Diplomacy & Crisis News

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Insight into the relationship between the Russian government and former U.S. president Donald Trump was recently provided by a list of Americans that Moscow is sanctioning as retaliation for American sanctions on Russia because of the latter’s invasion of Ukraine. Among the 500 Americans on whom Russia is placing travel and financial restrictions are some who have nothing to do with setting policy toward Russia, are unlikely to have any dealings with Russia at all, and whose only common trait is that Trump considers them adversaries. These include: Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state who resisted Trump’s pressure to alter the results of the 2020 election; Letitia James, the New York attorney general who is suing Trump for business fraud; and Jack Smith, the special prosecutor who is investigating multiple possible violations by Trump of federal law. The Russia list even includes Michael Byrd, a Capitol Police officer who shot a rioter who was at the front of one part of the pro-Trump mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

The sole plausible explanation for Russia’s inclusion of such people in its sanctions list is that Moscow had a stake in Trump gaining and maintaining power in Washington and today has a stake in him possibly returning to power.

The full scope of exactly what that stake entails is unknown to anyone but Trump and the Russians, and that is part of the problem. We don’t know because there has not been a full, unimpeded counterintelligence investigation of Trump. The investigation by former special counsel Robert Mueller was limited in scope to Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election and Trump’s obstruction of inquiries into that interference, and by a policy decision not to do criminal investigations of a sitting president. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the agency that would be responsible for a counterintelligence investigation. But what steps the Bureau has taken to fulfill its responsibilities in this regard have not only been impeded but also met by a full-blown political attack aimed at discrediting the FBI and anything it might uncover.

It is highly likely that even before Trump first descended the escalator at Trump Tower and announced his candidacy for president, Russian security agencies had identified him as a promising “developmental,” as intelligence services term such prospects. The Russians already were familiar with Trump from his business dealings in Russia. In the United States, Trump was well-known, had a following, and showed political ambition. He was wealthy but also had money problems, as manifested in his multiple business bankruptcies. He lacked ethical scruples. His disjointed personal life provided additional angles the Russians could work. The mere possibility of Trump as a future agent of influence provided ample grounds for Russia to keep his case open.

Exactly what angles the Russians have worked and what vulnerabilities they may have exploited are part of what is unknown. Some of the more salacious possibilities, involving alleged conduct during visits to Russia that most people would find embarrassing, probably did not constitute a vulnerability for Trump. His salacious behavior in the United States has not seemed to hurt him politically, and he even boasts about it. A more workable angle has been pecuniary and has involved Trump’s business objectives, such as building a skyscraper in Moscow—an objective that, as Mueller found, Trump was still pursuing even after he announced his candidacy for president.

If Donald Trump were an ordinary applicant for a position somewhere in the U.S. national security bureaucracy that required a security clearance, it is unlikely he would have received that clearance. There was ample reason to disqualify him on what security adjudicators call suitability grounds, including the bankruptcies and multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. If that were not enough, then the business connections with Russia would be a disqualifier.

If, despite those huge red flags, Trump had somehow slipped through the clearance gauntlet, he would have come to be regarded as just as much of a security error as Jack Teixeira, the Massachusetts airman who freely shared classified information to impress his online buddies. Like Teixeira, Trump had no compunction about carting off to his home, contrary to U.S. law, piles of classified documents. While president, he tried to impress the Russian foreign minister and ambassador with the classified intelligence he had by showing some of that material to the Russian officials.

Trump’s mishandling of classified information may be coming full circle back to his foreign business dealings. The prosecutors under Smith who are investigating that mishandling recently issued a subpoena for information about Trump’s foreign business ventures since he took office.

