How I Learned to Love Putin
Bret Stephens continues with his excellent commentaries. One has to wonder how long he will stay with the WSJ.
Vladimir Putin used to worry me. A lot. But I’m over it.
In September 1999 a series of apartment bombings in three Russian cities killed nearly 300 people. The Kremlin promptly blamed Chechen rebels, sparking the Second Chechen War. Later that September, agents of Russia’s security service, the FSB, placed explosives in the basement of an apartment building in the city of Ryazan. Authorities claimed it was a training exercise, and that the explosives were merely sacks of sugar. An independent parliamentary inquiry went nowhere. Documents related to the incident are under 75-year seal. The bombings were instrumental in bringing Mr. Putin to power.
(snip)
Among the members of the Ryazan inquiry was liberal politician Sergei Yushenkov and investigative journalists Otto Latsis and Yuri Shchekochikhin. Yushenkov was assassinated in April 2003. Latsis was killed after a jeep rammed into his Peugot in September 2005. Shchekochikhin fell violently ill in June 2003, lost all his hair, suffered multiple organ failures and died 16 days later.
The following year, Viktor Yushchenko, a Ukrainian opposition figure seen as hostile to Russia, fell mysteriously ill as he was campaigning for the presidency. He survived to win the office, but his face was permanently disfigured by what turned out to be dioxin poisoning. Two years later, Alexander Litvinenko, a former FSB agent and political asylee in Britain, ingested a fatal dose of polonium. An official inquiry concluded that his murder was conducted by the FSB with the likely personal approval of Mr. Putin.
(snip)
In 2015, Germany’s domestic intelligence service concluded that Russia hacked the email accounts of the entire German parliament. Bulgaria’s electoral commission was subjected to a cyberattack the same year, in what the country’s president called “an attack on Bulgarian democracy.” Russia, MI5 chief Andrew Parker told the Guardian last month, “is using its whole range of state organs and powers to push its foreign policy abroad in increasingly aggressive ways—involving propaganda, espionage, subversion and cyber-attacks.”
(snip)
In 2003 Mr. Putin’s government froze the assets of energy giant Yukos and sent CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky to a Siberian labor camp for nearly a decade. The company’s assets were then taken over by state-owned oil firms run by Mr. Putin’s cronies... In 2008, Bob Dudley, now the head of BP, was run out of Russia, reportedly fearing for his life, after his joint venture was seized by his Russian partners. That same year, Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil’s CEO, gave a speech in St. Peterburg warning that “there is no respect for the rule of law in Russia today.” Russia’s domestic lawlessness used to worry me. But since Mr. Tillerson was awarded the Order of Friendship by Mr. Putin in 2013, I assume nothing’s amiss.
(snip)
Russia’s willingness to lie used to distress me. But after this election season, political outrage has become passé. Why worry about Mr. Putin when it’s so much easier to love him?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-i-learned-to-love-putin-1481589536
(You may be able to read the whole article by googling the title)
