With every passing week we have new evidence of the threat that Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy poses to our democracy, our national security, and the entire liberal world order. Putin’s regime—something akin to an organized crime ring masquerading as a state—has looted the wealth of Russia, subjugated its people, attacked neighboring former republics of the USSR, annexed Crimea, and hacked the electoral process in the United States and other Western democracies.
Ill-gotten Russian wealth—in the tens of billions of dollars—has been pouring into the banking systems and property markets of Europe and the U.S., corrupting and distorting our own institutions. With the eager assistance of British “banks, law firms, accountants, private schools, art galleries, and even Conservative Party fundraisers,”Anne Applebaum recently wrote, the UK has become such a gratifying safe haven for the illicit wealth of Russian oligarchs that they have dubbed the nation’s capital “Londongrad.” Even in the wake of the brazen assassination attempt on British soil of a former Russian intelligence agent with a Soviet-era chemical nerve agent (the latest in a string of suspicious deaths in Britain linked to the Kremlin), the safe haven remains.
In the Middle East, Putin is trying to make Russia a dominant power player again by propping up one of the world’s most murderous dictators, Bashar al-Assad, while providing cover for Iran to deeply penetrate Syria with its Shia militias, who now sit within five miles of the Israeli border. Putin’s intervention in Syria has given Russia extended military bases and geopolitical sway that it has not had since the demise of the Soviet Union, but at the price of making the Syrian civil war one of the most devastating of the last half century in terms of lives lost and displaced.
We need a better strategy for dealing with Putin and his regime. If there is one thing we should have learned from history, it’s that you don’t contain an autocrat like this by whispering pleasantries in his ear—or worse, pronouncing them publicly. Both the Obama and Trump strategies have failed because they have not been tough enough and principled enough in confronting this mafia-style regime. How can we do better?
We can start by listening to a group of people who share our values but understand Putin much better than we do—Russia’s democrats. One of Russia’s bravest and most brilliant democrats is the man who the Putin regime twice tried to kill by poisoning—Vladimir Kara-Murza. A lucid analyst and dogged activist, Kara-Murza was a close associate of the opposition leader, Boris Nemtsov, who was assassinated (Russian democrats have no doubt, by the regime) just steps from the Kremlin in 2015.
On a visit to Stanford this week, Kara-Murza shared with me three important guidelines for dealing with Putin’s threat to democracy. “First, stop saying Russia when you mean Putin.” Putin wants to frame the conflict as a battle between the Russian people, trying to preserve their culture and sovereignty, and a decadent and overbearing West. But our conflict is not with the Russian people. It is with a predatory ruling elite that has hijacked Russia’s state and its vast natural resource wealth. We are not the only victims of Putin’s crimes. There are over 140 million Russian victims as well. In our diplomatic statements, we need to make a clear distinction between Putin’s repressive kleptocracy and the Russian people. And we need to constantly work to separate the two.
Second, don’t offer Putin gratuitous praise. The last thing we should be doing is congratulating him on his election “victories”—a mistake both Presidents Obama and Trump have made. These were not real elections but rather grotesque charades to mimic a democratic process in the hope of giving some shroud of legitimacy to Putin’s dictatorship. Russian democrats are urging us: Please don’t legitimate this fake exercise in democracy. Don’t encourage Putin. And don’t discourage Russian democrats who are trying to fight for the real thing. We need a new golden rule to deal with autocrats like Putin: If you can’t say something critical about him, don’t say anything at all.
Third, we need to ratchet up the pressure on regime elites where it hurts—in their assets and their ability to enjoy them. The vehicle to do this is targeted sanctions on the people responsible for human rights abuses, predatory corruption, and other criminal acts. A milestone on the road to accountability came with the passage in 2012 of the “Magnitksy Act,” named for the Russian anti-corruption whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky, who was beaten to death in a Russian prison in 2009. After it authorized visa and banking sanctions on those believed responsible for his death, the Obama administration placed 18 Russians on the list. In March 2014, responding to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its military operations in eastern Ukraine, a U.S.-led coalition of Western governments began imposing sanctions on numerous other Russian government officials, military officials, business oligarchs, banks, and companies. These actors were thereby prevented from traveling to or doing business with the West. Under President Donald Trump, more Russian oligarchs and their businesses have been added to the list.
Targeted sanctions are effective because they punish corrupt and abusive individuals, not the Russian people at large. Kara-Murza recalls Nemtsov saying that the Magnitsky Act was the most pro-Russian legislation ever passed in a foreign country. “because it targets the people who abuse the rights of Russian citizens and who steal the money of Russian citizens.” “For now,” Kara-Murza says, “We can’t stop the kleptocrats from stealing in Russia, but we can stop them from spending their stolen riches in the West.” Indeed, what’s the point of stealing all this wealth if you can’t use it to buy property in New York, London, and the French Riviera; if you can’t dock your yacht on the Mediterranean coast; if you can’t send your kids to the most prestigious American and British universities; and if you can’t buy Western lawyers, bankers, and PR and lobbying firms to launder your image and your money through layers of transactions until you come out a respected businessman and philanthropist?
In 2012, Kara-Murza was a passionate advocate for passage of the Magnitsky Act. Now he urges other democracies to join the campaign for accountability. “If you have Magnitsky laws on the books, enforce them. If you don’t, pass them.” Several other countries, including Canada and the UK, have passed or are considering Magnitsky sanctions laws. Those that have them need to ensure that the Kremlin’s leading killers, kleptocrats, and enablers are on the sanctions list.
But we have to go further to attack the swiss-cheese system of legal loopholes that enables venal rulers and their cronies worldwide to launder their dirty money and dubious images in the West. The Kleptocracy Initiative, based at the Hudson Institute, has produced superb analyses documenting the problem and recommending reforms. We can start, for example, by ending anonymous shell companies (which the U.S. leads the world in facilitating), and by ending anonymous real estate purchases in the U.S. We need to modernize the entire American legal system for anti-money laundering. This will squeeze not only Russian kleptocrats but also drug traffickers, terrorists, human rights abusers, and organized crime networks around the world.
Finally, we shouldn’t yield to glib and cynical pessimism about Russia’s political future. The Russian people haven’t given up on the quest for democratic and accountable government in Russia, and neither should we. After the most prominent surviving opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was disqualified in January from the Russian presidential election, Russians braved freezing weather and official obstacles in scores of cities across the country to protest the lack of political choice. As Kara-Murza stresses, large numbers of Russians, including young people, are fed up with the corruption of the Kremlin cabal. In truth, we can’t really know how popular Putin is because in his nearly two decades of rule, “the assertion has never been tested in a free and fair election against credible opponents.”
Determined to snuff out any possibility of a political alternative, the Kremlin has been gradually ending competitive elections for mayors. The most recent victim of this tightening of the authoritarian noose is the charismatic mayor of Ykaterinburg (Russia’s fourth largest city), Yevgeny Roizman. Having beaten Putin’s candidate for mayor five years ago, he was stopped in 2018 with a blunt instrument: A bill rammed through the regional legislature abolishing direct elections for the city’s mayor. Yet Roizman vows to continue resisting the concentration and corruption of power in Russia. He says, “Surrender is not in our vocabulary.” That’s also a good motto for how we in the West should deal with Putin’s kleptocracy.
Karen Dawisha, the author of the definitive study, Putin’s Kleptocracy, passed away last week after a battle with cancer. A great scholar and person, she did not believe that predatory authoritarianism was stamped into the Russian DNA. And neither should we.