Eurasia Archives - Democracy Digest

Russian kleptocrats ‘fraught with anxieties’: why the latest sanctions will bite

The lives of Russian kleptocrats in Britain are suddenly fraught with new anxieties, the Washington Post reports:

Critics in London of Russian President Vladimir Putin are reevaluating their need for personal protection. Russians with money worry they will ensnared by new laws going after “unexplained wealth.” Russians without money say they are being maligned with stereotypes. Suddenly, exile is not as comfortable, their adopted home not so welcoming….Arthur Doohan, co-founder of ClampK, an anti-corruption initiative, welcomes the scrutiny. Doohan runs “kleptocracy tours” of London, pointing out opulent homes purchased with suspect funds.

A Europe-wide diplomatic push is under way to persuade the Trump administration to ease US sanctions targeting Russia, as fears mount that the restrictions are so severe they risk hitting manufacturing activity across the continent, the FT reports:

Paris, which is marshalling the efforts after sanctions on Russian metals companies caused aluminium prices to soar, is pushing allies including Berlin, London and Rome to make a joint representation in Washington. The French-led initiative underscores the widening concern in Europe about the consequences that sanctions could have on key EU industries from cars to aerospace.

RFE/RL

The former State Department diplomat who oversaw U.S. government sanctions policy said he was “extremely” frustrated when the Obama administration issued “weak” and “frankly inadequate” sanctions against Russia in December 2016 in response to that country’s campaign to disrupt the U.S. presidential election, according to reports.

“The Obama administration — in my view, and I was in it, OK? I was working on sanctions then — did not respond with adequate strength to the Russian interference in our elections,” said Daniel Fried, who retired in 2017 after a 40-year State Department career that included serving as U.S. sanctions “coordinator” under President Obama.

“What we did in December 2016 was a very light set of sanctions, which I think was frankly inadequate. … We went after some cybertargets, we expelled some diplomats, we sanctioned some of the intel services. But those sanctions are not apt to be terribly effective, and we knew it. This was not enough,” added Fried, a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy.

Chatham House analyst Nigel Gould-Davies explains Why the Latest US Sanctions on Russia Will Bite.

‘Kleptocratic tribute system’

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, notes Larry Diamond, a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. On a visit to Stanford this week, Russian democracy advocate Vladimir Kara-Murza (right) shared with me three important guidelines for dealing with Putin’s threat to democracy, he writes for the American Interest:

“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. …

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. …

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.

Karen Dawisha, who has died aged 68 of cancer, was an outstanding and original scholar of Russia who argued that Vladimir Putin had turned his country into a corrupt authoritarian state run by a group of KGB cronies, the Guardian adds:

Her 2014 book, Putin’s Kleptocracy – Who Owns Russia?, is a definitive account of how Russia’s president and his friends grabbed and consolidated power. Along the way they became among the richest people on the planet, and the beneficiaries of what Dawisha called “a kleptocratic tribute system”…..Stealing was done under the cover of restoring “Russian greatness”. There was “massive predation”, on a scale not seen since the tsars. Risk was nationalized and profit privatized. A new neo-feudal class featuring about 100 billionaires presided over a deeply unequal economy.

We must remember that predatory authoritarianism is not stamped into the Russian DNA, adds Diamond, who coordinates the democracy program of Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL).

Fighting the Hydra: whose state organs are ‘in hock to some sort of kleptocracy’?

The British government refused to assist a French investigation into suspected money laundering and tax fraud by the UK telecoms giant Lycamobile – citing the fact that the company is the “biggest corporate donor to the Conservative party” and gives money to a trust founded by Prince Charles, BuzzFeed reports:

When BuzzFeed News first approached HMRC to ask about its response to the French request, the agency’s senior press officer strongly denied that Lycamobile’s donations would ever be cited as a reason not to conduct criminal raids. “No HMRC official would ever write such a letter,” he said. “This is the United Kingdom for God’s sake, not some third world banana republic where the organs of state are in hock to some sort of kleptocracy.” However, after verifying the contents of the email seen by BuzzFeed News, another HMRC spokesman said that it was “regrettable”.