But all this and the serious implications of it have been largely shoved out of the public consciousness by a huge, sustained campaign led by Trump’s political party to discredit any investigation of the matter or even any public attention to it. The initial motivation for that campaign was to neutralize the stigma of foreign influence associated with Trump’s Russia-aided 2016 election victory. The campaign has taken multiple forms, including the intentional mischaracterization by Trump attorney general William Barr of Mueller’s findings, Jim Jordan’s committee on supposed “weaponization” of law enforcement and security agencies, and Barr’s appointment of John Durham as a special prosecutor with the mission of trying to find something—anything—wrong with the FBI’s earlier investigation of matters involving Trump and the Russians. Durham’s investigation was a four-year, $6.5-million-dollar dud. Far from finding the sort of politically motivated deep state effort to defame Trump that Barr had suggested would be uncovered, Durham was a loser in the courtroom, and his recently issued final report was reduced to applying to the FBI the kind of hindsight-laden criticisms that can be found in just about any report looking back at a difficult government investigation, such as that there was insufficient “analytical rigor.”

In criticizing the FBI for acting based on “raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence,” Durham either misunderstood or, more likely, intentionally misrepresented the Bureau’s work. The FBI necessarily deals with that kind of intelligence all the time. As the organization’s name implies, its business is investigation. Its job is to take available lead information—which by its nature is typically raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated—and to investigate to determine what can be corroborated and what cannot, and what is true and what is not. When the lead information points to a possibility as serious as a hostile foreign regime’s influence at senior levels of the U.S. government, the Bureau would be derelict in its duty if it did not investigate. If no action were to be taken on any information other than what is already neatly packaged, analyzed, and corroborated, then the nation would not need a Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It would be interesting—if this did not prolong further a misappropriation of public funds and attention—to do an investigation of Durham’s investigation and to apply to it the same standards that Durham claimed to apply to the FBI’s work. For example, with regard to “analytical rigor,” on the same page in which Durham asserted that he had found “no evidence” that the FBI had considered how the Clinton campaign’s interest in tying Trump to the Russians might affect the Bureau’s investigation, the report cites a message from a senior FBI official warning his colleagues of exactly that hazard.

The Republican political interest in erasing the whole smelly Trump/Russia story from the public mind has been aided by some on the Left who, evidently motivated by a desire to downplay anything that risks exacerbating U.S.-Russian tensions, also have tried to discredit not only a Trump connection to Russia but the very fact that Russia interfered in the 2016 election on his behalf. Whether the smokescreen is coming from the Left or the Right, the smoke has now been blown so strongly and for so long that “Russiagate” gets repeatedly and casually voiced as a mantra that is assumed to be equatable with a hoax. And the FBI appears to have been browbeaten into not pursuing the subject further.

The fact of the Russian interference, to the benefit of Trump, in the 2016 presidential election is beyond any doubt. The interference has been documented by the intelligence community, the Mueller report, and most thoroughly for the public in a bipartisan report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

As for Trump’s role and whether there was something warranting investigation, the inspector general of the Department of Justice had already determined, before Durham had gotten very far into his own effort, that the FBI’s investigation of the subject, while its conduct was subject to some legitimate criticism, was indeed warranted.

Even without access to all the material that the FBI and the inspector general had access to, the public has seen enough that ought to justify both worry and further investigation. Recall what is a matter of public record regarding how Trump and his entourage dealt with the Russian interference. Trump publicly urged Russia to hack into his opponent’s emails, and a few days later the Russians did exactly that. Mueller reported that the Trump campaign and members of the Trump family replayed material created by the Russian trolls who were Moscow’s main cyber instrument for interference in the election campaign. The Trump campaign chairman repeatedly met and shared polling data with a Russian intelligence agent. Senior members of the Trump campaign and family met in Trump Tower with a Russian known to have ties to the Russian regime, for the purpose of receiving dirt on Hillary Clinton. And as Mueller determined and documented in his report, Trump repeatedly obstructed investigation of the Russian interference.

Once in office, Trump provided additional reason for suspicion about the nature of his relationship with Moscow, with perhaps the most suspicious thing being how he choreographed his meetings with Russian president Vladimir Putin. In a highly unusual way of handling such meetings, Trump shut out his own staff and officials with responsibilities involving relations with Russia, not even giving them an after-the-fact debrief. After his first meeting with Putin, Trump confiscated his interpreter’s notes and ordered him not to disclose to anyone what he had heard. In other conversations with the Russian president, he used Putin’s interpreter, with no Americans present besides Trump himself. To this day, we do not know what they discussed.

