Everyone has heard the story. Early this month, former GRU officer and British double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned by the nerve agent Novichok in Salisbury, England. Twenty-one other people, including police officers who had intervened, received medical treatment and as many as 500 Salisbury residents might have been contaminated. Given what is known about Novichok, it is basically certain that the poisoning was organized by the Russian state.
The West’s answer? The UK government is expelling 23 Russian diplomats and suspending high-level contacts with the Russian government. The former U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson condemned the poisoning and called the Kremlin “an irresponsible force of instability in the world.”
Last week, Donald Trump, Angela Merkel, Theresa May, and Emmanuel Macron issued a joint statement that “abhorred” the attack and called on Russia to “live up to its responsibilities […] to uphold international peace and security.” On Monday, the EU’s foreign ministers, in turn, offered the UK their “unqualified solidarity”—though earlier on Monday Germany’s foreign minister called the attack a “bilateral matter” between the UK and Russia. In other European countries, meanwhile, the poisoning has barely made headlines.
Let’s face it: Expulsions of diplomats and official condemnations—or even a boycott of World Cup in Russia by UK government and royal family—will not make an inch of difference to the Kremlin’s calculus. Quite the contrary, a strong rhetoric from Western capitals, not matched by any real action, does Vladimir Putin a service. At home, it helps him create an image of Russia as encircled by mortal enemies plotting to harm it, without inflicting any costs on the political elite, which a genuine confrontation with the West would involve.
But there is another way. Without making a fuss, Europeans and Americans can hit Russia’s model of political economy where it hurts most—at the clientelistic networks that the regime has created and feeds of. Russian oligarchs owe their wealth, overwhelmingly from natural resource rents, to the Kremlin and have an interest in perpetuating the regime. But the West can make that wealth go away, or at last reduce it significantly.
First, Western governments, especially the United States are in a position to ensure that oil and gas prices stay low for the foreseeable future. Both fracking and investment into scalable, economically viable renewables can play a helpful role there.
Second, through sanctions and asset freezes the West can make it much harder for wealthy, regime-connected Russians to hide and spend their wealth abroad, making clientelistic rents distributed by the regime far less valuable. Under CAATSA, the US administration can act quickly and effectively, without any further legislative active. For European countries including the UK, going after corrupt Russian money might involve economic trade-offs but those are trivial compared to the cumulative effects of doing nothing. London will remain a global financial capital even if it stops laundering money for the world’s kleptocrats.
By restricting the ability of Russian state-owned and state-connected entities to operate in the West, it is possible to limit the extent of political corruption that the Kremlin has pursued by forging ties with Europe’s former statesmen, extremist politicians, and opinion makers. Simultaneously, the United States and Europe can do a better job at reaching out to ordinary Russians. A tough stance against the country’s current regime and its enablers is not Russophobia. In fact, both Europe and the United States would be perfectly happy to cooperate and work closely with a Russia that were a responsible international actor.
Russian disinformation in the West, which has captured imagination of the West’s political elites, is of course a real problem. However, it is not the only or even the most important challenge that the Kremlin poses. Looking for ways to counter it, through better regulation of social media or political advertising for example, is not wrongheaded per se but it is going make a marginal difference at best in an environment in which corrupt Russian flows freely through Western financial centers and in which acts of Russian state-sponsored terrorism, such as the Salisbury attack, are being effectively ignored.
If Putin’s Russia has now become a real threat to the West, it is almost entirely the fault of years of foot-dragging and resets on both sides of the Atlantic. With an economy of the size of Italy’s, relying on sales of minerals, and facing a severe demographic crisis, Russia remains for most practical purposes an “Upper Volta with missiles.” And policymakers from Washington, through London and Brussels, to Berlin have no excuse not to act with confidence and resolve needed to deter and contain Moscow.
Dalibor Rohac is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Twitter: @DaliborRohac.
