Russia

A Russian ship has just rammed a Ukrainian vessel, opened fire on it and captured its sailors. Ukraine has called it an act of war, and legally it may be right. But more than this the act reveals the nature of the true Russia. At this year’s Helsinki summit, some were aghast at how subservient Donald Trump appeared to be toward Vladimir Putin. His behaviour was seen as treasonous and supposedly pointed to the power Russia now wields. For the alt-right, Putin is seen as a model – a “strongman” who is making his country great again. Meanwhile, the Democrats see an all-powerful Russia behind everything. And there is a similar narrative about Russian meddling in the 2016 Brexit referendum. All of this could not be further from the truth.

At the last minute, the Russian police general everyone had assumed was a shoo-in to become the next head of Interpol was defeated by the acting head, South Korean Kim Jong-yang. It’s good news for the international police cooperation organisation, for the West and, arguably, for justice – but it’s not the end of the story. The presumed front-runner, major general Alexander Prokopchuk – formerly the head of Russia's Interpol bureau – has been accused of supervising the systematic attempt to apparently use the agency to persecute the Kremlin's political enemies. Nonetheless, until the eleventh hour, everyone saw Prokopchuk as the heir apparent. Moscow certainly seems to have thought so.

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’.

Donald Trump’s Twitter feed was oddly silent as the news came that his former campaign manager and his former lawyer were going to jail. Perhaps his staff have finally seized control of his phone. Perhaps his lawyers have convinced him that every time he tweets on anything relating to the Russia investigation, he is dancing on a precipice, with special counsel Robert Mueller just waiting to push him off. Whatever the reason, this was the equivalent of Trump entering a stunned, catatonic state, while his world spins out of control around him. The President merely tweeted to note that he was going to a Make America Great Again rally in West Virginia, slipping into a warm bath of affirmation from his most loyal supporters: ‘Thank you West Virginia!

Amid the confusion and the almost deafening cries of treachery and collusion over Donald Trump’s relations with Russia, few noticed the most tangible outcome of this week’s Helsinki summit. In the lead-up to his face-to-face talk with Vladimir Putin, senior US and Russian diplomats — in close coordination with leaders from mutual ally Israel — brokered a deal among all the warring parties (bar the Islamist terrorists) finally to end the devastating seven-year Syrian civil war. As is often the case with Trump, the hype tends to drown out the message but it was there for anyone paying close enough attention. The US, Russians and Israelis have agreed on a solution to Syria. His name is Bashar al-Assad.

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.