Trump said and did a number of things favorable to the Russian regime while he was in office, including publicly siding with Putin rather than U.S. intelligence agencies when the Russian president falsely denied interfering in U.S. elections. Such sayings and doings represent part of the payoff that Russia has gotten for its investment in Trump. Another big part of the payoff is the exacerbation of political division in the United States and discrediting of American democracy that Trump has done so much to foment. Most or maybe all of this was part of the approach Trump would have taken anyway in his bid for power, but it is a consequence that is in Russia’s interest and very much against U.S. interests.

Trump’s advocacy on behalf of the Russian regime has continued while out of office. Two days before the start of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, Trump was calling Putin a “genius” and lauding him for his “smart move” in deploying a “peace force” to the border with Ukraine. Such talk is not explainable in terms of any U.S. grand strategy, Republican foreign policy ideology, or even the culture-war-driven sympathy that some on the American Right have shown for Putin’s anti-woke themes. It becomes explainable only by postulating that there is even more to the relationship between Trump and Russia than has yet come to light.

Today, Donald Trump is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. Some polls show him going on to win the general election. If he does, Russia may again have an asset in the Oval Office. Because of what is still unknown, the exact nature of the Trump-Russia relationship could be anywhere along a spectrum of the sorts of relations that a foreign power can have with an asset in the United States. On one end of the spectrum is the useful fool, who is not consciously doing a foreign regime’s bidding but acts for his own reasons in that regime’s interests. On the other end is a Russian version of a Manchurian Candidate.

It is inexcusable, in the face of what may be one of the most serious cases ever of malign influence by a foreign power at high levels of the U.S. government, for politicians and commentators acting out of partisan motives—or even the ostensibly noble motive of minimizing U.S.-Russian tensions—to discourage the vigorous investigation that is needed to fill the remaining gaps in this disturbing story.

Paul Pillar retired in 2005 from a twenty-eight-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was as a National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Professor Pillar also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members of its Analytic Group. He is also a contributing editor for this publication.

Image: Shutterstock.

Yemen’s vicious civil war, ongoing since 2014, has now claimed close to 400,000 lives. Yet since April 2022, this war, which initially pitted the remnants of the loyalist forces with the backing of a Saudi-led coalition against the Iran-backed Houthi regime in Sana’a, has been frozen due to a temporary ceasefire. Given that the Houthis have established a solid grip over Northern Yemen and control approximately 200,000 troops, it is hard to imagine the scattered loyalists and fatigued Saudis being able to decisively defeat them on the battlefield. As such, negotiations to end the conflict are ongoing, but there is no end in sight.

Meanwhile, the power vacuum opened by the government’s collapse allowed the rise of a third force: the Southern Transitional Government (STC). This entity hopes to reestablish an independent South Yemen and maintains effective control over Aden and the most productive areas of the region. Here, too, reverting to the status quo ante bellum appears unrealistic, and the STC will likely remain the dominant force in the South for the foreseeable future.

The United States, which officially backs the Saudi-led coalition with military and intelligence support, has few interests in Yemen other than stopping the bloodshed and stabilizing the country. Given Washington’s interests and the conflict’s intractable nature, a change in tact is required. To resolve the war in Yemen, a north-south partition of the country is necessary.

Understanding the Yemen Divide

North Yemen gained independence from the Ottoman Empire right after the end of World War I, while South Yemen remained a British protectorate until 1967. The South soon gained Soviet support, while the North grew closer to Saudi Arabia and the West. Aden and Sana’a fought two wars to unify the country until an agreement in 1990 led to a peaceful merger. However, southern separatism became a perennial problem, and tensions reemerged after the Arab Spring.

Interestingly, the current demarcation line between the Houthis and the STC roughly corresponds to the former North-South Yemen international border. Since the Houthi regime controls most of former North Yemen and the STC dominates the southern seaboard, rooting for the losing loyalists makes little sense. The loyalist government has lost control of the country’s most populous and wealthy areas. It still stands thanks only to Saudi support and has no path to victory.

Moreover, the internationally-recognized authorities are notoriously corrupt and show little concern for the Yemeni public’s well-being. The Houthis and the STC are no better, but they are the ones with effective control over Yemen’s core—the country’s future is now in their hands. Reviving the old North-South Yemeni border with a Houthi government in the north and an STC government in the south is Washington’s best bet to end the war for good.

