNC and the US state department.Did Trump condemn Moscow? Nope. He blamed China, in one of his final tweet’s before Twitter kicked him off its platform after the 6 January Capitol attack. The cyber-raid was a reminder of Putin viewing the US as an eternal adversary in a never-ending quasi-war. The National Security Agency has spent billions on cyber-defence and yet on Trump’s watch it was unable to deter intruders from Moscow.Russia would have preferred it if Trump had won the election. Despite Joe Biden’s clearcut victory, though, the Russian leader has much to celebrate. Over four polarising years Trump accomplished many of the KGB’s longstanding goals. These included estranging the US from its western allies and Nato; deepening domestic strife; and waging a Putin-style disinformation campaign against the 2020 result.Manchurian candidate or not, Trump did more than any previous president to discredit US democracy and suck up to the Kremlin. Back in the 1980s the Soviet government invited Trump to Moscow. Seemingly it identified him early as a person without scruples, one perhaps capable given time and opportunity of bringing down the republic.The invasion of the Capitol was the culmination of this cold war fantasy; a perfect series finale.Luke Harding’s latest book Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West is available from the Guardian Bookshop More

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      in US Politics

      US poll chaos is a boon for the enemies of democracy the whole world over

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      Believe it or not, the world did not stop turning on its axis because of the US election and ensuing, self-indulgent disputes in the land of the free-for-all. In the age of Donald Trump, narcissism spreads like the plague.But the longer the wrangling in Washington continues, the greater the collateral damage to America’s global reputation – and to less fortunate states and peoples who rely on the US and the western allies to fly the flag for democracy and freedom.Consider, for example, the implications of the Israeli army’s operation, on US election day, to raze the homes of 74 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in the occupied West Bank village of Khirbet Humsa. The pace of West Bank demolitions has increased this year, possibly in preparation for Israeli annexation of the Jordan Valley – a plan backed in principle by Trump. Appealing for international intervention, the Palestinian prime minister, Mohammed Shtayyeh, claimed Israel had acted while “attention is focused on the US election”. Yet worse may be to come.Trump’s absurdly lopsided Middle East “peace plan” gave Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s rightwing leader, virtual carte blanche to expand settlements and seize Palestinian land. Joe Biden has promised to revive the two-state solution. But while the power struggle rages in Washington, analysts warn, Netanyahu may continue to arbitrarily create new “facts on the ground” – with Trump’s blessing.“Over the next 11 weeks, we are likely to see a major uptick in Israeli demolitions, evictions, settlement announcements, and perhaps even formal annexation of parts of the occupied territories, as Netanyahu and his allies in the settler movement seek to make the most of Trump’s remaining time in office,” Khaled Elgindy of Washington’s Middle East Institute predicted.The Khirbet Humsa incident gained widespread media attention. The same cannot be said of a football pitch massacre in northern Mozambique that also coincided with US polling. While Americans were counting votes, villagers in Cabo Delgado province were counting bodies after Islamic State-affiliated extremists decapitated more than 50 victims.Nearly 450,000 people have been displaced, and up to 2,000 killed, in an