Latin America’s Battle against Corruption: A Path Forward – (above) a new report from AS/COA and Americas Quarterly – suggests eight ways to build upon recent progress in the region’s fight against graft. Read the report.

Anti-corruption activists are mourning the passing of Karen Dawisha (right), author of “Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia?”

The book argued that corruption and authoritarianism in Russia in recent decades were not byproducts of the country’s emergence from communism but rather building blocks of a plan devised in the early 1990s by Mr. Putin and a circle of trusted associates, the New York Times reports:

The book made accusations so weighty that Cambridge University Press refused to publish it for fear of being sued by Mr. Putin or his allies under Britain’s restrictive libel laws. …[Dawisha] noted in a letter that Mr. Putin’s friends had succeeded in building channels of influence in British institutions, prompting Cambridge University Press to “cower and engage in pre-emptive book-burnings as a result of fear of legal actions.”

“These Kremlin-connected oligarchs feel free to buy Belgravia, kill dissidents in Piccadilly with Polonium 210, fight each other in the High Court, and hide their children in British boarding schools,” she wrote.

Western governments began to embrace her central thesis: that a network of corrupt oligarchs centering on Mr. Putin formed the basic structure of his political system, the Times adds.

“What wasn’t understood was that it went back to this St. Petersburg inner circle,” said Charles G. Davidson, the executive director of the Kleptocracy Initiative at the Hudson Institute in Washington. “The contention in Karen’s book that was so controversial at first — much less so now — is that there was a plan all along by Putin to take over the place.”

Because kleptocratic networks are transnational, anti-corruption alliances outside a country’s borders are also vital, according to a new paper from Carnegie’s Sarah Chayes (right). In Fighting the Hydra: Lessons From Worldwide Protests Against Corruption, she outlines several lessons for activists who wish to challenge corrupt systems, including:

A detailed reform agenda that targets the kleptocratic network’s diverse capabilities will be crucial to exploiting whatever window of opportunity does open.

This agenda should be communicated to ordinary people in such a way as to capture their imaginations, so support doesn’t flag when some symbolic victory is achieved.

Long-range planning is required to effectively deal with the multiple likely countermoves the campaign will encounter.

Alliances are force multipliers. Independent individuals or institutions within a corrupt government invariably control some levers of power, or at least information. Because kleptocratic networks are transnational, alliances outside the country’s borders are also key. RTWT

How did kleptocracy affect the trajectory of democratic development in Russia? the National Endowment for Democracy’s Melissa Aten asked analyst Lilia Shevtsova (right).

It seems to me that there are two important points, Shevtsova argued.

First, we have to distinguish between corruption and kleptocracy. Corruption presupposes the existence of a more or less independent bureaucracy and state apparatus on the one hand, and the business class on the other, which allows the business class to bribe representatives of the elite. This is not a kleptocracy. This is simple and primitive corruption.

Kleptocracy is the merger of power and property. Those who rule the country own it. This is a phenomenon that has emerged in the societies that have failed to transform themselves. The Eastern European communist countries that experienced successful anti-communist revolutions were lucky because they did so before this merger occurred. Anti-kleptocratic revolutions are much more complicated, and I don’t know whether they are possible everywhere.

Digital Resilience: Russia beating the West ‘hands down’ in information warfare

When it comes to information warfare, Russia is beating the West hands down, says a leading analyst.

The disinformation focused on the Skripal poisoning has many similarities with the Kremlin campaign following the downing of the civilian flight MH17, whereas the campaign on Syria is a predictable repetition of previous efforts discrediting civilian suffering, the EU Stratcom Task Force’s Disinformation Review reports.

Coda Story highlights the inside story of a Kremlin disinformation campaign in Georgia that is heating up because of the

EU Stratcom Task Force

Skripal case. Russian disinformation around the Syria strikes is a glimpse into the future of warfare, analysts suggest.