Can America Push for a North-South Divide?

Some may disagree with Washington speaking against respect for territorial integrity. But the United States has broken with this norm in the past. It supported Montenegro’s independence from Serbia in 2006 and Kosovo’s in 2008. Moreover, it recognized South Sudan as a sovereign state in 2011 after it seceded from Sudan. At the end of the day, internationally-recognized borders are just that; a line on the map. Borders are not fixed for eternity, but merely the expression of a certain balance of power at a certain time. The United States accommodated secessionist states in the past and should do it again for South Yemen.

If the United States chose to pursue this diplomatic route, it may find support from its regional allies. The United Arab Emirates supported the rise of the STC and would readily accept a partition of Yemen. Saudi Arabia, too, has an often overlooked but essential security interest in a divided Yemen. The country’s population is almost as large as the kingdom’s, and it is growing quickly. Moreover, a robust unified Yemen could use its oil and gas reserves to kick-start its economic growth, which could in the long-term break Riyadh’s domination over the Arabian Peninsula and be a formidable competitor.

However, Riyadh might resist such a partition plan, as the Saudis have long feared the presence of a pro-Iranian Houthi stronghold on their southern border. Nevertheless, the Saudis are eager to exit the Yemeni war and have come to increasingly acknowledge that the Houthis are here to stay. Additionally, the recent thaw in Saudi-Iran relations has alleviated some of Riyadh’s concerns about Iranian clout.

Still, if diplomacy fails to sway the Saudis, light American pressure might. Washington could leverage its military support; for instance, restricting the U.S. supply of ordnance and spare parts to the Saudi Air Force would limit Riyadh’s ability to bomb the Houthis in the future. This would push Saudi Arabia toward accepting partition and a definitive peace with the Houthis. Yemen is one of the rare ongoing crises where America could reach a relative international consensus. Outside the Middle East, China, Russia, and other major powers have little stake in the Yemeni civil war’s outcome and are unlikely to oppose an American peace plan.

President Joe Biden pledged to end the Yemen war. A partition plan acknowledging realities on the ground appears as the last viable path toward a lasting settlement. The administration stands to lose nothing from trying, and a successful partition would be hailed as a major victory for U.S. diplomacy. Will Biden seize the opportunity?

Dylan Motin is a Marcellus Policy Fellow at the John Quincy Adams Society and a former visiting research fellow at the Institute for Far Eastern Studies. Dylan was named one of the Next Generation Korea Peninsula Specialists at the National Committee on American Foreign Policy and a Young Leader of the Pacific Forum. His research expertise revolves around international relations theory, and his main interests are balance-of-power theory, great power competition, and Korean affairs.

Image: Shutterstock.

Vingt et un mois après la tentative de coup d'État organisée par une fraction de l'armée, 115 000 personnes ont été mises au ban de la société. Certaines sont mortes en prison ; d'autres vivent avec le souvenir des tortures, dans l'attente d'être condamnées à de lourdes peines. La cassure au sein de la (...) / Turquie, Europe, Proche-Orient, Répression, Autoritarisme, Coup d'État, Violence, Police, Justice - 2018/04

Le 19 mars, l'armée turque a pris la ville syrienne d'Afrin, tenue depuis 2012 par les troupes arabo-kurdes des Unités de protection du peuple (YPG). Cette victoire galvanise la propagande guerrière d'Ankara, qui menace d'étendre ses opérations à l'est de l'Euphrate. Allié à l'extrême droite, M. (...) / Europe, Proche-Orient, Syrie, Turquie, Élections, Extrême droite, Kurdes, Nationalisme, Parti politique, Politique, Kurdistan, Répression, Coup d'État, Autoritarisme - 2018/04

L'expression « passions tristes » s'est si largement répandue qu'on ne sait plus toujours qu'elle est empruntée à Spinoza. Cette popularisation d'un philosophe exigeant s'est fortement accentuée ces dernières années. Les analyses et commentaires qui en sont faits, hier comme aujourd'hui, s'inscrivent (...) / Idées, Idéologie, Intellectuels, Politique, Spiritualité, Néolibéralisme, Essai - 2018/04

After Azerbaijan recently opened up its embassy in Tel Aviv, Saadat Sukurova Israelov, the head of the Kanal 24 news outlet, the vice President of Aziz, Azerbaijan’s main cultural organization in Israel, and the chairwoman of the Dona Gracia Center for Diplomacy, is in the process of making a documentary titled “the Great Leader and the Jews,” which speaks about the life of Azerbaijan’s national leader Heydar Aliyev and his relationship with the Jewish people.

