Next week, shortly after the G7 meetings end, President Biden will meet with Vladimir Putin in Switzerland. This past week, I think it was AL, inquired whether I had some thoughts on this.
I don’t want to second guess Biden’s team. I’m not in the room and they all have, overall, more experience than I do in regard to diplomacy. On the other hand, none of them were in US Army Europe headquarters in Wiesbaden with the Commanding General and senior staff in 2014 watching the strategic environment shift as things went from Putin is being a pain in the ass to Putin is waging a low intensity war against the US, the EU, and NATO.
I am very concerned. And have been for several weeks as the summit approaches as I’ve observed Russia’s and Putin’s and Putin’s key surrogates behavior.
For instance, on 31 MAY Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov made remarks about Russia monitoring the US’s law enforcement response to the 6 JAN attack on the Capitol:
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov: we are closely watching the persecution of people involved in storming of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. Suggest the human rights, rights of opposition are being violated pic.twitter.com/cf3rJA7c4y
— Liveuamap (@Liveuamap) May 31, 2021
This included reporting about this inside Russia:
This comes out of Malofeev's outlet. He sponsors the far right parties working to overthrow democracy in the West pic.twitter.com/LknIpk3t4w
— Olga Lautman (@OlgaNYC1211) May 31, 2021
It is important to note that this was the language Russia was using regarding Ukraine in 2014 just before in the months before it scarfed up Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine using the little green men. I’m not expecting a similar attempt here, at least nothing so clearly obvious, but Putin will keep funding state level secessionist movement, making overtures to Republican officials and conservative movement leaders and their organizations, and continue his active measures campaign to undermine and destabilize the US.
We now know that at least part of Lavrov’s remarks were a domestic maskirovka – a strategic diversion through the targeted use of information – as Russia was preparing to, and now has, outlawed Navalny’s opposition groups. From the AP:
MOSCOW (AP) — A Moscow court on Wednesday night outlawed the organizations founded by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny by labeling them extremist, the latest move in a campaign to silence dissent and bar Kremlin critics from running for parliament in September.
The Moscow City Court’s ruling, effective immediately, prevents people associated with Navalny’s Foundation for Fighting Corruption and his sprawling regional network from seeking public office. Many of Navalny’s allies had hoped to run for parliamentary seats in the Sept. 19 election.
The ruling, part of a multipronged Kremlin strategy to steamroll the opposition, sends a tough message one week before President Vladimir Putin holds a summit meeting with U.S. President Joe Biden in Geneva.
The extremism label also carries lengthy prison terms for activists who have worked with the organizations, anyone who donated to them, and even those who simply shared the groups’ materials.
In fact Lavrov’s statements and the outlawing of Navalny’s organizations were proceeded by this statement from the editor in chief of Russia Today:
Her rationale is that Moscow is forcing the closure of “undesirable”/“extremist” groups like @openrussia_team & @fbkinfo (which she implies are foreign puppets), and turning the screws against U.S.-based social networks. Basically, it’s the “bomb Voronezh” school of thought.
— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) May 27, 2021
This was not, however, solely for internal effect within Russia. Russia has been funding and financing, both covertly and overtly, numerous neo-nationalist and neo-fascist opposition movements and political parties within the EU in an attempt to break up the EU. It has also been funding the Texas and Californian secessionist groups in addition to spending lavishly to penetrate major conservative movement organizations and activities like the NRA and the National Prayer Breakfast. Rather, this was Putin both signaling that he would tolerate no real opposition domestically and that it doesn’t matter if President Biden thinks he’s the new sheriff in town and that liberal democracy is back, Putin will do whatever he wants because it doesn’t matter what he does, the American president, regardless of who is president, will meet with him.
A very interesting op-ed in yesterday’s Moscow Times provides some of the reasoning behind Putin’s actions:
Putin’s Russia is not simply uninterested in dialogue with Europe. The Kremlin believes that the EU does not deserve dialogue with Russia.
