Punishing Putin mostly means punishing his foes

After being surprised by broad-based protests in late March, the Russian authorities were ready to prevent a repeat on Monday. Police detained hundreds across the country as well as opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The protests themselves were thinner, too — planning to be arrested, which is likely, is not for everyone — but thousands still turned out.
As I watched footage of police pulling people out of the crowds in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and dozens of other Russian cities, I couldn’t help but wonder if US politicians and commentators calling for economic sanctions against Russia realize who they are ultimately hurting. Is it President Vladimir Putin’s repressive regime or the small number of courageous Russians he is
repressing?
Senator Lindsey Graham on Sunday called for ‘punishing’ Russia “for trying to destroy democracy” and a group of legislators is working to combine various Russia sanctions proposals into a single amendment to a popular bill introducing sanctions against Iran. These proposals would codify the restrictions on Russia imposed by the Obama administration and add more measures against Russia’s energy and defense
industries.
Upon closer examination, sanctions have been a questionable deterrent: Putin has held on to Crimea, continued backing Russian proxies in eastern Ukraine and waded into battle in Syria on behalf of President Bashar Al Assad. Putin’s regime is far from teetering, and it’s not internationally isolated, either.
Three years after the sanctions were introduced, their limits are on full display. Putin’s use of the obvious Western hostility toward Russia as justification for tightening the screws has been visibly, tangibly successful. An April poll by the Levada Center, one of the last independent pollsters in Russia, showed that 28 percent of Russians believed Navalny was “working in the interests of the West.”Only 12 percent said he was working for Russian interests.
Navalny keeps fighting, saying he’s running for president — likely against Putin — in 2018 despite being disqualified because of a criminal conviction on trumped-up charges. Monday’s protests, planned long in advance for Russia’s Independence Day, were part of his campaign, based on the anti-corruption investigations run by Navalny’s non-profit foundation. The most recent one of these targeted Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev and the shady non-profits, run by his friends, that own several luxury estates used by Medvedev.
The Moscow authorities had agreed to let Navalny and his supporters gather on one of the central avenues, but then the corruption fighter failed to find contractors to build a stage for the rally: Moscow firms acted as if he were toxic. In protest against the tactic, Navalny moved the action to Tverskaya, an unsanctioned location where police immediately swooped in to detain more than 700 of those who showed up. Some 500 were picked up in St. Petersburg and hundreds more in other Russian cities. And as Navalny himself was arrested while trying to leave the high-rise building where he lives, electricity at his office was cut off to disable his YouTube channel. With so few Russian news outlets daring to cover the protests, Yandex News, the country’s most powerful news aggregator, doesn’t even pick up on the coverage. At the same time, protesting has become riskier because of the detentions and beatings, and it’s grown harder for opposition leaders to run effective campaigns because businesses whose services they need are scared of retaliation.
It would have been impossible to design sanctions in a way that would have denied Putin this tool of repression altogether. But if the sanctions were only against Putin’s friends and odious, corrupt Kremlin officials, not against Russia as a country, they would have hurt the weakened Russian opposition less. They could have even strengthened its hand if the foreign assets of corrupt Russian officials were frozen; Navalny’s investigations would have been backed up by stories of confiscated illicit wealth. But instead of working to make personal sanctions more effective Western politicians talk about increasing sectoral sanctions directed against the country, not just the regime.
Such measures tend to be sticky. The US kept the 1974 Jackson-Vanick amendment, which restricted trade with the Soviet Union and Russia, in force long after Moscow stopped hampering Jewish emigration, which the law was meant to support. Punishment outlived the transgression by decades — and, throughout the 1990’s, it hurt Russia’s fragile attempt to become part of the West.
The idea of ‘punishing Russia’ is here to stay in US domestic politics. ‘The Russians’ is an abstract notion represented by the image of a smirking, bare-chested Putin. A month ago, U.S. legislators who favored heavier sanctions were still willing to wait for an investigation to produce specific results; somehow that no longer appears necessary. There’s probably no way to stop the steamroller, but those calling for punishment should also keep in mind the images of Navalny being shoved into a police car and the thousands protecting their heads against rubber sticks. That the regime takes out its hatred of the West on these people, and most of Russia looks on — and much of it even nods along — is among the side effects of protecting democracy as the ‘punishers’ understand it.

—Bloomberg

Leonid Bershidsky is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru