Putin's unhealthy obsession with Britain

This piece I wrote appears in The Times online today.................. RELATIONS between Russia and Britain have been reduced to a new form of megaphone diplomacy, with each side showering the other with accusations and counter-accusations. So, was the attempted assassination in Salisbury of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence double agent, the launching point for this growing hostility? Or is there a more fundamental reason for the current total breakdown? Why, for example, does it seem that Britain, above all other European countries, has been picked on by the Kremlin for its malign activities? Britain is certainly a prime target for President Putin and his subversive agenda against the West, not least because Theresa May’s government has adopted a strong and outspoken position towards Russia. The government has indirectly accused the Russian leader of being the mastermind behind the novichok attack on Mr Skripal and his daughter and of waging cyber war on the nation. There is also history between Moscow and London going back decades, partly as a result of successful operations by MI6 and MI5 which disrupted the Kremlin’s espionage networks. Sir David Omand, the former security and intelligence co-ordinator at Downing Street and ex-director of GCHQ, said that the bad history between the two countries could go back to when a British division was sent in to Russia to try to quell the revolution a century ago. “The UK has always been a demon figure [in Russia’s eyes] and I wouldn’t be surprised if that colours the fact that the UK is seen in this kind of light today,” Sir David said. He claimed that MI6 was viewed as a prime adversary within the small circle of powerful intelligence and security figures in Moscow, “with Putin at its centre”. Sir David said that the Russian intelligence services had never got over the shock of having 105 spies expelled from Britain in 1971 when Sir Alec Douglas-Home was foreign secretary. The revelation that four officers from the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, were caught trying to hack into the Office for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons in The Hague, and the evidence of Moscow’s covert interference in the 2016 US presidential election and the 2017 French election have demonstrated that the Kremlin’s malevolence spreads far and wide throughout the West, not just against the UK. Yet, Britain’s intelligence relationship with the US, which gives the UK a unique status in Europe, has always put this country in the forefront of Russian targeting. What is different today is that the UK government has made a point of being more open about the threats from Russia. Details of cyber attacks have been put into the public domain. So, too, has all the evidence gathered by the police against two members of the GRU accused of trying to murder Mr Skripal and Yulia, his daughter, last March. From Moscow’s viewpoint, often expressed by the Russian embassy in London, this proves that Britain is anti-Russian. As Andrew Parker, the director-general of MI5, said in a speech in Berlin last May, however, Britain was not anti-Russian but anti-Russian government. “The Russian government’s invasion of Crimea [in 2014], taking territory from another sovereign European country by force, is not acceptable,” he said. “Seeking to interfere with legitimate democratic elections in the US and in France is not acceptable . . . and neither is unleashing cyber attacks against our countries and institutions.” This was quite a political speech by the MI5 chief and would undoubtedly have been viewed as such in Moscow. The attempted killing of Mr Skripal who had worked as a double agent for MI6, and the 2006 fatal poisoning in London of Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian FSB intelligence officer, could be judged in some ways as a separate issue and not part of Mr Putin’s all-embracing anti-Western approach. British diplomatic sources said the UK was ingrained in Russian minds of Mr Putin’s generation as “little Satan” to the US “big Satan”. “Not only defecting spies but critics and opponents of Putin’s regime have chosen to live in the UK in much larger numbers than in any other country,” one source said. “They feel less safe and secure in Germany, France, Italy or Switzerland. So in the eyes of the regime, the UK is seeking to act as a safe haven for traitors and enemies of the regime. This has a 15-year history,” the source said. “Poisoning the likes of Litvinenko and the Skripals helps to demonstrate to others that the UK is not as safe as they think,” the source said. The diplomatic sources also said the Russian regime was frustrated that it had less leverage over the UK than over other Europeans, especially Germany. “Other EU countries are more malleable and have more Putin sympathisers,” one source said. The Litvinenko and Skripal poisonings were both revenge operations, the action of a state wanting to underline the message that intelligence officers who did not remain loyal to their country would be punished. Mr Putin summed up his view of “traitors” when he called Mr Skripal a “scumbag” this week. The plot against the Skripals in March, however, and the use of a deadly nerve agent that subsequently killed Dawn Sturgess five months later, coincided with growing alarm throughout the West over Mr Putin’s antagonistic leadership, especially in Britain. Sir David said that the government had little choice but to point an accusing finger at the Kremlin. The fact that Moscow dismissed the UK’s accusations as fantasy only helped to worsen relations with Britain, making it impossible for the government to try to seek a more diplomatic dialogue. The casual nature of the two accused GRU officers recorded on CCTV in Salisbury and the relatively easy trail that led to their uncovering underlined for old-hand intelligence operatives one obvious conclusion. Both men knew that they had Kremlin backing and would be protected. After all, Andrei Lugovoi, the prime suspect in the killing of Mr Litvinenko in 2006, was made a national hero. These sort of emboldened acts by Russia’s military intelligence service, both in the UK and in the Netherlands, as has been revealed this week, presents an acute challenge for western governments. Sanctions and expulsions of Russian spies have only added to the fear that a new form of Cold War is unavoidable. In the meantime, relations between Russia and Britain are so low that it is difficult to envisage any hope of improvement while a former KGB lieutenant-colonel is running the Kremlin.