The only country that Moscow genuinely wants to have a dialogue with is Washington. Putin’s regime defines its place in the world through rejection of the U.S. global leadership and, simultaneously, through mimicking what it believes to be American behaviour in the international arena. Russia’s own subversive, yet often erratic, behaviour on the global stage can, to some degree, be seen as a continuous attention-grabbing stunt aimed at compelling Washington to ask Moscow for cooperation.
The most recent example of this is the unprecedented massive spring build-up of Russian troops along the Ukrainian border – a build-up that ended after U.S. President Joe Biden proposed a meeting with Putin.
With the accelerating global competition between Washington and Beijing, Moscow understands that its chances of being accepted as an equal pole in a multipolar world are dependent on Washington’s willingness to engage in dialogue with Moscow.
Putin believes, or at least acts like he believes that, Russia is still one of the two great powers left over after the end of World War II. And that the US and its allies and partners have worked for decades since the end of the Cold War to undermine this reality. Putin’s actions are all intended to get the US’s attention. To force the US to engage with it. For the American president to engage directly with Putin, which elevates Putin’s stature. This, combined with Putin’s desire to restore Russia’s near abroad and sphere of influence to that of the USSR, undergirds all of Putin’s actions within the low intensity political war he has been waging against the US for at least the past seven years.
This morning we learned that Putin is going to supply Iran with an advanced satellite system for tracking military targets. Less than a week before his summit with President Biden.
Putin is going to do what Putin is going to do. But my overall feeling is you don’t want to give Putin anything he can spin in his favor right now. Especially if he has not earned it via demonstrations of good behavior, which he hasn’t. Instead, he and his surrogates have spent the past several weeks acting out. If I had been advising on this – which I was not and highly doubt I ever will be – I would have recommended that Biden should do a tour of the region post G7, meet individually with the heads of the Baltic and Scandinavian countries, as well as Ukraine, then hold a summit with all of them first. Then either hold the meeting with Putin because he was in the neighborhood or announce that he is willing to meet with Putin at a later date provided events warrant it. That would provide much better optics for Information Operations and PSYOP. It will also begin to demonstrate that their are rewards for good behavior and punishments for bad behavior. Because until or unless Putin is punished in some way that actually negatively impacts him, he will not change his behavior.
But other than some people here, no one is asking me. So…
debbie
Real chutzpah accusing America of “persecution.” ???
craigie
I guess I would make a terrible dictator because I am at a loss for what else Putin could want. He already lives like a king, what’s the point of provoking other countries or trying to expand the borders of Russia or any of it? Why not just fucking relax and eat grapes?
raven
Ask Johnny Rocco.
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: Without clicking the link: “More.”
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: There it is.
debbie
@raven:
Putin wouldn’t last a minute with Bogart.
Another Scott
Relatedly? (repost) – DW.com:
The timing is, er, interesting.
:-(
Cheers,
Scott.
PaulWartenberg
@craigie:
Putin is also a nationalist, he wants Russia to remain a major power on the global stage. But Russia is a minor economic power compared to the rest of the G7 and the EU, and their military value is limited to them being a nuclear superpower (the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and half of the USSR weakened their manpower and military reach). So Putin wants to disrupt and break up all the western alliances: if he can break up NATO, he can make Russia a puppetmaster of Eastern Europe again, especially dominating Ukraine and Poland.
Putin is disrupting every western democratic nation in order to weaken the rest of us down to HIS level. It’d be acts of war if he and his buddies were any more overt about it.
Adam L Silverman
@Another Scott: This much coincidence takes a lot of planning and coordination.
The working strategic assumption needs to be not which of our systems have been penetrated, but, rather that all of them have.
The key strategic question is not whether we’re paranoid, the real question is whether we’re paranoid enough!
Gin & Tonic
Good post, Adam.
Here’s a group for you – do you have a motorcycle license? I bet they’d love to have you.
BigJimSlade
@debbie: and more right-wing projection.
Raoul Paste
It is disturbing to read this, and it seems like their cyberwar on us is in full swing.
