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| Image from a 'rap-trash group from Sankt-Pitersberg' according to
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Since I patted Harold Wilson on the back in a Miners' Welfare hall in the Midlands in the 70s I have been boy and man Labour. Even when I was
yelling at them over the treatment of lesbian and gay asylum seekers I still supported them because I knew Labour could do better.
Ukraine is something else. If Jeremy Corbyn is elected leader he gets to select a shadow Foreign Secretary and he gets to set the direction of travel of Labour Party foreign policy.
As I explained in my now viral
post on Corbyn and Ukraine it is clear as day that he supports Russian imperialism. But as I also explained I am pessimistic that the party will take Ukraine and Russia seriously because foreign policy was not being raised at the hustings. It still isn't. Only now - only now - is a key left website like Left Foot Forward publishing '
Why is no one challenging Jeremy Corbyn on foreign policy?'
So why should I trust that the party will reign Corbyn in on foreign policy? Which seems to be the argument from Corbyn supporters who share some, if not all, of my concerns. This puts all the weight onto one person, MP John McDonnell, Corbyn's agent in the leadership race, who does support Ukraine.
I wrote that post because, 1/ no one else was going to and, 2/ because I felt I owed it to the people of Ukraine. Unlike gay asylum seekers, people like the Ukrainian socialist I quoted have, for two years, struggled to get any hearing on the British left. There is no evidence suggesting that will change and that someone like McDonnell will be able, termite like, to eat away at the leader's Putin backing.
There is a perceptible naivete about Russia on the British left and I think it is utterly naive
not to think that much of that may be down to Russia itself and not simply the absence of a strong Ukraine lobby or an Iraq hangover (as Gary Kent suggests in his excellent
piece on Corbyn and foreign policy).
This is not just about the influence Russia Today and trolls from St Petersberg have on sentiment (which I
agree with Jim Kovpak is probably counter productive) but something far subtler and more pernicious and far, far less discussed.
Russia has to an extent shown its hand regarding Corbyn. Russia Today
broadcasts his rallies and a key Kremlin foreign policy adviser
has said that Corbyn's election would be in Russia's interest.
They have other ways of influencing.
As
Anne Applebaum points out when she wrote about Western 'useful idiots':
In some cases it even suits their own financial interests. Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front, has been lent millions of euros by a Russian bank. With so much money at stake, it’s not surprising she isn’t bothered by the deaths of more than 6,000 people in a totally unnecessary war. National Front leaders regularly visit Moscow. One of Le Pen’s advisers went to Crimea during the “referendum” there last year, to serve as one of the election observers who came to rubber-stamp the process.
Before anyone yells about conspiracies read this by John Schindler (reblogged with permission) which turns the Corbynite argument on its head.
Schindler is an ex counterintelligence officer and someone who I started to read around the time that
I wrote about how the Snowden so-called revelations and their use by Glenn Greenwald was a libertarian ploy. I argued that socialists needed to wake up about the real political implications of a movement undermining faith in government as a good.
Schindler I tease as a 'secret socialist' - because he did indeed once write that he is. The idea that someone who used to work for the NSA could be, gasp, socialist probably makes a lot of people I know heads explode. Which I admit I do like the idea of.
Putin Turns Up His Special War Against Europe
By John Schindler
Over the last year, since the Russian theft of Crimea, I’ve unambiguously
warned that
Vladimir Putin means what he says and he will not shy away from
confrontation with the West, even at the risk of major war.
Opportunities to deter this resurgent Russia, which I
counseled many
months ago, were punted on by the U.S. and NATO, so we now face a
serious risk of war with Putin over his mounting hegemony in Eastern
Europe. Ukraine is just the beginning.
As I’ve long made clear, Russia does not play by Western rules, and
Putin and his Kremlin, being Chekists to their core, place great value
on what I term
Special War,
meaning a shadowy amalgam of espionage, propaganda, and terrorism that
Western states are poorly positioned to counter. At the end of the last
year I
predicted that the Kremlin’s Special War against the West was sure to rise, and so it has in the first quarter of this new year.
Last week I
explained how
Russian espionage against the Czech Republic — no congenital hater of
the Russians like, say, Poland or the Baltics — had become so serious
that Prague had expelled three Russian spies in recent months, amid
warnings from Czech counterintelligence that at least a quarter of the
outsized number of Russian diplomats in the country were actually spies
posing as diplomats.
Over the last year I’ve explained in detail how Russian intelligence
abroad, encompassing the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and the
military’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), have increased the scope
and intensity of their operations against many NATO countries,
including
France,
Germany,
Hungary, and
Poland.
