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U.S. President Joe Biden is welcomed by Central Intelligence Agency employees during his visit to CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, U.S., July 8, 2022. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
LANGLEY, Va., July 8 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday thanked staff at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency for warning the world about Russian President Vladimir Putin's plans to invade Ukraine, and hailed what he called the "quiet bravery" of America's spies.
Marking the CIA's 75th anniversary, Biden said he had been involved with the agency for 52 of those years, first as a junior senator on a 1975 committee set up to investigate mind control experiments and other abuses by the agency.
Intelligence gathered by the CIA had exposed Putin's plans and allowed Washington to warn other countries about the war, he said.
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"It was thanks to the incredible work of our intelligence professionals that we were able to forewarn the world what Vladimir Putin was planning in Ukraine," he said. "Exposing Putin's playbook punched a gigantic hole in the pretense, and discredited his lies about what we were doing in Ukraine."
Before Russia's invasion on Feb. 24, as Russia massed more than 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border, Putin repeatedly accused the United States and other Western powers of deliberately creating a scenario to lure Moscow into war.
Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a "special operation."
Biden's speech was a stark contrast to that of former President Donald Trump, who made his first speech as president at the CIA headquarters, where he criticized the news media and his political opponents in front of the "wall of stars" memorializing dozens of CIA agents who died on duty.
Biden noted that two stars had been added to the wall this year. "Your physical health and well-being are critically important to me and to your leadership here at the CIA," Biden said, in a possible reference to the Havana Syndrome, a series of anomalous health incidents that has affected some 200 U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers worldwide.
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Reporting by Jeff Mason in Langley, Va., Writing by Andrea Shalal Editing by Heather Timmons and Matthew Lewis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
President Joe Biden praised the Central Intelligence Agency’s efforts to expose Russia’s plans to invade Ukraine, telling the staff that they had “punched a gigantic hole” in President Vladimir Putin’s objectives.
“It was thanks to the incredible work of our intelligence professionals that we were able to forewarn the world what Vladimir Putin was planning in Ukraine,” Biden said during his first visit as president to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. “We saw what he was doing. You saw it, the forces he was amassing, the plans he was making.”
Russia keeps on carrying out information campaigns and psyops in the Netherlands to enhance impact on country’s political system.
A workshop “Understanding the Conflict in Ukraine”, assisted by the Forum voor Democratie pro-Russian political party, is scheduled for July 10, in Amsterdam at Europe Square 24, 1078GZ. Moscow has set a goal for the organizers of the event to blame the West, and the United States for the war, and prevent the Netherlands from providing military assistance for Ukraine. The organizers are also expected to make an attempt to question the facts of Russian war crimes in Ukraine and justify Putin’s policies.
The Kremlin has set up to restage the operation of 2016 that way, when Russian puppet party’s leader, Thierry Baudet, campaigned against granting Ukraine the status of an associated EU member. Russia is eager not just to use the FvD to hit Ukraine, but also to oust the Dutch government by stirring up a government crisis.
For that Russian information campaign, Thierry Baudet got funding from the Russian embassy in the Netherlands. Russian Ambassador O. Shulgin will be one of the key speakers at the Forum.
Anonymous counterintelligence sources say that Moscow helped Thierry Baudet to form the party and promote it in the media.
Henk Otten, a former party colleague of Thierry Baudet, told the NL Times this February that Baudet was a “puppet of an enemy power” (Russia).
The FvD party announced itself in 2016, with its ideology promoted amid the migration crisis from Syria, initiated by Russia, and effort to squash the Association Agreement between Ukraine and the EU. Despite tough criticism of migration, Baudet’s mother has origins in Indonesia. There is a possibility of Moscow having got dirt on Baudet.
Those efforts were largely funded by Russian intelligence, which facilitated setting up the party’s administrative structure, its assets, and media promotion.
Direct democracy through referendums is among the FvD’s priorities, also consistently promoted by Russia in some countries by means of friendly parties, including Ukraine. Moscow believes disinformation campaigns and controlled propaganda media can shape temporary public opinion that might affect the outcome of those referendums. That is why Russia provides substantial funding for the far-right parties and Eurosceptics, and infiltrates there to create preconditions for the EU’s disintegration. The FvD, for instance, is in favor of the Netherlands leaving the EU by a referendum, like Brexit.
As Russia started the war against Ukraine, Baudet became heavily involved in the Kremlin’s information campaigns. He twitted a video accusing the West of making Russia launch the military operation to demilitarize Ukraine. Prior to the war, Baudet was excited about the actions by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, as the allies warned of highly possible Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Otten said that in 2015, Baudet hinted in personal letter that Russia was giving him money for pro-Russian propaganda in the Netherlands.