The common response to a story like this is that there is a lot going on that we don’t know about, and one hopes that is the case But that’s why this assessment by Adam, a relative insider, is upsetting.
Biden has called Putin a killer publicly; he’s under no illusions. And, he has massive resources . I’m trying to put a positive spin on this
debbie
Has there ever been a great power led by a thug? It seems to me that Putin’s the one holding Russia down.
Subsole
@craigie:
Two thoughts:
1. He needs to keep us destabilized and on the back foot so we don’t start disrupting the flow of bratva-bux that keep his little tinpot circus running. That means a constant pummeling from unexpected angles.
I am pure civilian, and defer to Adam, but I get the sense Putin is utterly desperate to keep the pressure on and dictate the tempo because he has rotted Russia down to the foundations. If the mob money goes away, he’s fucked – because there IS no other money in Russia.
2. Once a chekist, always a chekist. Putin wants the old, Great Russian empire back.
That’s why he isn’t sitting around with the Bolshoi Ballet feeding him MDMA.
Gin & Tonic
@debbie:
USA, 2016-2020.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: I do not. I have never ridden a motorcycle and have no interest in ever riding a motorcycle.
Roger Moore
@debbie:
The USSR under Stalin? Nazi Germany? Napoleonic France?
Adam L Silverman
@Raoul Paste: I’m relatively not much of an insider. Not anymore. And not for a long time. Just an outsider, who has been an insider, and has some experiences from that time informing his understanding of the strategic environment and the problem set.
Subsole
@Adam L Silverman: Considering Kushner and the Krazy Klown Kavalcade had access to secret material, I think we’re better off asking what HASN’T been compromised.
I for sure wouldn’t move until that ratfuck little weasel and his ratfuck little wife were incommunicado. Otherwise Putin makes a call and ooops, there go ALL of our assets.
Not just the ones in Russia. I assume those were compromised first, as payment for services rendered.
ALL of our assets. Mideast, China, everywhere.
I never want to hear another G-D peep from Republicans about patriotism…
Adam L Silverman
@debbie: @Gin & Tonic: Under what we affectionately refer to as the “our bastard” concept, there were a lot of regional powers that were led by thugs that we either helped take over or kept in power because we thought they would help us prevent the spread of communism.
randy khan
The RWNJs in my social media feed are convinced that Biden won’t meet with Putin because Biden is a senile doddering idiot. Not that I really care what they think.
Subsole
@Raoul Paste: The situation is complicated by the fact that our allies are rather embarassingly dependent on Russia for natural gas and the like. Also their financial systems and sectors of their economy are thoroughly infested with Russian oligarch money.
It isn’t just damage to us we have to worry about. It’s damage to our allies in the region.
Adam L Silverman
@Subsole: I was referring to computer systems, but the working assumption needs to be that between JAN 2017 and JAN 2021
2020, everything was compromised. And that assumption should only be discarded when significant, quality evidence is presented rebutting it.debbie
@Roger Moore:
But were they great powers when they were led by thugs? I don’t think so. My definition of great doesn’t include domination by force.
Gin & Tonic
@Adam L Silverman: You mean JAN 2021.
HalfAssedHomesteader
I wonder if Biden’s thinking is that by (re)establishing a connection with Putin now he’ll have something he can withhold later.
Roger Moore
@debbie:
Then your definition is different from everyone else’s. Great power status has generally been defined in terms of political dominance, not cultural, and that includes dominance by military power.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@debbie:
James E Powell
@Gin & Tonic:
He’s not a thug, he’s a no good two-bit punk. A lousy dime store hood.
topclimber
I look forward to the joint press conference or communique and the contrast with Trump in Helsinki. Biden is again sending a message that whatever problems Putin presents to the US, dominating our leader is not one of them anymore.
Chetan Murthy
@Roger Moore: You are sadly correct. I struggle to come up with a Great Power that dominated by means *other* than military power. And that includes us.
