It is high time Russian embrace came to an end

The Covid-19 epidemic was one great test of democratic resilience. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine poses another. Do Western societies have the moral fiber to stand up to aggressively authoritarian regimes abroad? What about at home?
From the World Economic Forum in Davos to London’s glittering business and party scene, Moscow’s gold has bought soft-power influence. Where the Russians have led, the Chinese have followed more discreetly. It is high time this sticky embrace came to an end.
Now comes the reckoning. A predictable debate about sanctions on Russian interests has begun in earnest. Will they work? Do they hit the right targets? The threat of sanctions failed to deter Putin’s military adventurism before, but they have again been rightly triggered across the West to punish him. However, they only scratch the surface.
In London, the UK government’s first feeble efforts — sanctioning a few Putin cronies already targeted by the US government — were likened to “bringing a pea-shooter to a knife fight.” Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced another tranche. One aim is to hit the interests of Russian oligarchs who use British financial advisers to hide their dubiously acquired gains. Yet there are gaping holes in the government’s net of retributive measures. The true ownership of much property in London is hidden from view. Companies House, which registers all corporate entities in the UK, allows owners to disguise their assets behind shell companies. As Labour opposition leader Keir Starmer put it last week, “We cannot go on being the world’s laundromat for illicit finance.”
A long-delayed Economic Crime Bill will now be brought forward before Easter this year, following pressure from Washington. Last week, the government also withdrew its so-called Golden Visa scheme offering foreign residents fast-track residency in the UK to those willing to pay 2 million pounds ($2.7 million). Home Secretary Priti Patel promised “a renewed crackdown on illicit finance and fraud.”
Some argue, however, that the oligarchs have become politically toothless — and so better to hit the 2,000-strong Moscow political class of Duma and Senate members, security-service bosses and state television propagandists who slavishly carry out Putin’s orders. Those who have watched a recent video of Putin berating his foreign intelligence chief will wonder whether the real threat to Russia’s strongman will emerge from within his own apparatus, not from billionaire exiles on yachts berthed on the Cote d’Azur.
Of more importance than the sanctions, however, has been the UK’s willingness to call out the Kremlin’s aggressive intentions and send defensive weaponry to democratic Ukraine. Britain still has “the muscle memory” and the will to defy dictators — it is proud of meeting Nato’s target of committing 2% of GDP to defense, though its army’s size has been drastically reduced.
It is also encouraging that in Germany, the new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has turned his back on his political party’s cooperation with Moscow to suspend the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. But Germany’s military commitment to NATO is less robust. The head of the German army, Alfons Mais, said on Thursday that he was “pissed off” the armed services had been left in such a dilapidated state that they “were unable to fulfill our commitments to our allies.”
Yet Putin, Xi Jinping and the clerical regime in Iran fear the contagion of democracy more than the Western sanctions for which they have long prepared. They see free elections and popular demonstrations on the streets of Kyiv, Hong Kong and Tehran as existential threats. Russia and China have long wanted to turn the tables — they aim to divide Western democracies and weaken the will to resist from within. In the so-called “golden era” of good relations with Russia and China, Western democracies let their enemies operate on their home soil with impunity.

—Bloomberg