5 years later, in 2020, Baudet’s WhatsApp messages, revealing his contact with Vladimir Kornilov, associated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, came out in the media. Those messages proved Kornilov had significant impact on what Baudet did concerning Ukraine and anti-NATO campaigns. Baudet also mentioned financial support by Kornilov in message exchanges with his FvD colleagues. Baudet was also among those who initiated an appeal to ex-US President Donald Trump demanding a new investigation of MH-17 Malaysia Airlines downing, as part of Russian intelligence operation.
Thierry and Kornilov were engaged in active cooperation to discredit the JIT investigation in the Netherlands in 2019, when they attracted the RLI’s attention.
An investigation by Zembla TV program and De Nieuws BV confirmed the RLI’s findings and proved that Baudet met Kornilov in late 2015 for an interview on a Russian website and they have been in touch ever since.
Baudet invited Kornilov to address the FvD meeting and translated Kornilov’s articles into Dutch. Baudet most likely facilitated posting of those articles on the GeenStijl blog, which was the information core for the propaganda by Eurosceptics.
That way, Baudet is likely to have come to the attention of Russian SVR station in Amsterdam as a promising candidate to recruit. Lots of signals he was getting Russian money and taking part in campaigns carried out by Russians just confirm that Russian intelligence recruited him in exchange for money and dirt.
Elsevier magazine reported in February 2021 of WhatsApp messages sent by Baudet to his party mates in which he claims that white people have higher IQs than Latin Americans and African Americans. Baudet and some other participants allegedly sent messages with racial slurs and disagreed with race relations. Spread of xenophobia in Europe is among the Kremlin’s goals, as part of triggering conflicts inside the EU.
Fully opaque Baudet’s income that he gets aside from the work in parliament, does not work to his advantage. That indirectly proves he is financed by Russian intelligence. A VVD (People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy) MP Ruben Brekelmans, said Baudet’s statements were “reprehensible and appalling,” while D66 (Democrats 66) MP Sjoerd Sjoerdsma said that was “Kremlin’s propaganda in parliament.”
Vladimir Putin was born on Tuesday, October 7, 1952, at the Snegiryov hospital, close to his parents’ home in Leningrad’s Dzerzhinsky district. From the outset it was the survival of the fittest. One newborn in 50 died before leaving hospital. Husbands were kept away, and Putin’s father, Vladimir Spiridonovich, had to stand on the street outside, hoping to see his wife, Maria Ivanovna, at one of the windows and to learn if the birth had gone well.
He and Maria had had two children previously: Albert, who died of whooping cough in infancy in 1934, and Viktor, who succumbed to diphtheria at about two years old during the blockade of Leningrad in March 1942. These losses may help to explain why Maria was obsessively protective
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audio/mpeg In his speech on the night of the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, which Philip Short describes as “pulsating with anger and resentment” at 30 years of Russian humiliation, Putin seethed: “They deceived us… they duped us like a con artist… the whole so-called western bloc, formed by the United States in its own […]
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In his speech on the night of the invasion of Ukraine on 24 February, which Philip Short describes as “pulsating with anger and resentment” at 30 years of Russian humiliation, Putin seethed: “They deceived us… they duped us like a con artist… the whole so-called western bloc, formed by the United States in its own image is… an empire of lies.” For those who dismiss the speech and the invasion that followed as the words and actions of a man gone mad, dying or out of contact with reality due to Covid isolation, this new biography should be compulsory reading.
As Short observes, however authoritarian and corrupt modern Russia may be, “national leaders invariably reflect the society from which they come, no matter how unpalatable that thought may be to the citizens”. While his people may have been as surprised as the rest of the world at the timing, the invasion hardly came out of the blue and many Russians, not all blinded by propaganda, support it. For as the foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, commented a couple of weeks later: “This is not actually, or at least primarily… about Ukraine. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like. Will it be a world in which the west will lead everyone with impunity and without question?”
Running through all Putin’s thinking was a clear belief that 1991 was a catastrophe for Russia
Refreshingly, Short, in this meticulous biography of a man portrayed elsewhere as a 21st-century monster, refuses to moralise, opting instead to lay out how Putin’s recent actions can be seen as the consequence of the 30 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The former BBC correspondent is at his best when pushing us to see the world from a Russian perspective. The importance of this is neatly illustrated in the publisher’s own claims for the book: “What forces and experiences shaped him [Putin]? What led him to challenge the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the cold war?” Short relentlessly traces the journey Putin has taken in rejecting that “peace”, the Pax Americana, the unipolar world in which, according to Russia expert Strobe Talbott, then US deputy secretary of state, “the US was acting as though it had the right to impose its view on the world”. From Moscow, Putin watched the US openly intervene in elections whenever it chose, encourage the break-up of the sovereign state of Serbia using bombs, invade Iraq on a tissue of falsehoods and then overthrow Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi without any UN resolution. As Putin commented in one of his acid asides that pepper Short’s account, when it came to concocting fables “those of us in the KGB were children compared to American politicians”. No wonder Xi Jinping of China and much of the world demur at the west’s claim to have done nothing to provoke the nightmare that has descended on Ukraine.