Russia’s neighbors are well-placed to advise Western democracies on how to counter the Kremlin’s active measures, argues Andrian Candu, speaker of the Moldovan Parliament.

What makes some people more susceptible to disinformation? Nick Monaco asks on Demworks, the blog of the National Democratic Institute, highlighting a Digital Intelligence Lab (above) paper he co-authored– State-Sponsored Trolling: How Governments are Deploying Disinformation as Part of Broader Digital Harassment Campaigns:

In this report, we explore how governments around the world are weaponizing surveillance systems and propaganda apparatuses to intimidate and silence individuals critical of the state. State-sponsored trolling sees many problems familiar to digital rights researchers – disinformation, unlawful hacking and surveillance, the usage of bots and computational propaganda – combine and metastasize into a larger phenomenon.

Digital Resilience

On June 22–23, 2018 the DFRLab is taking its 360/OS open source summit to Berlin, a city firmly focused on the future and a stark historical reminder of the divide between democracy and those who seek to undermine government by and for the people. Save the date for the gathering of #DigitalSherlocks from around the world building Digital Resilience ….

A British parliamentary committee has recommended that the government conduct further research into the manipulation of political information on social media and suggested that people of all ages receive training in digital literacy in order to recognize fake news, Reuters reports. So this initiative could not have been more timely…..

Facebook: Seeking Proposals for Global Literacy & Accessibility Challenge Grants

Lack of literacy skills has been shown as one of the top challenges for people to adopt technologies and take part in the social communications online, Facebook writes:

Facebook is pleased to invite the academic community to respond to this call for research proposals to better understand and address global literacy and accessibility issues. Research awardees will be expected to contribute to the field of literacy and accessibility through qualitative or quantitative research, including, but not limited to:

Novel, scalable methods on assessing individual or population literacy levels.

Understanding the experiences and challenges associated with literacy issues, eg learning disabilities or barriers due to English as a second language.

Understanding the social, structural, and technology issues that prevent people from improving literacy skills.

Understanding the impact of literacy skills on individuals and society.

Digital, social technologies used to improve literacy level, especially, closing the gender gap in literacy rate.

Design and development of technologies to elevate the literacy barrier, preferably with a focus on social and AI technologies.

Awards will be made up to $30K USD per proposal for projects up to one year in duration beginning August 2018.

Applications are now open. Applications close July 25, 2018, 11:59pm PST.

FULL DETAILS HERE.

Cyber-attacking the civil in civil society

EU Stratcom Task Force

In the face of authoritarian foreign influence* operations, the U.S. Congress should support public-private partnerships to tackle the challenge posed by disinformation and abuse of social media platforms, according to Jamie Fly and Laura Rosenberger, the co-directors of the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

Congress should create a fund with pooled public and private resources that would establish media literacy education and training pilot projects, helping to build resilience against foreign or other malign manipulation of our open society, they write for the Hill. In addition, Congress should:

improve election security and cybersecurity. Many state elections boards lack the funding and expertise to adequately secure their elections systems against foreign intrusion. …
improve disclosure requirements for online political advertisements. Americans should have the right to know who is funding political ads they see online, just as they do for political ads on radio, print and television. ….
tackle illicit foreign money in our political system. Dirty money should be prevented from entering the country. …RTWT

But Europe, not Congress, is more likely to address the threat posed to democracy by social media and disinformation, the Washington Post’s Michael Birnbaum & Tony Romm contend.

