Vladimir Putin and the Rape of the Russian People

It's no secret that I despise Vladimir Putin and view him as the latest incarnation of Russia's cavalcade of unfit rulers who have driven the country into the ground and robbed the country blind. Unlike Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna who I believe had good intentions - I have read their diaries - and were simply way out of their league in ruling as autocrats, Putin knows exactly what he is doing and cares nothing for the Russian people.  With Putin, it's all about satisfying his narcissism and inflated ego and hiding money overseas for the day when the Russian people wake up and realize that Putin should meet a fate like that of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Now, a breach of banking record security has provided a picture of just how badly Putin has betrayed the Russian people.  Here are highlights from The Guardian:

A network of secret offshore deals and vast loans worth $2bn has laid a trail to Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin.

An unprecedented leak of documents shows how this money has made members of Putin’s close circle fabulously wealthy.

Though the president’s name does not appear in any of the records, the data reveals a pattern – his friends have earned millions from deals that seemingly could not have been secured without his patronage.

The documents suggest Putin’s family has benefited from this money – his friends’ fortunes appear his to spend.

The files are part of an unprecedented leak of millions of papers from the database of Mossack Fonseca, the world’s fourth biggest offshore law firm. They show how the rich and powerful are able to exploit secret offshore tax regimes in myriad ways.

The offshore trail starts in Panama, darts through Russia, Switzerland and Cyprus – and includes a private ski resort where Putin’s younger daughter, Katerina, got married in 2013.

The Panama Papers shine a particular spotlight on Sergei Roldugin, who is Putin’s best friend. Roldugin introduced Putin to the woman he subsequently married, Lyudmila, and is godfather to Putin’s older daughter, Maria.

Roldugin appears to have been picked for this role because of his lesser profile. He has denied in documents to bank officials in Switzerland and Luxembourg that he is close to any Russian public figures. He has also said he is not a businessman.

Yet the files reveal Putin’s longstanding intimate has a 12.5% stake in Russia’s biggest TV advertising agency, Video International, which has annual revenues of more than £800m. Previously, its ownership was a closely guarded secret.

Roldugin was also secretly given an option to buy a minority stake in the Russian truck manufacturer Kamaz, which makes army vehicles, and has 15% of a Cyprus-registered company called Raytar.

He also owns 3.2% of Bank Rossiya. The St Petersburg private bank has been described as Putin’s “crony bank”. The US imposed sanctions on it after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

These assets are only part of a series of linked financial schemes revealed in the documents that revolve round Bank Rossiya.

The bank is headed by Yuri Kovalchuk. The US alleges he is the “personal banker” for many senior Russian government officials including Putin. The Panama Papers disclose that Kovalchuk and Bank Rossiya achieved the transfer of at least $1bn to a specially created offshore entity called Sandalwood Continental.

These funds came from a series of enormous unsecured loans from the state-controlled Russian Commercial Bank (RCB) located in Cyprus and other state banks. There is no explanation in the files of why the banks agreed to extend such unorthodox credit lines.
Some of the cash obtained from RCB was also lent back onshore in Russia at extremely high interest rates, with the resulting profits siphoned off to secret Swiss accounts.

A $6m yacht was purchased by Sandalwood and shipped to a port near St Petersburg.
Cash was also handed over directly to the Putin circle, this time in the form of very cheap loans, made with no security and with interest rates as low as 1%. It is not clear whether any loans have been repaid.

In 2010 and 2011, Sandalwood made three loans worth $11.3m to an offshore company called Ozon, which owns the upmarket Igora ski resort in the Leningrad region. Ozon belongs to Kovalchuk and a Cypriot company. Putin is the resort’s star patron and a reputed resident.

Speculation over the size of Putin’s personal fortune has gone on for almost a decade, following reports in 2007 that he was worth at least $40bn, based on leaks from inside his own presidential administration.

In 2010, US diplomatic cables suggested Putin held his wealth via proxies. The president formally owned nothing, they added, but was able to draw on the wealth of his friends, who now control practically all of Russia’s oil and gas production and industrial resources.

One of the companies linked to Ove Financial Corp belonged to Mikhail Lesin, Putin’s media tsar and former press minister. Lesin founded the Kremlin’s propaganda TV channel Russia Today but later fell out of favour. He was mysteriously found dead last November in a Washington hotel room with blunt force injuries to the head.

Asked about the offshore companies linked to him last week, Rodulgin said: “Guys, to be honest I am not ready to give comments now … These are delicate issues. I was connected to this business a long time ago. Before ‘perestroika’. It happened … And then it started growing and such things happened. The House of Music [in St Petersburg] is subsidised from this money.”

Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s official spokesman, declined to comment on specific allegations against the president. Speaking last week, Peskov said western spy agencies were behind an all-out “information attack” against him to destabilise Russia before elections. Peskov dismissed the investigation by the Guardian and others as an “undisguised, paid-for hack job”. He said Russia had “legal means” to defend Putin’s dignity and honour.

US political scientist Karen Dawisha said it was inconceivable that Putin’s friends had become rich without his patronage. “He takes what he wants. When you are president of Russia, you don’t need a written contract. You are the law.”

Russia's Curse of Bad Leaders - Putin, the Latest Chapter

Some time back I noted that I had read the book "Red Fortress - History and Illusion in the Kremlin," which had been given to me as a Christmas gift.  The book traced the history of the Kremlin and by extension the history of Russia from the founding of the Muscovy state through the near present.  The take away from the book: (i) much of Russia's "curse" has been bad leaders who has squandered Russia's future and acted to the detriment of the Russian people, (ii) too often, Russians have found themselves struggling to over come the backwardness and societal regression arising from brutal regimes and squandered opportunities, and (iii) Russia continues to have a love-hate relationship with western Europe.  Fast forward to the present day and a piece in Time looks at why modern day Russians are allowing their future to be harmed by Russia's latest bad ruker, Vladimir Putin.  Here are article highlights:

But in all of it there was an undercurrent of aggrievement; a sense of having to restart after seven decades of the Soviet State, having to retrace steps back to the path the rest of the world had been on—and then struggle to catch up; a feeling that the chance for Russia to remake itself had been hampered by the hegemony of the West; a knowledge that the county was less than it could be, should be, that their individual lives were lessened too; or maybe just a knowledge—especially among the populace in poorer towns and villages outside of Moscow—that what wealth and success has come to the county has come only to a very few.