For all his recent whitewashing of Stalinism and Soviet history, in the early 1990s Putin understood the 1917 revolution had taken the country to an economic and political dead end. In his words, “the only thing they had to keep the country within common borders was barbed wire. And as soon as this barbed wire was removed, the country fell apart.” Yet running through all Putin’s thinking was a clear belief that the break-up of the Union in 1991 was a catastrophe for Russia; what was lost was not the Soviet dream but a country that physically stretched from Poland to the Pacific and historically back to Peter the Great and before. Putin mourned: “It was precisely those people in December 1917 who laid a time bomb under this edifice… which was called Russia… they endowed these territories with governments and parliaments. And now we have what we have.” Except we do not. For Putin and many of his fellow Russians have never understood how a country they believe saved the world from fascism at staggering personal cost just 50 years before dissolved in a matter of weeks.
‘Loyalty is a trademark and his friends have done very, very well over the years’: Putin speaking at a rally in Moscow, February 2012. Photograph: Yuri Kadobnov/AFP/Getty ImagesStrikingly, the occasions Short records when outsiders have witnessed Putin’s inscrutable mask fracture nearly all relate to these “lost” lands, countries whose independent existence was to him an impossible outrage. There is the rant about Estonia to the British ambassador or former French president Nicolas Sarkozy’s magnificent record of Putin’s “violent diatribe” over Georgia and its leader, who should be “hung by his balls”. That only ended when Sarkozy retorted: “So your dream is to end up like Bush, detested by two-thirds of the planet?” Putin burst out laughing. “You scored a point there.” Finally, most importantly, over Ukraine, which, whisper it quietly, in its present shape truly was a creation of Stalin and Khrushchev. The tragedy may be that it has taken Putin’s actions, the atrocities committed by the Russian army and tens of thousands of deaths, to finally prove Ukraine’s existence to the man himself.
Critics point to Putin’s work for the KGB as revealing the core of the man, as so often investing its members with inhuman powers of control, deception, amorality and evil. Short, instead, places the real shaping of the man both before and after his KGB years. Born in the harsh courtyards of postwar Leningrad, he emerged a cautious operator, shy and unreadable, but with a startling streak of brutality. Working for the city’s famously liberal mayor through the whirlwind of chaos and violence that swept his city and Russia in the early 1990s, he forged lasting bonds with everyone from the new business elite to leading mafia bosses and senior players in the Kremlin. He labelled himself a bureaucrat, not a politician. Avoiding conspicuous consumption and not known for swimming in the oceans of corruption around him, he was at the same time not above buying himself a dissertation towards a Candidate of Sciences degree, whose subject was “Strategic Planning for the Rehabilitation of the Mineral Resources Base in the Leningrad Oblast”. Its true author, according to Short, would later receive “several hundred million dollars’ worth of shares”. Loyalty is a trademark and his friends have done very, very well over the years, as the puritan has spectacularly lost his inhibitions. His subsequent rise was public yet shadowy, a sequence of well-chosen battles engaged when he knew he could win.
Who remembers that Putin asked the BBC’s Bridget Kendall to moderate the first of his annual phone-ins to speak to the nation and the world?
Ironies haunt the book: “Those who believe that [military force] is the most efficient instrument of foreign policy in the modern world will fail again and again… One cannot behave in the world like a Roman emperor,” he said after one US military adventure. Equally haunting are the lost opportunities to avoid rubbing a proud nation’s nose in their defeat at every turn: expanding Nato to Russia’s very borders, breaking at the very least the spirit of clear promises; or not taking seriously Putin’s coherent attempt to create a joint front against radical Islam after 9/11, when he defied his own military’s cold war warriors to help Bush. Torture in Chechnya, it seems, can never be the same as torture in Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib to the victors. “We won, they didn’t,” trumped Bush senior in 1991; Clinton said “Yeltsin could eat his spinach”, while Obama more recently dismissed Russia as simply a “regional” power.
