Editorial: Europe’s Top Cop a Putin Crony?

Vladimir Putin uses an assortment of ruthless methods to target those who defy him: intimidation, imprisonment without trial, disinformation campaigns, murder. One tactic gets less attention than it should: infiltrating and leveraging international bodies. Consider the Kremlin’s bid to install police major general Alexander Prokopchuk—a Putin henchman if ever there was one—at the head of Interpol.

The global police body, which is slated to elect a new president today, allows member states to request the detention of a wanted person pending extradition. These “red notices” are intended to apply to ordinary crimes, not political vendettas. But with thousands of such notices put out every year—13,048 in 2017—the group operates on a concept entirely foreign to the Kremlin: trust. For the Russians, Interpol is another tool to harass its opponents and try to force their extradition.

Here’s how it works: the Kremlin issues a red notice request or disseminates a more informal “diffusion notice” using Interpol channels. The “wanted” individual—a dissident or critic—is detained, sometimes for weeks. Interpol may then intervene or the detaining country may catch on. To its credit, Interpol has repeatedly denied these bogus red notice requests, but that hasn’t stopped Putin from using the system to harass and intimidate critics.

Financier Bill Browder is one of the Kremlin’s prominent targets. Browder became a strident Putin critic after his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, uncovered a massive tax fraud scheme and later died in a Russian prison. The Kremlin has on seven different occasions ventured to exploit Interpol and have Browder arrested. Unsurprisingly, the U.S.-born financier is emphatically opposed to Russia’s leadership bid and distrusts the Kremlin’s sudden interest in law and justice. As if to prove him right, Russian prosecutors on Monday announced new charges against Browder—whom the Kremlin now characterizes as the leader of a “transnational criminal group.”

As for Putin’s candidate, Prokopchuk, he is currently a vice president of Interpol and has spent the last few years leading Interpol’s National Central Bureau for Russia. “Every single abusive act that Russia has perpetrated through Interpol since June 2011,” says the Heritage Foundation’s Ted Bromund, “was sanctioned directly by Prokopchuk.” Putin has no doubt been working to get the requisite votes to secure victory. The Kremlin has even accused those critical of his candidacy of election meddling. A nice irony.

Even if the presidential position comes with limited power, it will give Russia legitimacy that it does not deserve. Moscow barely merits Interpol membership; giving it the organization’s top leadership spot would be an embarrassment. Putin and his cronies care neither about international agreements nor about the rule of law. International institutions are there, in their view, to be exploited.