escalating insurgency in the mainly Muslim province where extreme poverty exists alongside valuable, western-controlled gas and mineral riches. Chinese, US and British energy companies are all involved there. Mozambique’s government has appealed for help, saying its forces cannot cope.Trump’s ‘man of the people’ myth of resisting a liberal conspiracy is the ultra-toxic element of his poisonous legacyBiden vows to maintain the fight against Isis. But it’s unclear if he is willing to look beyond Syria-Iraq and expand US involvement in the new Islamist killing grounds of the Sahel, west Africa and the Mozambique-Tanzania border.As for Trump, he claimed credit last year for “defeating 100% of the Isis caliphate”. The fool thinks it’s all over. In any case, he has shown zero interest in what he calls “shithole” African countries.Afghanistan is another conflict zone where the cost of US paralysis is counted in civilian lives. It’s a war Trump claims to be ending but which is currently escalating fast.While all eyes were supposedly on Pennsylvania, Kabul university was devastated when gunmen stormed classrooms, killing 22 students. Another four people were killed last week by a suicide bomber in Kandahar.Overall, violence has soared in recent months as the US and the Taliban (which denied responsibility for the Kabul atrocity) argue in Qatar. Trump plainly wants US troops out at any price. Biden is more circumspect about abandoning Afghanistan, but there’s little he can do right now .The Biden-Trump stand-off encourages uncertainty and instability, inhibiting the progress of international cooperation on a multitude of issues such as the climate crisis and the global pandemic. It also facilitates regression by malign actors.China’s opportunistic move to debilitate Hong Kong’s legislative assembly last week by expelling opposition politicians was a stark warning to Democrats and Republicans alike. Beijing just gave notice it will not tolerate democratic ideas, open societies and free speech, there or anywhere.China’s leaders apparently calculated, correctly, that the US was so distracted by its presidential melodrama that it would be incapable of reacting in any meaningful way.Taiwan’s people have cause to worry. The “renegade” island is next on Chinese president Xi Jinping’s reunification wish-list. Who would bet money on the US riding to Taipei’s rescue if Beijing takes aim?Much has been said about the negative domestic ramifications of Trump’s spiteful disruption of the presidential transition – his lawsuits, his refusal to share daily intelligence briefings with Biden, and his appointment of loyalists to key Pentagon posts. He hopes to turn January’s two Senate election re-runs in Georgia into a referendum – on him.But not enough attention is being paid to how this constitutional chaos affects America’s influence and leadership position in the world – or to the risk Trump might take last-minute, punitive unilateral action against, say, Iran or Venezuela. Like Xi, Vladimir Putin undoubtedly relishes US confusion. He may find ways to take advantage, as with last week’s Moscow-imposed Armenia-Azerbaijan “peace deal”. Authoritarian, ultra-nationalist and rightwing populist leaders everywhere take comfort from America’s perceived democratic nervous breakdown.This is the worst of it. By casting doubt on the election’s legitimacy, Trump nurtures and instructs anti-democratic rogues the world over. The Belarus-style myth he peddles, and will perpetuate, of a strong “man of the people” resisting a conspiracy plotted by corrupt liberal elites, is the final, toxic element of his profoundly poisonous legacy.Farmers in Palestine, fishermen in Mozambique, and students in Kabul all pay a heavy price for his unprincipled lies and puerile irresponsibility. So, too, does the cause of global democracy. More