“Azerbaijan is the world’s most tolerant country,” she noted.   “We observe this in everyday life.  Jews have been living in Azerbaijan for more than two thousand years.   The Jewish people have established roots in Azerbaijan and anti-Semitism is a foreign concept in the country.   For this reason, Azerbaijani Jews all over the world do everything that they can to promote Azerbaijan in a good way.”

Azerbaijan’s national leader Heydar Aliyev once said, “The Jews have two hearts, regardless which country they live in.   One heart beat for their country and the other one for Israel.”   Aliyev also declared that “Jews can live freely in the land of Azerbaijan.”  

Israelov continued, “In honor of the 100th anniversary of the birthday of Heydar Aliyev, the founder of the independent state of Azerbaijan, and the declaration of 2023 as the Year of Heydar Aliyev, I decided to make a documentary about the life of Heydar Aliyev here in Israel.   As we know, when the modern state of Azerbaijan was established by Heydar Aliyev, a policy of tolerance and multi-culturalism was pursued.   Other religions and beliefs were always respected.”

She stressed that Aliyev went down in the history of the Azerbaijani people as a “savior” of the nation and a “genius.”   She added: “He will always be remembered in the history books as an outstanding politician and statesman.   I believe that the legacy of Heydar Aliyev should always be studied, promoted and applied.”

She concluded: “Because Heydar Aliyev is a great friend of the Jewish people and Israel, I as an Azerbaijani Jew devoted a lot of space to the promotion of relations between Israel and Azerbaijan.  I consider it my duty to carry out the work assigned to me by filming and promoting the documentary ‘The Great Leader and the Jews.’”

In an event hosted by the Azerbaijani Tourism Board in honor of the 100th birthday of Heydar Aliyev, former Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Efraim Sneh declared: “I was the first Israeli official to visit independent Azerbaijan in December 1993.  I was invited to meet the late Heydar Aliyev.   At the end of the official visit, I asked to have a few minutes with him alone.  It was more than five minutes.  We discussed the very sensitive aspects of Azerbaijani-Israeli relations.   I can say with all humility that in this conversation, we formed the Azerbaijani-Israeli alliance that exists till today.”

He continued: “In both Israel and Azerbaijan, there are more people who live outside the homeland than in the homeland.   Both nations are trying to revive their old language to the vibrant language of today.  Similarly, we both live in tough neighborhoods.   Not all of our neighbors are good and it is tough.  Therefore, we know to appreciate our true friends.”

Sneh noted that the late Heydar Aliyev told him “we miss our Jewish brothers who immigrated to Israel.   But one day, Azerbaijan will be so prosperous that they will ask to come back and we are waiting for this.”   He proclaimed: “I remember Baku in 1993.   It was a dark gloomy place.  There is nothing to compare it with the Baku of today.  People call it the Paris on the Caspian or Dubai on the Caspian.”   Sneh recalled that the late Heydar Aliyev, may his memory be a blessing, envisioned that Azerbaijan would reclaim the lands that it lost and that has since come into fruition: “It took a long time, but his vision came true.  Azerbaijan took its natural wealth and turned into a strength of treasure.”

Indeed, Azerbaijan is the wonderful country that it is today thanks to the legacy of Heydar Aliyev.  Turkish Ambassador to Israel Sakir Ozkan stated, “Heydar Aliyev was one of the great leaders of the twentieth century.   His ideas still enlighten those who study national relations and politics, not only in Azerbaijan but around the world.   May his soul rest in peace.”  

His rehabilitation will only encourage more brutality in Syria and elsewhere.

A response to “How Secrecy Limits Diversity.”