Uncle Omar
In a perfect world the meeting would go sort of like this…The men shake hands, do the photo-op formalities, then go into the head to head meeting. Biden pulls a list of names out of his inner pocket and hands it to Vlad and says, “I want these assholes on the plane we’re sending for them at 1400 hours, local time, complete with their complete employment files and all identfying documents. If you don’t agree and if they aren’t on the plane at 1400 hours, the guy in the blue jeans, MIT sweatshirt, and sneakers you saw outside is going to push a button and freeze and seize all of your personal assets in Switzerland, turn off the power grid in Russia, and cause Mar-a-Lago to collapse into a sink-hole. Your choice.”
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
@Subsole: gas station with nukes.
Subsole
@randy khan: You should point out Russia Today, Putin’s official megaphone, changed their tune on that now that Putin is gonna actually be in the room with Biden. Ay-mazing how fast their dicks fell off.
Also, thanks again to all the tankie leftist dipshits who spread the “Biden is a senile rapist” line. Amazing how their talking points keep lining up with the American Fascist Party’s…
Roger Moore
@Chetan Murthy:
Even when it was militarily weak, China maintained cultural dominance of its neighbors.
Gin & Tonic
@HalfAssedHomesteader: Like what? The US rolled over on Nordstream. Like Adam says, this is treating Russia as more serious than it actually is. It’s a reflexive “they are one of the nuclear superpowers, we have to meet with them” more than anything real. If he’d met with Zelensky first, that would have shown who’s who. But given who Biden is, and given the US foreign policy “establishment” – not-quite-affectionately known as “the blob” that was too much to hope for.
Adam L Silverman
@Gin & Tonic: Yes, I just fixed it. I need some sleep.
James E Powell
I do not know if I am justified in feeling this way, but I have more confidence in Joe Biden on foreign affairs than I have had with any president in my lifetime.
bbleh
@PaulWartenberg: Same thought occurred. This is asymmetric (certainly not on the scale of US-Taliban, but also not on a local stage where the smaller power is the home team), so should not at least some principles of asymmetric warfare apply, in particular when it comes to defending against and responding to their attacks?
One big question for me is, how much of an asset, and how much of a vulnerability, to the US is the EU-Russia relationship? I’m vaguely aware of energy resource ties, and of course there are extensive financial links and hence “agents of influence” throughout the EU (and the US, ahemTrumpAhem), and I’m sure their intelligence networks are at least the equal of ours, but it certainly seems like that’s a major factor, and hence to Adam’s point perhaps the timing of the Putin summit immediately following the G-7 is not so bad.
Put another way: isn’t this a little bit like Containment 2.0, except with a MUCH stronger Europe, a considerably weaker Russia, and some new features like cyber?
Chetan Murthy
@Roger Moore: I don’t know that history; are you saying that China was able to exert political control over its neighbors thru cultural means ? Get them to go along with the desires and policies of Beijing (or wherever the Emperor sat) without having any effective military force ? That’d be quite interesting.
Gin & Tonic
@Uncle Omar:
Gin & Tonic
@Adam L Silverman: Go get some rest.
bbleh
@Uncle Omar: I love it! It’s so much more civilized than lobbing nuclear missiles.
Subsole
@Adam L Silverman: Ugh. I really, really wish folks had acted like they had some damn sense back in ’16.
Subsole
@Chetan Murthy: A surprisingly large chunk of our power really is soft power.
Not to excuse the brutalities we influcted on people, or the ones that we condoned or enabled.
But comparatively speaking, the Pax Americana is probably one of history’s more benign hegemonies.
bbleh
@Gin & Tonic: Lissen up you Commie, ‘Murkans don’t GIVE a rat’s ass about yer po-liti-cal co-rrect-ness, we’re gonna damn well call him what we wanna call him, y’hear?! [hoists saucer-sized belt buckle somewhat further up swell of gigantic beer gut, turns abruptly but unsteadily, lumbers away]
Subsole
@MontyTheClipArtMongoose:
And the pumps don’t work cuz the vandals took the handles…
Hildebrand
You meet with Putin to remind him exactly what you think of him. The Russian media will spin it as a win? So what, they spin everything as a Putin win. Putin surely must already know that Biden recognizes exactly who he is and what he is – a wealthy thug sitting on a mouldering nation that is slowly sinking into lower tier status (no matter what Putin’s dreams of empire might be).