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      in Elections

      'Already broken': US election unlikely to change relations with Russia

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      After four years in which the Kremlin loomed large over US politics, the topics of collusion, Russian meddling or Ukrainian scandals have been largely absent from the campaign agenda as election day draws close.
      It may be that Moscow still intends to interfere: the FBI director Christopher Wray said last month that the bureau has seen “very active efforts by the Russians to influence our election in 2020” – mainly involving misinformation with the primary goal of denigrating Joe Biden. And the US indictment of six Russian military intelligence hackers last week served as a reminder of the potential threat.
      However, as Biden enters the final days of the campaign with a significant lead, Putin appears to be hedging his bets. The Russian president pointedly declined to amplify Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated allegations about Biden’s son, Hunter, and his past business dealings in Ukraine, noting he did not “see anything criminal” in them. Putin has also pointed to possible common ground with the Democrats on social democratic ideology and arms control.
      The Russian leader and the former vice-president certainly know each other well from past encounters, though the relationship lacks any of the warmth that Trump claims infuses his bond with the Russian leader.
      “I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul,” Biden told Putin at a 2011 meeting, according to an account he gave the New Yorker. “He looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said: ‘We understand one another.’”
      Biden has not dwelled on the well-worn topics of Trump’s soft spot for Putin or Kremlin meddling – in part because coronavirus has cast such a long shadow over the election and the Biden team feel that voters are tired of hearing about Russia.
      “The most resonant issues for American voters right now are Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, and the dangers of white nationalism; by contrast, Russian election interference in 2016 seems more distant for those just trying to make ends meet,” said Michael Carpenter, a foreign policy adviser during Biden’s time as vice-president who remains in touch with the campaign.
      It is possible, too, that “Russiagate” was never a major vote-winning issue: Trump’s supporters dismissed the charges as “fake news” and many of his opponents were more focused on other issues.
      “Russia is a media and a Washington conversation. My students don’t care about Russia; they care about Black Lives Matter and MeToo,” said Nina Khrushcheva, a Russian-American professor of international affairs at the New School in New York.
      Questions over the business dealings of Biden’s son in Ukraine have failed to resonate much beyond Trump’s core base, with a recent attempt to reopen allegations of Biden’s alleged wrongdoing in Ukraine largely falling flat.
      If Moscow did indeed help put Trump in the White House, their man has done little to improve the the bilateral relationship over the past four years, despite his personal praise for Putin. But his disdain for western alliances and naked America-first self-interest is something that the Kremlin appreciates – and may explain why officials in Moscow want to see Trump win a second term.
      “Putin and people around him might like Trump because he fits very nicely with their view of the world. He’s a graphic illustration of their logic that the world is moving away from liberal values and multilateralism and towards sovereignty and traditional values,” said Andrey Kortunov, of the Russian International Affairs Council.
      He said that while Putin genuinely does not understand politicians such as Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron – and believes their talk of values to be hollow and cynical – with Trump there is a recognition of a kindred spirit, even if there is little affection for him as a person. The two men share “scepticism of international bodies, emphasis on sovereignty, a transactionalist approach to foreign policy and a feeling that discussions about values are mere hypocrisy”, said Kortunov.
      Putin earlier this month noted Biden’s history of “sharp anti-Russian rhetoric” and contrasted it with Trump’s oft-stated desire for better ties with Moscow.
      “Biden’s approach to Russia would involve supporting a dialogue on arms control, strategic stability, crisis management and risk reduction from a position of strength,” said Carpenter, saying it was simplistic to see the question of Russia policy as a black-and-white hawk or dove calculation.
      Kortunov said that Russia, unlike Germany, Israel or China, is in the “privileged position” that the outcome of the election is likely to have little effect on bilateral relations. “But the bad news is that this is because it will be bad either way. Almost anything that could be broken is already broken,” he said. And there is little prospect of improvement.
      Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund, who was reportedly an intermediary for informal contacts with members of the Trump entourage after his 2016 victory, declined to say whether he favoured a Trump or Biden victory. But he said either way it was hard to imagine how things could get worse. “We are at the lowest point ever in the history of US-Russian relations so going even lower would be difficult,” he said.
      Russia still denies all accusations of meddling in the 2016 election, whether it be the hacking of Democratic party servers or armies of internet trolls stirring up trouble on Facebook and Twitter.
      But Fiona Hill, who was the national security council director for European and Russian affairs for three years of the Trump administration and testified at Trump’s impeachment hearing, said hawkish Russian security official Nikolai Patrushev and other top officials all but admitted Russia’s interference in the 2016 vote when she confronted them.
      “The Russians said to us: ‘You guys left yourselves open.’ They were admitting it essentially. They said it’s on you that this got so out of hand.”
      The officials suggested that the US had left Russia an open goal with its divisive politics – and she felt they had a point: “We were providing the raw materials, making our own mistakes,” she said. The Russian interference “wouldn’t have resonated without our deep polarisation and our structural issues”.
      This time round, there are new allegations of Russian attempts to influence the political landscape, such as a rightwing site apparently set up by Russians and meant to influence US voters. But there is less attention now, perhaps because with the amount of disinformation flowing from the White House, the Russian efforts appear to be a drop in the ocean.
      “The biggest risk to this election is not the Russians, it’s us,” said Hill. More