Short is too astute to indulge in easy post-event speculation about different outcomes. Instead, he charts the inexorable march away from the genuine more liberal aspirations of Putin’s early days to the harsh autocratic isolated tsar of recent years, from a Russia culturally and mentally in Putin’s words “an inalienable part of Europe” to the present rupture, which will surely separate it for at least a generation. Who remembers that Putin asked the BBC’s Bridget Kendall to moderate the first of his annual phone-ins to speak to the nation and the world? Now, he talks of the end of the “so-called liberal idea” while promoting traditional Russian spiritual values, the collective over the individual, rejecting the west in tones redolent of Soviet propaganda. But will a younger generation who have grown up feeding on internet social media, able to travel freely and getting information how and when they like, really admire an authoritarian regime that is rotten to its core? That was the challenge laid down by the anti-corruption campaigner, Alexei Navalny, and he had to be locked away. Can the ageing tsar, whose acolytes still seem keen to educate their offspring in Britain and the US when not out sailing on ever-larger yachts, really believe himself a persuasive model for those ancient values?
There is a blank evenness to Short’s prose, a steady accumulation of information built through intelligence and concentration on detail with emotions coiled tight, which makes this book a perfect mirror to its subject. He calls Putin a liar, regularly, but again and again he pulls back from laying direct responsibility on him for some of the more egregious acts. “Hard to judge” or “Nothing concrete suggests” and other such qualifiers litter his accounts of critical moments. Sometimes, they usefully temper the more extreme personal charges against Putin. Overall, however, they let him escape true responsibility, not for individual crimes, but for failing to transform Russia, instead reaching back to an arthritic mythical past, not forward to a different future.
The result is a step-by-step journey, whose penultimate chapter is a little surprisingly called “The Endgame”, hobbled by being published as the climax approaches, not after the event. Short, let alone history, has not had time to judge the success or failure of the latest horrifying act in Putin’s astonishing drive to make Russia great again.
Film-maker Angus Macqueen has helped create a platform of award-winning documentaries, Russia On Film
Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short is published by Bodley Head (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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Vladimir Putin is a pariah to the West.
Alone among world leaders, he has the power to reduce the United States and Europe to ashes in a nuclear firestorm and has threatened to do so. He invades his neighbours, most recently Ukraine, meddles in Western elections and orders assassinations inside and outside Russia. The regime he heads is autocratic and corrupt.
Yet many Russians continue to support him. Despite Western sanctions, the majority have been living better than at any time in the past. By fair means or foul, under Putin's leadership, Russia has once again become a force to be reckoned with.
Philip Short's magisterial biography explores in unprecedented depth the personality of its enigmatic and ruthless leader and demolishes many of our preconceptions about Putin's Russia. Since becoming president in 2000, his obsession has been to restore Russia's status as a great power, unbound by Western rules. What forces and experiences shaped him? What led him to challenge the American-led world order that has kept the peace since the end of the Cold War?
To explain is not to justify. Putin's regime is dark. He pursues his goals relentlessly by whatever means he thinks fit. But on closer examination, much of what we think we know about him turns out to rest on half-truths.
This book is as close as we will come to understanding Russia's ruler. It also makes us revise long-held assumptions about the course of global politics since the end of the Cold War.
For most of his time in office, Vladimir Putin has worked hard to hide his personality. There have been occasional revelatory moments where he has shown character, generally in the form of petulance and pettiness. These have been exceptions rather than the norm.
he result has been that people have read what they have wanted to into Putin. In the first years of his rule, this worked to his advantage. Western leaders such as Tony Blair, George W Bush (who infamously looked into Putin’s eyes, saw his soul and liked what he saw) and Gerhard Schröder saw him as someone they could do business with.
Likewise, many Russians believed he shared their values. In the early 2000s, they saw Putin as someone very different to his precedessor Boris Yeltsin: sober, clear-eyed, active, young and untainted with the disasters of Russia’s 1990s. For nationalists, he was a nationalist; for liberals, he was an economic liberal and had Western friends. Most importantly, he was someone who believed in the restoration of law and order for people fearful of the disorder of post-communist Russia.
The passage of time, and the invasion of Ukraine and the horrors that it has brought, have tarnished Putin’s brand. He is now seen as the personification of evil, and we should, it has been argued, have always known he was this bad. Everything that has happened in the last 20 years in Russia is his fault in this view: Putin is simply the old KGB personified and in power.
But what’s the truth about Putin, between “the hope of many, East and West” in the early 2000s and “the Stalinist/fascist/imperialist/would-be totalitarian” (delete as fits your preference) of 2022?