So, you go meet with him, after the real powers have met, to remind him he ain’t in that club anymore, and never will be.
Putin is dangerous, but he isn’t brilliant, nor as untouchable as he thinks. Time to remind him of that. I think Biden’s team will do that, quietly, which I think is the way to play all of this right now.
sdhays
@Chetan Murthy: Put it this way – even when China was literally conquered, the conquerers just absorbed themselves into Chinese culture, not the other way around.
Chetan Murthy
@Subsole:
I’m very aware of this. But I’ll note that our soft power in Europe and the Far East, for instance, was fundamentally based on ensuring that our “allies” there were militarily incapable of acting without us, and *then* turning them into allies and friends. It was all based on a mailed fist. I’m not complaining about it: just observing the reality. I mean, Brad Delong noted that between 111BC and 1945 CE, an army crossed the Rhine every 37 years on average. And since 1945, zip. That’s the result of soft power, but also our military domination of Western Europe.
Subsole
@sdhays: Also, fun fact: a sizable chunk of the barbarians who toppled Western Rome did so because, essentially, their tribes wanted to be Roman and the Romans wouldn’t have them.
Benw
Whatever Putin or Trump do, there’s no escaping the fact that Barack Obama is a far better person than them, and they can’t stand it
sanjeevs
https://www.ft.com/content/07378501-0ab9-4eef-ad13-eb72adff1838
They also just jacked up interest rates for the third time since March.
James E Powell
@Gin & Tonic:
Go with Volodka
Subsole
@Chetan Murthy: Eh. I see what you’re saying, but Europe was so exhausted by that point I doubt it took much ‘ensuring’ to keep them from killing each other. Our mailed fist was more a tacit acknoweldgement that we were the only fist in town besides the USSR.
The ugly side of that, of course, was that the Global South spent decades bleeding so the Global North didn’t have to.
Cheryl Rofer
@James E Powell: Totally agree. He’s been looking at Russia for most of his career. When he was in the Senate, he was the Chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. He was involved with the Nunn-Lugar activities to get Russia’s nuclear enterprise under control after the Soviet Union broke up. I think he will do just fine.
Cheryl Rofer
@Gin & Tonic: My understanding is that Putin prefers Volodya.
way2blue
What you’re saying resonates with what Garry Kasparov has been shouting forever. Thanks for the context.
persistentillusion
@Uncle Omar:
Good lord, that’s the most hot thing I’ve ever read.
MontyTheClipArtMongoose
Chris Johnson
Here’s the thing: Biden does not have to go and make Putin think that he is the greater, bolder, fiercer man of the two. That’s fascist posturing and playing it by Putin’s rules.
Biden REPRESENTS something. Biden is a public servant, not a mobbed-up thug. Biden’s got a team behind him: a very big team that runs all the way to folks like Adam, and me, and mostly all the rest of you here. (working trolls exempted)
So, he does not have to out-bully the bully. Biden is playing to the crowd. He could be a doddering old fool (he ain’t) and STILL be better than what Putin represents, because this is not single combat. Biden is our representative. We don’t play by the rules Putin imposes.
Authoritarians have a block against understanding this.
If Putin is enough of a jerk about it, we can still have the rest of the world on our side, against him. Particularly since Putin bears a lot of responsibility for the shame of our last five years or so (and more: dates back before then) and we’re all coming to know it. The world is watching, and Russia did NOT manage to topple us, even after all that. Fuck Putin. Uncivilized.
Just Chuck
And when the EU decides that Russia doesn’t deserve to sell gas to the EU? I think energy independence is going to be back on the EU radar in a big way in 2021.
Kayla Rudbek
@Just Chuck: amen to that. The German Embassy in DC had a Webex yesterday on the hydrogen economy that I attended. Their goal is to be carbon neutral by 2050, with transatlantic cooperation.