Technological advances have played an obvious and fundamental role in new forms of hybrid attacks against the West, according to Northwestern University analysts Buddhika Jayamaha and Jahara “Franky” Matisek. The rise of “troll farms” contribute to hyper-polarized debates, leading many citizens with access to social media to subconsciously choose one side of a false-choice debate without realizing there could be a moderate choice and policy, they write for the AWC’s ‘War Room’:

It is also more than just a “weaponized narrative,” because propaganda-like efforts are no longer meant to shape the information terrain in favor of the aggressor. Instead, hybrid attacks on civil society are meant to weaken the system from within, by weaponizing grievances and social divisions, and even highlighting hallmarks of a liberal democracy (i.e. pluralist interest representation) as vulnerabilities. This is accomplished with an intent on making existing problems appear intractable and creating imaginary problems that fragment and polarize as many group identities as possible.

Much less promiscuous are the means of adversarial states using “sharp power” to silence critics as a way of shifting focus and commentary away from their own corrupt governments and authoritarian societies, they add. RTWT

The US and UK are accusing Russia of launching what they’re calling “malicious” cyberactivity, targeting government institutions, infrastructure and internet providers, and warning of growing disinformation and trolling in the wake of the Syrian chemical attack.

Russia’s trolls and propagandists have turned Soviet disinformation into a terrifying art form, argues Bob Seely, a British MP and expert on Russian information warfare . Information warfare is more important than ever – and Russia is beating the West hands down, he writes for the Daily Telegraph.

EU Stratcom Task Force

Beyond retroactively deleting fake news pages and accounts, what more can be done to prevent the spread of disinformation? Alexander Babuta, RUSI Research Fellow IN National Security and Resilience, asks.

“It seems that automated content removal is the only viable preventive action social media companies could take to ensure that disinformation does not appear on their platforms in the first place,” he writes. “However, tech companies’ experiences with extremist content-removal demonstrate the difficulties in developing systems to automate content takedown, for this technology inevitably results in large amounts of legitimate content also being blocked.”

*China’s overseas influence efforts come under the spotlight in the latest issue of the National Endowment for Democracy’s Journal of Democracy in articles by John Fitzgerald on Australia, Anne-Marie Brady on New Zealand, Donald K. Emmerson on Singapore, and Martin Hala on Central and Eastern Europe.

Putin’s regime: ‘a Titanic looking for an iceberg’

The growing awareness that Russia, growing ever more hostile, should be treated as a threat rather than a mere annoyance is pushing Western capitals toward a unified front in challenging Moscow over such serial transgressions as destabilizing its neighbors, assassinating its critics abroad, meddling in the elections of other countries, tolerating the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government and cyberskirmishing, the New York Times reports:

The confrontation is likely to only get worse, analysts say, for one main reason: Mr. Putin and his closest advisers are convinced they are justified in their policies and have persuaded important portions of the elite as well as the bulk of Russians that the country is thriving, rebuilding its global muscle rather than weakening itself.

“The party of war has won within the Russian elite,” said Yuliy A. Nisnevich, a political-science professor. “There are people in the elites who would like the confrontation to stop — these are the people who would like to spend or earn money abroad. But the party of war, the people who get their money inside the country and live here, is prevalent now.”

Putin’s regime is “a Titanic looking for its own iceberg,” according to a leading analyst.

The ruling elite wants to be inside the West for its own purposes, but also against the West, promoting militarization and patriotism in an efforts to consolidate its legitimacy, said Russian political analyst Lilia Shevtsova (right), addressing the National Endowment for Democracy’s International Forum for Democratic Studies (above). The elite is seeking a new incarnation, but with diminished resources, while militarization entails international isolation and marginalization. Ordinary Russians want change but the system can’t allow it, she added.

Western commentators “got Russia wrong”, especially in dismissing its international relevance,” said Miriam Lanskoy, NED’s Senior Director for Eurasia. But there is now a risk of overstating it strength, she said, recommending a speech by former National Security Adviser HR McMaster for recognizing that the US is in a new global completion needs to summon the will to advance democratic values.

Russia exhibits a range of contradictions, said Christopher Walker, NED’s Vice President for Studies and Analysis: weak economically, but dynamic, punching above its weight in foreign policy; politically stultifying but technically innovative; and insular but practicing malign internationalism.

The US lacks a clear strategy on Russia, Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The New York Times.

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