If you happened to be waiting for your morning coffee at the Starbucks in the Pentagon, you might not be aware that you are surrounded by what is probably the world’s highest density of strategists. Every year, without fail, thousands of mid-level and senior military officers as well as their civilian counterparts will complete some form of professional education that prepares them to be strategists or emphasizes strategic thinking. But what is the true payoff of all the money the U.S. government spends on “strategic education” aside from all those fancy certificates on office walls in Washington DC? A quick look at the last two decades of American global strategy suggests strategic education may simply have become a rite of passage instead of something to be put into practice.

To be sure, every student who attends a strategic education program is undoubtedly familiar with Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz, who famously wrote that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” But it seems that two decades of American strategists have forgotten (or worse, never truly absorbed) Clausewitz’s prescient admonition that politicians and military commanders must “recognize the kind of war they are undertaking, neither mistaking it for, nor attempting to turn it into something it cannot be because of the nature of the circumstances.” Our track record certainly leaves much to be desired. Over the past twenty years, the $6 trillion Afghanistan and Iraq debacles were followed by more regime change in Libya, plunging that country into a civil war (and subsequent proxy war) that rages to this day. Western attempts to overthrow Syria’s Bashar al-Assad were blunted by Russian support, ensuring Assad remains firmly in control. American strategy failed to deter Russia from invading Georgia in 2008 or Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022. Finally, the hawkish consensus emerging in Washington (i.e. a “New Cold War”?) that conflict with China is increasingly likely—if not inevitable—risks excessively securitizing every aspect of the U.S.-China relationship.

How did we get here? The United States, at least since industrialization, has won its wars (when it’s won them) through the overwhelming application of force and firepower. We have essentially churned out awe-inspiring amounts of war material that we brought directly to bear on clearly identified and traditional (nation-state) opponents who could not match or withstand it. While not necessarily pretty, it was effective. This highly linear approach (action “x” will lead to predictable/intended effect “y”) to warfare became our default strategic playbook.

Unfortunately, such a linear approach is often insufficient in highly complex, interconnected, and interdependent environments. In today’s world, the challenges are much more multi-dimensional and don’t often present a clearly identifiable military center of gravity—never mind one whose damage or destruction can be easily translated into political objectives.

This gets at the fundamental problem: for the United States, the typical answer is to militarize problems that may elude purely military solutions. Our national security leadership appears incapable—even after immense amounts of so-called “strategic education”—to be able to look at an emerging strategic challenge and ask themselves: 1) what are its unique characteristics and requirements; and 2) do we actually have the tools/capabilities to achieve the desired political outcomes? Lacking this ability, they too often default—ineffectively at best and catastrophically at worst—to the toxic belief that if we just apply enough force, we can achieve whatever goal we desire.

Instead of learning from our past mistakes, we are doubling down on failed strategic approaches. The same voices that led us into the strategic fiascos of the past two decades still loom large in contemporary security debates. Turn on any cable news show and you’ll see one of the architects or enablers of these failed policies lecturing us on the “right way ahead.” Apparently, even relying on one’s “gut instincts” alone (as one recent Air Force memo suggests) is an acceptable means of making strategy. Part of this problem, however, lies in a dangerous culture of toxic positivity within the national security establishment. There is a big difference between a proactive, “can-do” approach and a failure to simply look facts in the face. The unintended consequences and outcomes of excessively linear thinking over the last twenty years underscore this reality.

So, is there a better way to educate our national security leaders? Ultimately, today’s complex strategic environment requires a fundamentally different set of skills. To be sure, we need a strong understanding of strategic foresight, future literacy, and complex systems. We must also acknowledge that today’s hyper-connected strategic challenges are not so much solvable as they are merely manageable. Strategic foresight—which involves the practice of envisioning alternative futures in order to better sense, shape, and adapt to change—can help. It cultivates a tolerance for uncertainty, which cognitive psychology tells us can reduce judgmental bias and promote non-linear thinking.