Most of these operations are undertaken by SVR or GRU officers serving
under what the Russians term Legal cover, meaning they are pretending to
be diplomats, trade representatives, and whatnot.
But in recent years there has also been an uptick in operations by
spies whom the Russians term Illegals, meaning intelligence officers who
serve abroad without any official protection, often posing as
third-country nationals. The massive 2010 round up of a whole network of
SVR Illegals in the United States proved a serious blow to the Kremlin,
and their espionage still exhibits weaknesses, as evidenced by
the recent arrest of an SVR Illegal operating in New York, a second-rater who did not belong to the elite of Russian spies.
Such Kremlin activities extend beyond NATO as well, and now it’s
Sweden’s turn. A neutral that’s prone to downplaying threats on
political grounds, and is always careful not to needlessly aggravate the
Russian bear looming across the Baltic Sea, Stockholm has nevertheless
had enough of clandestine Russian shenanigans in their country. This
week they have
gone public with the extent of the Kremlin’s Special War being waged against Sweden.
According to the Swedish Security Service (Säpo), at least one-third
of the Russian diplomats in the country are actually spies. Recent
months have seen repeated incidents of Russian intelligence provocations
— submarines off the coast, SVR and GRU ramping up clandestine
in-country operations — and Stockholm is worried, particularly because
Kremlin efforts to recruit spies inside Swedish military and political
circles are increasingly obvious.
Gone are the bumbling, vodka-swilling Russian spies of the 1990’s,
when the Soviet collapse curtailed much espionage abroad. Since 2006,
SVR and GRU operations against the West have risen steadily, to the
point that current activities are as intense in number and audacity as
they were at the height of the Cold War. Sweden is no exception, and
Säpo’s chief analyst noted that Russian spies today are “highly educated
and often younger than during the Soviet era. They are driven,
goal-oriented and socially competent.” Not to mention that this is only
talking about Russian
Legals, not Illegals, who can be assumed to add to the ranks of Kremlin spies in Sweden, perhaps considerably.
As always, these spies are recruiting sources,
disseminating disinformation, and fomenting dissent in the host country,
per longstanding Russian espionage practice. This has become so serious
that Stockholm now considers Russia to be the top threat to Swedish
national security. The Säpo analyst bluntly
explained, “There
are hundreds of Russian intelligence officers around Europe and the
West. They violate our territory every day … We see Russian intelligence
operations in Sweden—we can’t interpret this in any other way—as
preparation for military operations against Sweden.”
There’s the rub. Every week of late, Putin turns up the
heat on NATO and the West: diplomatic threats, aggressive maneuvers with
combat aircraft, the
movement of
late–model missiles to Kaliningrad, putting Stockholm, Warsaw, and
Berlin within easy range of Russian tactical nuclear weapons. Now, Putin
either wants open war against the West — not just the clandestine games
of Special War — or we wants us to think he does: in either case, this
is a terrifying situation.
Many believe that Putin thinks he can use the threat of
nuclear blackmail to gain a free hand for Russian aggression in Eastern
Europe, and they may be right. Certainly there is little in NATO
reactions to Russian aggression to date that suggests a backbone is
forming in Berlin, Paris, or Washington, DC. Whether or not the Kremlin
wants major war is known only to Putin and the tiny circle of advisors,
all hard-edged Chekists like himself, whom the Russian leader listens to.
For now, Special War will continue to achieve Kremlin aims,
possibly without major war, while laying the intelligence groundwork
for that bigger conflict, should that happen. Today’s
news brings
word that Polish counterintelligence has detected an air force officer
spying for Moscow. He is reported to have passed classified information
about Poland’s wing of F-16 fighters, the
backbone of
Polish defense against the Russians, in what may constitute a serious
blow to NATO readiness on the Alliance’s exposed eastern frontier.
Another day, another Russian spy in the West detected. You
can expect more of this. If we’re lucky, our conflict with Putin, which
is being orchestrated by the Kremlin, will remain confined to SpyWar.
Yet how robustly the West confronts Russian Special War — which is
ultimately a question of politics, not counterespionage — is a good
benchmark for how effectively we can deter a major, and possibly
nuclear, war. Without political will, all the West’s acumen in military
and intelligence affairs will matter little compared to the robust will
shown by Vladimir Putin, who is playing for keeps, and intends to win.
- Putin’s early years
As a young spy in Dresden, Vladimir Putin sets the stage for his unprecedented career
Edited to add: Andrew Coates
published on a worrying development on the French left, namely signally increased opposition to the EU and even a suggestion to work with the National Front (Marine LePen). Here is my comment to his post:
