On Wednesday, Russia’s SVR and FSB intelligence services made real the fictional “children of Lieutenant Schmidt” fraudsters from Ilf and Petrov’s early Soviet-era satire, The Little Golden Calf.
The two services’ latest frauds are almost amusing in their absurdity.
First up, we have SVR director Sergey Naryshkin. Aristocratic in ancestry and imperial outlook, Naryshkin is a hardliner’s hardliner and loyal Putinist. The president’s former enforcer in parliament, Naryshkin is now a passionate active measures disinformation aficionado. He has a particularly vivid imagination when it comes to supposed CIA plots. In September, for example, Naryshkin claimed that the CIA was planning to kill Catholic and Orthodox priests in order to overthrow Belorussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko.
Naryshkin’s new assertion is that the United States is undermining a recently agreed ceasefire between Armenia and Azerbaijan in their Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. That accord was reached after extensive lobbying efforts by the U.S., European Union, and Russia. But it was Vladimir Putin’s warning to Azerbaijan that it had to pick between a favorable and fast peace deal, and Russian intervention against it, which ultimately restored peace. Naryshkin knows that this ceasefire has U.S. and EU support. But he’s playing mind games. In a statement released on the SVR website, the director asserted that the U.S. and EU “are trying to convince the Armenians that peace in Nagorno-Karabakh is a defeat … Such actions are further evidence that the United States and its European friends, as always, solve their problems at the expense of the interests of ordinary people, this time – Azerbaijanis and Armenians.”
This is ridiculous stuff. No one in a serious policymaker position in Brussels, Berlin, London, Paris, or Washington is trying to get Armenia back into combat operations. There is no western strategic utility to that fighting, and it would only cause more suffering. If nothing else, all sides also recognize that Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan was forced into compromise by the simple fact that Azerbaijan was crushing his military. If Armenia restarts the conflict, it will lose even more than it already has.
So what’s the actual motive behind these otherwise absurd assertions?
For one, the Russian intelligence services truly despise the U.S. and always look for ways to make Washington look bad. More specifically, I suspect Naryshkin’s latest fairy tale is about providing preemptive cover for Putin should the ceasefire fail. The Russians have invested significant political capital in getting both sides to stop fighting. And at a level that goes far beyond Western-style political image shaping, Putin detests appearing weak or incompetent. These fears take on added concern in that the increasingly unstable Recep Tayyip Erdogan wants to reignite the conflict (side note: Russia is attempting to deter Erdogan by threatening escalation against Turkish interests in Syria). Put simply, Naryshkin wants to hedge against Russian prestige being undermined by renewed fighting.
That’s the first chapter of this week’s trip through the Russian intelligence looking glass.
Next up, we find the FSB’s announcement (Interfax report) that it has decided not to investigate a criminal complaint about the August poisoning of investigative journalist Alexei Navalny. That attempted assassination was carried out by FSB officers or agents with a Novichok-class nerve agent. But in October, Navalny’s anti-corruption foundation endeavored to trap the FSB in a Catch-22 situation by requesting that it investigate the use of weapons of mass destruction on Russian soil. I say Catch-22 because the investigative request forced the Kremlin to choose between acting on its pledge to investigate what happened to Navalny and risk new sanctions by covering up the most basic fact that Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent.
Predictably, Putin has taken the latter option. According to the FSB, there is no evidence that Novichok was used. This is a laughable falsity, but it does indicate the true gall of the Russian security state. Unless deterred by counter-threat or retaliatory action, it recognizes no boundary spare that which Putin sets (or that Putin lets Ramzan Kadyrov do instead).
Regardless, each of these claims is one of which Ilf and Petrov would surely be proud.