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      in US Politics

      Kleptopia review: power, theft and Trump as leader in Putin’s own image

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      In a year dominated by a US presidential election between a kleptocrat and a democrat, a book about world-class thieves laundering trillions ought be the perfect bedtime reading for anyone curious about the unprecedented amounts of money that have been looted and hidden over the last 20 years.Tom Burgis, a reporter for the Financial Times, is certainly an impressive investigator. He works hard to explain how myriad financial institutions, from the Bank of New York to Merrill Lynch and HSBC, have tried to deceive regulators and wash the ill-gotten gains of countless dictators.The oligarchs of Putin’s Russia are big players in these pages. So are Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan, Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, Joseph Kabila of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, British bankers turned regulators, a trio of Central Asian billionaires, and no fewer than 30 other major characters, all listed at the beginning.This results in so many competing storylines that it becomes almost impossible to keep track. We bounce back and forth, from the Russian and Italian gangsters of Brooklyn to the oil fields of the former Soviet Union, from the platinum mines of Zimbabwe to the copper and cobalt of the Congo.Burgis draws useful parallels between Putin’s kleptocracy and Hitler’s GermanyThere are long sections about the wholesale theft of natural resources in post-Soviet Russia and the birth of the oligarchs, all of whom were forced to become Putin’s partners – or face imprisonment or death. For example, the purchase of a three-quarter stake in Yukos, for $350m, made Mikhail Khodorkovsky the richest man in Russia. Five years later, the vast oil company with 100,000 employees was worth $12bn. Khodorkovsky was arrested, jailed and eventually sent into exile.Burgis draws useful parallels between Putin’s kleptocracy and Hitler’s Germany, each home to both a “normative state” that generally respects its own laws and a “prerogative state” that violates most of them.According to the German-Jewish lawyer who was the author of the theory in the 1930s, “Nazi Germany was not a straightforward totalitarian system. It retained some vestiges of the rule of law, chiefly in matters of business, so that the capitalist economy had the basic rules it needed to keep going. But the prerogative state – Hitler’s political machinery – enjoyed … ‘jurisdiction over jurisdiction.”Trump helped to construct a new ‘global alliance of kleptocrats’. Their whole goal is the privatization of powerPutin has used his jurisdiction over everything to vanquish almost all of his enemies. And since Donald Trump has been collaborating with Russians in one way or another for almost 40 years, our kleptocrat-in-chief does finally make an appearance in Kleptopia, on page 250. After we’ve read a lot about Felix Sater, a second-generation Russian mobster connected to several schemes including the Trump Soho in lower Manhattan, Trump is identified as the “crucial ingredient” in Sater’s “magic potion for transforming dirty money”.Once the ratings of The Apprentice had washed away the public memory of multiple bankruptcies and “reinvented” his name as “a success”, Trump’s role in real estate deals became simply to “rent out his name”.“The projects could go bust,” Burgis writes, and “they usually did – but that wasn’t a problem.” The money had completed “its metamorphoses from plunder to clean capital”.Then there was the notorious sale of Trump’s Palm Beach mansion, to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95m, more than twice what Trump paid a few years before. According to Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, Trump thought the real buyer was Putin – a story which hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as it should.With his election as president, as Burgis puts it, Trump helped to construct a new “global alliance of kleptocrats”. Their whole goal is the privatization of power, and they control “the three great poles” – the US, China and Russia.In our new world of alternate facts, corruption is “no longer a sign of a failing state, but of a state succeeding in its new purpose”. The new kleptocrats have subverted their nations’ institutions, “to seize for themselves that which rightfully belonged to the commonwealth”.This is a ghastly and very important story. But the secret to great storytelling is knowing what to leave out. If Burgis had found a more focused way to tell this one, he would have written a much more powerful book. More

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      in US Politics

      Fit for office? From Trump to Abbott, 'vitality' is too often conflated with character in politics | Eleanor Gordon-Smith