Philip Short’s book is the best place to look for an answer to this question. This is the first full biography of Putin and it is unlikely to be matched as a study of the man for some time. It is readable, judicious, critical but balanced, and focused on Putin the person, rather than on the Putin regime.
There is no ‘gotcha’ moment that explains Putin, no single childhood trauma or slight. Short builds up a picture of his character — enigmatic, a mixture of emotional coldness, fits of anger and epic grudge-bearing, and very much focused on himself — by telling his life story straightforwardly and without empty psychologising.
The distinction between Putin the person and the regime is important. His power is great but not absolute; he does not dictate everything that happens. Short’s analysis of the political murders that have happened during his rule is a case in point. He can only firmly link one murder — the polonium poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko — and one attempted murder – the novichok poisoning of Alexei Navalny — to Putin. This does not excuse him of complicity in other killings, of course. He may not have ordered other murders, but he did nothing to see those that ordered them were punished.
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Putin’s character has shaped the regime he heads, especially over the last decade. His coldness, begrudgery and self-centredness motivate him to hold on to power but don’t always make him an active ruler. His neglect of anything but his own power and status allows the regime to do bad things, not always because he wills them but because he does nothing to end corruption, incompetence, bad governance or the toadyism that prompts subordinates to kill on his behalf. Short’s Putin either does not feel the pain his regime causes or does not care.
This has been particularly noticeable since he came back to the presidency in 2012 after a spell as prime minister under president Dmitry Medvedev. Putin returned because Medvedev began to think too much of himself and because Putin did not trust him to maintain political stability. Putin had no a grand plan for his new presidential terms. His promotion of traditional moral values as Russia’s ideology after 2012 were a means of excluding and persecuting liberals rather than the basis for Russia’s renewal. Consequently, Short implies, he has been in power for the last decade not because he wants to achieve anything but because he can.
This view might seem at odds with his pursuit of great power status in Crimea, Syria and Ukraine. Short’s book was being set up to print when the war against Ukraine erupted so his coverage of it is necessarily brief. That war, like earlier foreign policy adventures, fits the idea of a semi-detached Putin, however.
Foreign policy aggression allows Putin to indulge his penchant for making arguments about Russia’s necessary historical greatness and blame the West for not accepting this and unfairly persecuting his country. He may be too jaded to bother with the complexities of domestic politics, but he gets status from foreign adventures. Achieving economic growth is hard. Getting praise for foreign adventurism is easy when you control the media, and it shouts your praises about foreign victories and hides the casualty figures.
While Putin engages in deadly power games, his regime keeps ticking over. When Putin finally goes, this messy, corrupt, incompetent, and violent regime will live on after him for a long time as a problem for Russia and the world. There’s no better guide as to why this will be Putin’s fault than this exceptional book.
Biography: Putin: His Life and Times by Philip Short
Bodley Head, 864 pages, paperback €22.90; e-book £10.99
Neil Robinson is professor of politics at the University of Limerick
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U.S. President Joe Biden is welcomed by Central Intelligence Agency employees during his visit to CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, U.S., July 8, 2022. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
LANGLEY, Va., July 8 (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden on Friday thanked staff at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency for warning the world about Russian President Vladimir Putin's plans to invade Ukraine, and hailed what he called the "quiet bravery" of America's spies.
Marking the CIA's 75th anniversary, Biden said he had been involved with the agency for 52 of those years, first as a junior senator on a 1975 committee set up to investigate mind control experiments and other abuses by the agency.
Intelligence gathered by the CIA had exposed Putin's plans and allowed Washington to warn other countries about the war, he said.
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"It was thanks to the incredible work of our intelligence professionals that we were able to forewarn the world what Vladimir Putin was planning in Ukraine," he said. "Exposing Putin's playbook punched a gigantic hole in the pretense, and discredited his lies about what we were doing in Ukraine."
Before Russia's invasion on Feb. 24, as Russia massed more than 100,000 troops on the Ukrainian border, Putin repeatedly accused the United States and other Western powers of deliberately creating a scenario to lure Moscow into war.
Russia calls its actions in Ukraine a "special operation."
Biden's speech was a stark contrast to that of former President Donald Trump, who made his first speech as president at the CIA headquarters, where he criticized the news media and his political opponents in front of the "wall of stars" memorializing dozens of CIA agents who died on duty.
Biden noted that two stars had been added to the wall this year. "Your physical health and well-being are critically important to me and to your leadership here at the CIA," Biden said, in a possible reference to the Havana Syndrome, a series of anomalous health incidents that has affected some 200 U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers worldwide.
Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com
Reporting by Jeff Mason in Langley, Va., Writing by Andrea Shalal Editing by Heather Timmons and Matthew Lewis
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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