In 1992, Richard Nixon assessed the future of Russia in a remarkably prophetic interview. ‘Russia is at a crossroads’, said the former US President:
It is often said the cold war is over and the West has won. But that is only half of the truth. Communism has been defeated but the ideas of freedom are now on trial. If they don’t work, there will be a reversion not to communism but to a new despotism which would pose a mortal danger to the rest of the world. It will be affected by a virus of Russian imperialism which has been a characteristic of Russian foreign policy for centuries.
Therefore, the West and the US has a great stake in freedom succeeding in Russia. If it succeeds, then China and other communist states will follow. If it fails, the hardliners in China and Russia will get a new life. They will say it (freedom) failed so there is no reason for us to turn to democracy’.
Nixon was not the only soothsayer. The British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Rodric Braithwaite, wrote in his dispatch to London six months earlier: ‘We must now gear ourselves for what may well be a decade of instability with the rebirth of Russian nationalism, frightening in its power and there will be trials of strength between Russia and Ukraine’. He concluded the Russians now fear the ‘Time of Troubles’, prophesised by the fool at the end of the 19th century opera ‘Boris Godunov’ – with hungers, tears and impenetrable darkness.
This rebirth of authoritarian Russian nationalism was helped by the catastrophe of wholesale privatisation, with valuable state assets given to a tiny group of oligarchs who moved their wealth to London via offshore entities instead of investing in Russia. As this policy was based on the advice of US economists, Putin could blame western free-market capitalism for the chaos and corruption of the 1990s.
But the real origins of the new despotism and ultra-nationalism that resulted in the invasion of Ukraine lie in a long-running conspiracy theory inside the Kremlin that Russia has been in a perpetual full-scale non-military war with the West. ‘This is underpinned by a belief, widely held by Russia’s leaders, that their country is under threat from the Euro-Atlantic alliance and is existential’, said Andrew Foxall, a former academic who now advises the Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. ‘This view did not originate with Putin but has become canonical under his leadership. Russia’s leaders perceive that Euro-Atlantic values – universal human rights and the rule of law – threaten Russia’s stability as much as its conventional capabilities.’
This siege mentality can be traced back to 2005 when the Defence Secretary Sergei Ivanov declared: ‘There is a war against Russia underway and it has been going on for quite a few years. No one declared war on us. There is not one country that is in a state of war with Russia. But there are people and organisations in various countries who take part in hostilities against Russia.’ These ‘organisations’, according to the Kremlin, included Netflix, the videogame Pokémon Go and the funding of NGOs as part of a CIA plot to harm Russia’s interests. All of this constituted an act of war. For Putin, any protesters in Russia were ‘paid agents of the West’. And the promotion of democracy was an attempt to ‘dismember Russia’, declared National Security Chief Nikolai Patrushev.
By 2014, faced by what they regarded as a hybrid war by the West, the role of the security service, the FSB, was paramount. A new generation of Russian intelligence officers had taken over and were conscious of the humiliations of the past like their president. In Russians Among Us by Gordon Corera, there is a revealing account of a conversation between a former KGB operative and a serving FSB officer:
One American recalls witnessing the tension at the end of a long vodka-drinking session after a liaison meeting. An older Russian officer reminisced wistfully about the good old days of the Cold War, when the two spy services went head-to-head. But a young FSB officer reacted angrily. The older officer’s generation was the one that lost the Cold War, he said bitterly. His generation was determined to restore Russian pride and would take the fight to the enemy.
This hard-line mindset manifested itself in the invasion of the Crimea and Donbas region in 2014. The FSB recruited senior members of the Ukrainian Security Service, the SBU. Over the next seven years about 50 per cent of the security forces were recruited by FSB operatives, some using Kompromat techniques. The FSB spent an estimated $200 million per year in bribing and persuading Ukrainians to become Russian agents of influence, according to the Ukrainian lawyer Yuri Shulipa. He said these funds are derived from the state and Russian oligarchs but ultimately controlled by the Kremlin.
The FSB’s agenda was to divide and weaken Ukraine and its security service, according to Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, head of the SBU between 2006 and 2010, and between 2014 and 2015. His investigation resulted in five FSB officers being arrested for espionage. The SBU discovered digital voice recorders, a video camera inside a fountain pen, a tiny container for storing digital data inside a keychain and a memo with instructions for undercover FSB operations.
After Nalyvaichenko left the SBU, the FSB flourished in Ukraine before the invasion of the Crimea in 2014. ‘The FSB inserted their own agents into the Crimea government, its parliament and its law enforcement offices’, Nalyvaichenko told me. ‘Unfortunately, there was no SBU which had become a branch of the FSB’.
In November 2013, the President of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych had been ousted as president but refused to leave office. Ukraine was on the brink of civil war. Meanwhile, a group of 43 FSB and GRU (military intelligence) generals and officers and Vladislav Surkov, deputy chief of staff to Putin, twice secretly visited Yanukovich in Kyiv. ‘According to our investigation, Surkov and FSB officers were actively engaged in activities against the Ukrainian people’, said Nalyvaichenko.
It was during this period that the SBU allowed 20 high-ranking FSB officers to stay at a secret counter-terrorist facility near Kyiv where they were given access to the internal data and computer software of the Ministry of Interior. The FSB officers – heavily armed – copied everything and flew back to Moscow.
On returning to the Kremlin, the FSB was in possession of a treasure trove of top-secret documents and discs. Using this stolen data, the FSB hacked MPs in the Ukrainian parliament, civil servants and military officers. ‘This unit operates as a special institution inside the FSB where 1,500 people work around the clock’, Nalyvaichenko told me. ‘They operate through the social media networks, robotic messaging systems, send out texts to make people panic over several days. When your mobile phone is under attack by this robotic calling system, you cannot make a call to anyone or text a message for several hours.’
For the Ukrainian citizens of Crimea, it was much worse. From the day of the invasion in 2014, the FSB used the stolen database for disrupting their lives. The data was used to place all people at train and bus stations under surveillance. This enabled the FSB to arrest all military and police officers and their families. Hundreds of people were detained by the FSB.
Nalyvaichenko told me the FSB have been using every cyber-attack at their disposal both before and after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Based on partly the data stolen in 2014, the FSB cyber-attacked Ukraine government websites, television channels, banks and corporations. ‘The FSB is very active on social media, telegram channels and public online forums and using these platforms to send out disinformation, fake news and trying to create panic among our people’, he said.
Today the Ukrainian people are suffering from the unrelenting and ruthless firepower of Putin’s war machine. But the warning signs of brutal Russian nationalism was visible in the resurgence of the FSB, the Kremlin’s focus on influence operations, cyber hacking and the complacency of the 1990s. Perhaps if western leaders had listened to President Nixon in 1992 history would be different.
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