That’s a feeling a great number of Americans can relate to: not only the frustration with growing inequality, but the sense that our country is also somehow becoming smaller than it should be. Here, when our sense of self is threatened, we turn to historical mythology that buttresses our belief in who we are: The American Dream, our forefathers wrestling with what that would be, the presidents who, through our beloved democracy, shaped how we understand it now—FDR, JFK, Reagan. We look for the next in that mold.

But Russians don’t have that history. Theirs is one in which revolutionary uprisings led to instability before being channeled by a system of control; one in which democracy is associated with a time of devastating economic collapse. We all know the long history of Russian strongmen—from Ivan the Terrible to Joseph Stalin—but can you imagine having that history as our own, having those leaders to look back on? Can you imagine our own country collapsed, our own inequality increased, our own dreams squeezed? Maybe you can, all too well. Now imagine that we had a leader who not only gave us hope, promised us change, but delivered.

But what has Putin really delivered?  Unfettered political and economic corruption; staggering wealth disparities that rival or exceed those of Imperial Russia; a growing status as a international pariah; a return to a dictatorship; media censorship and  the arrest of political opponents of trumped up charges.  The list goes on and on.  Posturings of military strength and cow towing to the Orthodox Church which has throughout its history backed autocrats does not equal delivering on changes.  Rather, it is merely a repackaging of the worse aspects of Russia's past.  The ultimate irony?  Had the 1917 Bolshevik revolution never occurred and trends under the last phase of the Romanov dynasty continued, Russia might well have been wealthier and more powerful and more cultural prominent than it is today.  Bad leaders being replaced by those even worse is not delivering on promises of change.

Hope needs to be based on substance, not just a controlled media and endless propaganda.  In some ways nothing has changed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

 

Is Vladimir Putin Setting the Stage for His Own Self-Destruction?

One of the problems with dictatorships is that eventually they believe their own propaganda even as their subjugated public often begins to recognize that they have been spoon fed lies while news outlets disseminating the truth are stifled.  It happened under some of the Tsars, most certainly in the later days of Nazi Germany, obviously under the regime that ruled the former Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent in China today.  The problem is that sooner or later, objective reality and inconvenient facts - the truth, if you will, show the lie that has been perpetrated on the subjugated public.  The reckoning can be severe and fatal.  Ask Mussolini.   Andrew Sullivan speculates that Vladimir Putin has created a nightmare scenario for himself that offers no gracious exit notwithstanding Putin's pandering to right wing extremists in Russia and to the leaders of the Orthodox Church (I hope Sullivan is correct) .  Here are highlights:

 

There’s always a moment – sooner or later – when a regime propped up by lies will have to account for an empirical reality that refutes it and threatens to bring the entire edifice down. That’s the potentially game-changing significance of MH17, it seems to me.

Here’s Putin’s strange 13 minute address to Russians today on foreign policy – after his deeply weird televised address at 2 am. He’s visibly panicking; and the faces of his colleagues are quite a study: . . . .   Notice the petulant raging at Ukraine and then the litany of paranoia and isolation: “we know what’s really going on.” No wonder the Russian population had to be talked down from widespread panic at the thought of an imminent invasion by the West! That’s how far Putin had ratcheted up the hysteria – a very dangerous place for a leader with nukes to be in. A reader who has been monitoring the Russian Internet writes:

As you can imagine, the last few days have been a rollercoaster ride on the runet. The first reaction to the downing of MH17 was panic. They were trying to shoot down Putin’s plane! Two doubles took off from Amsterdam at the same time, one filled with corpses who all had new passports and totally new Facebook pages!

The second wave of the pro-Putinists was despair – “It is all over now! The only thing standing between us and slavery to Western interests is our beloved Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin!”

Now, already, it seems that they are quickly realizing that “everything has changed.” The anti-Putin journalists and posters are becoming much more courageous than they have been in recent months about opposing Putin directly. Here is a piece from Slon.ru, the Russian version of Salon:

“The nighttime address to the nation was something unprecedented, and even more unprecedented was its content, in the sense that there was no content in this speech at all. Why did Putin call up his press service, cameramen, make-up artists, and internet site workers and many others at 2 in the morning? Just to repeat once more that there would have been no tragedy if there hadn’t been any war in the Donbass, to call for peace negotiations and inviting ICAO aviation experts to the site of the crash? Couldn’t these two and a half points waited until the morning?”

The pro-Putin people have seen their arguments fall to pieces against the reality of the situation. Putin is being portrayed as in a total panic. The anti-Putin forces are worried about what he might do in such a state, but he is no longer being seen as the magician in control.

Today, the Europeans finally approved of a host of new sanctions, yet to be implemented. That may give Putin some room to climb down. But it won’t be easy. That’s the look on Putin’s face. It’s called rattled.

In his own dangerous way, Putin is just as insane as Adolph Hitler and one does need to worry about what he might do now that his little adventure in Ukraine is unraveling.  Meanwhile, if the Russian people want the future that they deserve, the first step is to drive Putin and his cronies from office and replace him/them with people who give a damn about average Russian instead of enriching themselves, stashing money in secret foreign bank accounts and satiating their own megalomania.