Russia

Maria Butina was not a Russian spy. She did not trade sex for influence. She had nothing to do with any clandestine espionage activity, nor did she ever hide her dealings with American political officials. In fact, she unabashedly loved America – perhaps to a fault. But she’s currently sitting in jail, and almost no one will say a word in her defense. The ordeal to which she’s been subjected is jaw-dropping for its recklessness and absurdity. There’s so much that’s wrong with this case, it’s almost hard to know where to begin. Maybe the most obnoxious malfeasance was committed by moralizing media members who saw fit to cast judgment on her personal romantic decisions – as if that was ever remotely any of their business in the first place.

On Tuesday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to Sochi to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and, of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was the first such trip by a high-ranking US official since the release of the Mueller report in April. During his meeting with Lavrov, Pompeo struck a conciliatory tone while calling for cooperation more between the United States and Russia. If that sounds familiar that’s because it is. US-Russia diplomatic efforts always start pushing in the same direction, then something goes wrong. ‘We have differences.

Vladimir Putin is not nearly as clever as American liberals like to believe. His meddling in the 2016 election backfired, after all — spectacularly. The Kremlin did not expect Donald Trump to win, just as no one in Washington did. If Trump had lost, the Kremlin’s gambit would have paid off: stolen emails would have damaged America’s newly elected president as she faced a hostile, Republican-controlled House and Senate. She could hardly expect cooperation from them on Russian sanctions or anything else, and the GOP could be counted on to react to another Democratic administration by adopting an oppositional foreign policy.

Over the weekend, two Russian military aircraft carrying General Vasily Tonkoshkurov along with over 100 Russian troops landed in Caracas, Venezuela. Did the US know Putin was planning this? What will America’s response be? Who knows, because the American media isn’t asking. What might well become the most explosive situation since the Cuban missile crisis has gone almost totally ignored on the homepages of our major news sites. Rather than inquire what will be done about Russian troops in Venezuela, the media focuses its myopic gaze on the only Russia story they seem capable of seeing: what role Russia may have played in our 2016 presidential election.

‘This is not the Cold War redux; it is even worse than the Cold War.’ That’s how Nicolas Roche, of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, described the current climate around nuclear weapons. Roche spoke at the Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, a veritable Woodstock for the nuclear policy community (organizers insisted on referring to the shindig as ‘#NUKEFEST’), which convened for two days in Washington, DC. Despite the party-like atmosphere at ‘Nuke Fest’, despondency pervaded the gathering. North Korea received substantial attention at the conference, while Iran and South Asia were relatively neglected. The dominant topic of conversation, and predominant reason for despair, was the US-Russia relationship.

To the grand, art nouveau Café Louvre in Prague, once one of Franz Kafka’s favorite haunts in the Czech capital. Cockburn is here to meet another – very different – Czech figure of historical importance: Karl Koecher, the only KGB agent known to have infiltrated the CIA. He is relevant again because of a strange story claiming that Donald Trump’s National Security Adviser, John Bolton, visited a New York sex club called Plato’s Retreat. Koecher went there too, when he was a Soviet spy. Is it possible that the Kremlin has kompromat – compromising material – on Bolton, dating from the 1970s and 1980s?

If only President Richard Nixon could go to China, per the hoary Beltway cliché, perhaps only yours truly could write this column. Longer than just about anybody, I’ve warned the public about the threat to Western democracy posed by Vladimir Putin’s aggressive spies and weaponized lies. As a counterintelligence officer for the National Security Agency, I was combating Russian propaganda, what they call Active Measures, two decades ago. When the NSA contractor Edward Snowden defected to Moscow in June 2013, I called him out as the Kremlin agent he is — as the Kremlin subsequently admitted — which won me few friends among the great and the good.