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      It was important to US president Donald Trump to beat Covid-19. Not to recover from it, or to be successfully treated for it, but to beat it, as you would a wrestling enemy with the back of a chair. Already he has begun reframing his hospital discharge as a sign of strength. On Monday, campaign adviser Mercedes Schlapp told Fox News: “We’re going to defeat this virus. We’re not going to surrender to it like Joe Biden would surrender,” deliberately leaving open the interpretation that the relevant “surrender” was getting sick and dying. The president retweeted columnist Miranda Devine’s characterisation of him as an “invincible hero, who not only survived every dirty trick the Democrats threw at him, but the Chinese virus as well”.It is the latest instalment in a long history of the conflation between physical fitness and fitness for office, as though facts about a person’s character can be deduced from whether they get sick.Rightwing, authority-hungry leaders often make this move. From the state of their bodies we are supposed to deduce things about the state of their person. Vladimir Putin rides horses shirtless; shoots tigers; hugs bears. Jair Bolsonaro removed his mask after his Covid-19 diagnosis to show reporters how little it affected him. “Just look at my face, I’m fine”, he said.When these are the characters who voice a connection between physical wellness and moral character, the falsity of that connection is obvious. It is cartoonish, even – Trump himself is so obviously unfit (apparently owing to a belief that humans are born with finite heartbeats and to exercise is to waste them) that it’s almost impossible to take the position seriously.But the presumed link between physical health and strength and worthiness is far more politically widespread. In March a staffer for Democratic candidate Elizabeth Warren tweeted a photograph of her jogging jauntily up a set of stairs, hair springing with her gait, while fellow candidate Bernie Sanders trailed behind her on an escalator, paunched and balding. “This hits me so hard,” said the staffer, assuming an obvious connection between physical mobility and leadership.The character endorsements for “fighters” who make it through disease are common; Gabrielle Giffords’ recovery from a cranial gunshot wound was used to show her strength of character, and Barack Obama –in his own right a good athlete – took many photographed opportunities to play basketball in shirtsleeves. Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott was possessed of genuine physical strength, which the public was seldom able to forget, as his rivals needed help to do a pull-up or failed to sink a basket.The assumption in all cases is that the visual impression of a person’s body is a reasonable guide to their character, or that since certain traits express themselves physically, the physical lack of those things shows they are lacking in the person’s character. This is just a bad and backwards deduction; intellectually energetic people are often physically spry but not all un-spry people lack intellectual energy. But this does not stop candidates leveraging physical wellness as a sign of some deeper strength.Now, of course, a candidate for political office has to be well enough to do the job. There are reasonable criticisms of an ageing political class and of specific individuals who stay in their jobs past the point where they can do them well. When your job involves working on other people’s behalf, you have to be able to do it better than the next best candidate, and there are some forms of physical wellness that bear on whether that’s true.But the broader connection between vitality, power and physical health is damagingly false whether it comes out of Trump’s mouth or the Warren campaign’s. It should be seen with special suspicion by those committed to accessible healthcare, a policy built on the idea that whether you are sick is not a function of what you deserve and that usual interventions of character will not save us.If – as most of us do – we believe that physical illness is not a sign of decrepit character or weakness, then we have to be careful about the photonegative thought that physical wellness is a sign of burnished character or strength. It is not only Trump and his fellow rightwing personality-leaders who seek to leverage that thought. Political positioning everywhere leverages the idea of physical health as strength, which in turn licenses the associated thought that physical illness is weakness. Whichever side of politics it appears on, that thought hurts millions of people. As any sufferer of chronic illness will tell you, the presumed connection between character and body runs deep in society, in the glances of strangers, the minds of loved ones.The president’s bizarre machismo around the virus is just the latest and most visible expression of that thought. Perhaps seeing it in such an extreme form can help us identify its more pedestrian, creeping, insidiously ordinary forms. We would do well to regard them, too, with the same sense of absurdity.• Eleanor Gordon-Smith is a writer and ethicist currently at Princeton University More

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      in World Politics

      How Russia Views the Election Aftermath in Belarus

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      In Moscow, all eyes are on Belarus. Russia and Belarus are intimately connected, so political actors in Russia feel an immediate connection with developments there.

      In formal terms, the two countries form a “union state” and an economic and defense community. Belarus is Moscow’s closest ally and a linchpin for Russian neighborhood policy. For two decades, Russia has funded and subsidized Belarus’ state and economy. This has become a high price for a complicated relationship, as Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko consistently — and successfully — spurns Russian attempts to deepen integration.

