Russia

To much fanfare and glee last week, federal prosecutors announced a plea deal had been secured for Maria Butina, the mystery woman who populated DC conservative circles for a short period around the 2016 election. The popular interpretation of her travails, circulated with gusto in the press since her arrest in July, was that Butina – an attractive young woman, and, most damningly, a Russian national – had used her sexual prowess to trick gullible middle-aged Republican men into granting her access. She did this, or so the story went, at the behest of her menacing benefactors as part of the sprawling Kremlin campaign to ‘interfere’ in American politics.

Last week the public was informed of the indictment of a Russian citizen, ‘Elena Alekseevna Khusyaynova, 44’, for conspiring to defraud the United States. What had she done wrong? According to FBI Special Agent, David Holt, whose girlish signature appears on the official ‘Criminal Complaint’ submitted to a District Court in Virginia, she had served, since 2014, as an accountant to a firm in St Petersburg that had attempted to influence the American electorate by posting discourteous opinions about US politicians and officials online.

I like to think I’m a journalist like any other. But I work at the RT London office. That’s the Russian state-funded news channel. Four days a week, I’m a straight up news reporter. But, once a week, I do an even more sinister job. On Wednesdays, I ascend an extra couple of floors to a different ‘zone’ within the RT London compound, where I join a stealthy, covert team of online propagandists. There, in the lair of online information warfare, (six sad looking desks and quite a bit of mundane office banter) we record a short, and (we hope) funny and often expletive-laden video on a topic of entirely our choosing, satirizing the sorry state of the world.

Like a reckless gambler whose roulette system has worked in the past, Vladimir Putin can’t resist trying to hack US elections. He’s at it once again, in the midterms, one source close to the intelligence community tells Cockburn. ‘The GRU [Russian military intelligence] is up to its usual tricks in the midterms but the NSA [the National Security Agency, responsible for electronic spying] knows and is mitigating.’ Our source says it’s the ‘usual Russian Intelligence playbook’ familiar from the presidential election: propaganda on social media with ‘some GRU active SIGINT [signals intelligence] collection, also known as hacking, in the mix’.

History somehow isn’t moving toward its predetermined end, and this has driven Western liberals completely mad. The theatrical overreaction to Donald Trump’s joint press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki is just the latest proof. Before the Trump-Putin summit, pundits warned that Trump might recognise Crimea as Russian territory. He did nothing of the sort. But he did give Putin the benefit of the doubt when the Russian leader, in a carefully chosen phrase, said the ‘Russian state’ had not interfered in the 2016 election. Trump’s equivocation—‘My people came to me, Dan Coates came to me and some others, they said they think it's Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it's not Russia.

Donald Trump's longtime personal attorney Michael Cohen is playing a starring role in a riveting drama featuring the President, Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Putin-connected oligarchs, shady vory v zakone-adjacent moneymen, and American and Russian corporations seeking influence with the Trump Administration. For Americans, this is a new lurid political drama, but it’s one London has seen up close for two decades. It’s the story of the inevitable consequences that result when Russian money, influence and corruption slither up on Western shores.

Diplomats are poker chips. The pomp and mystery that accrues to the diplomatic and intelligence services en poste overseas conceal a simple truth: in today’s world, journalists, bankers, NGOs and bloggers are, far more often than not, better informed than diplomats about the countries in which they operate. I know this to be true in Russia – I speak to senior British and US diplomats in Moscow regularly. Believe me when I say that I can think of half a dozen veteran foreign correspondents in Russia who have considerably more extensive, diverse and senior contacts in the Russian establishment than any Western diplomatic mission.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has given Russia until Wednesday to explain why a nerve agent that it has developed was used in an attack in Salisbury, Wiltshire. She told the House of Commons that it was ‘highly likely’ that Russia was responsible for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter. She said that Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson had summoned the Russian Ambassador and put it to him that were only two explanations for what had happened, one that the Russian government itself was responsible or that Moscow has lost control of its stock of deadly nerve agents. I think it is safe to assume that no explanation, at least not one that would satisfy a reasonable observer, will be provided before Wednesday.