      Belarus Election Unleashes Unprecedented Anti-Government Protests

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      Heading a joint state in Moscow had been raised as an option for keeping Russian President Vladimir Putin in power after 2024. Lukashenko was less than enthusiastic and turned, as always in moments of tension with Moscow, to the European Union. That variant is off the table, now that the amended Russian Constitution permits Putin two more terms in the Kremlin.

      A Lack of Distance

      Despite growing political differences, Moscow continues to support Lukashenko through his latest domestic political travails. Official figures put his share of the presidential vote at 80%. The candidate of the united opposition, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, had just 10%, according to the Central Election Commission. Opposition exit polls paint a very different picture, with some showing the proportions exactly inverted.

      Since the announcement of the results on August 9, the country has seen ongoing mass demonstrations, to which the security forces have responded with brutality. Nevertheless, President Putin congratulated Lukashenko on his “victory” as expected.

      The Russian political discourse pays very close attention to developments in Belarus, reflecting a persistent post-imperial lack of distance to its sovereign neighbors. Looking at the Russian discussion, one might forget that there actually is a border between Russia and Belarus, much as was the case following the Ukrainian presidential election in 2019.

      Embed from Getty Images

      Another reason for this closeness lies in the similarity of the political systems. Both are aging autocracies that are out of touch with the societies they rule and suffer rapidly evaporating legitimacy. The economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic is tangibly accelerating these processes in both states.

      The Russian state media tend to play down the significance of the events and push a geopolitical interpretation in which the protesters are a minority controlled by hostile Western actors. They would not exist without Western support, it is asserted. The objective of Western policy is said to be reducing Russian influence in the region and, ultimately, “regime change” in Moscow. In other words, the issue is not liberty but geopolitical rivalry.

      In this understanding, the trouble in Minsk is just the latest in a long series of Western plots against Russia — following the 2014 Euromaidan in Ukraine and the “color revolutions” of the early 2000s. The needs of Belarusian society are completely ignored.

      Russia’s independent media, on the other hand, seek to present a realistic picture, concentrating on developments within Belarus and Lukashenko’s loss of public legitimacy. Belarus is also treated as a template for Russia’s own political future. Comparisons are frequently drawn with the ongoing protests in Khabarovsk, with speculation whether Minsk 2020 might be Moscow 2024.

      Russian Intervention?

      Foreign policy analysts in Moscow do not believe that Tsikhanouskaya can expect Western support. The European Union is divided, they note, weakened by COVID-19 and preoccupied with internal matters, while the United States is generally incapable of coherent foreign policy action. The regime will weather the storm, they believe, but emerge from it weakened.

      This, in turn, will increase Lukashenko’s dependency on Moscow. Regime-loyal and more critical foreign policy experts alike concur that Russia will ultimately profit from the situation in Minsk without itself having to intervene politically or militarily.

      The coming days will tell whether that assumption is correct. The regime in Minsk may have lost touch with the realities of Belarusian society, but it has good prospects of survival as long as the state apparatus backs Lukashenko and Russia maintains its support.

      But if the unrest grows to paralyze the country, a Russian intervention cannot be excluded. The costs would be enormous, in view of the pandemic and the economic crisis. And an intervention could also harm the Kremlin domestically, where it has its own legitimacy problems. On the other hand, it would not be the first time Moscow chose geopolitics and great power bravado over economic and political reason. And Russia’s rulers are still happy to ride roughshod over society, both at home and in Belarus.

      The EU cannot overlook the massive election fraud and the brutality of the security forces against unarmed demonstrators. It should back the demand for new elections, offer mediation and impose additional sanctions if the regime refuses to alter its current stance. But in the process, it should do everything it can to preserve contacts within Belarusian society. Clear communication with Moscow is vital, both to float possible solutions and to lay out the costs of intervention. There is no need to fear a quarrel — the EU has been in a conflict with Russia for a long time already.

      *[This article was originally published by the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP), which advises the German government and Bundestag on all questions relating to foreign and security policy.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More