As we shift to building artificial intelligence-based platforms and data solutions, we must also deliberately develop intellectual capital. Seizing and occupying the high ground in national security requires more than just “buying things,” developing weapons systems, or pursuing disruptive technologies. It requires security professionals to have the cognitive capacity to leverage them. Perhaps most importantly, we need a new approach to strategic education that produces leaders that are humble and not paralyzed—or worse, driven to obsolete default behaviors—by the unavoidable uncertainty of today’s complex world. We need more leaders who can bring themselves, when appropriate, to say “no, we probably can’t achieve that through military means, but we might be able to do this with the range of tools we have available.” After twenty years of failures, American taxpayers ought to know that their government has a plan to effectively leverage this cadre of strategists in whom they have invested so much.

Josh Kerbel is a member of the research faculty at the National Intelligence University, the academic arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Lt. Col. Jake Sotiriadis, USAF, Ph.D., is a career Air Force intelligence officer. He currently serves on the research faculty at the National Intelligence University and is Director of the Center for Futures Intelligence.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the official positions of the U.S. intelligence community or the Department of Defense.

Image: Felix Mittermeier/Unsplash.

Four dozen countries have applied a broad array of financial restrictions, export control measures, and targeted sanctions in response to Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine. The intent of these restrictions was to limit sanctioned individuals’ ability to provide support to the Kremlin, and from there, convince Russian billionaires to use all available means to affect Russian president Vladimir Putin’s decisions. Although the sanctions have slashed individual oligarchs’ wealth, the number of Russian billionaires and their collective net worth actually increased over the past year since the Russian invasion began. Individual sanctions have contributed to a “rally around the Kremlin” effect and increased elites’ dependence on Moscow.

Individual sanctions, in their current form, are a weak tool for dismantling Russia’s crony capitalism, which combines incentives for elites’ loyalty to the regime and punishment for defection. Russia’s war in Ukraine and Western sanctions have provided the Kremlin with new opportunities to reward loyal tycoons through asset redistribution and heighten economic repression against renegade business elites.

The system has been in place since Putin was elected Russia’s president. Two months after his inauguration on May 7, 2000, the president gathered twenty-one Russian tycoons in the Kremlin. In this historic meeting, Putin struck a kind of “social contract” with Russia’s richest men, who had amassed their spectacular wealth during the previous decade. In exchange for their loyalty and political non-interference, Putin promised the oligarchs that his government would stand by the results of the chaotic privatization of the 1990s that enriched Russia’s post-Soviet elite. In the coming years, the Putin government put the unwritten rules of the social contract into effect. The oligarchs who reneged on his deal paid with their lives and freedom. The loyalists who pledged their allegiance to the president became the regime’s benefactors.

The class of wealthy economic elite in Russia has swelled over Putin’s long reign, fueled by ample opportunities for predatory asset stripping. The poor protection of property rights and recurrent economic hardships have incentivized many oligarchs making money in Russia to stash their wealth abroad. To tighten his government’s grip on business and political elites, Putin launched the “deoffshorization” campaign in 2013, which resulted in a series of measures prohibiting Russian officials from holding their assets abroad and levying hefty taxes on profits made through overseas ventures.

Before 2014, Russia’s economic elite, unwilling to bend to Putin, moved their capital and residency abroad. Between 2008 and 2014, 1,993 Russian nationals received the United Kingdom’s “golden visas,” which offered residency to people investing £2 million or more in the country. The United States, Portugal, and Austria were among the top issuers of investor visas for wealthy Russians. These opportunities began fizzling away following the imposition of Crimea-related sanctions on a number of Russian oligarchs linked to the Kremlin. Despite the financial losses that the Russian tycoons incurred, the list of Russian billionaires grew by a third—from 77 in 2016 to 106 in 2018—and their net worth rose to a collective $485 billion in the two years following the 2014 tranche of sanctions.

When Russia brazenly invaded Ukraine, the U.S. government promptly levied an array of well-coordinated economic and individual sanctions. By the one-year anniversary, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control extended asset freezes and travel bans on more than 2,400 individuals, including at least forty-six Russian or Russian-born billionaires. The European Union, similarly, has sanctioned some 1,473 Russian nationals.

A day after the invasion, Putin called a meeting with four dozen Russian tycoons and heads of state-owned companies. In the meeting, Putin demanded solidarity from Russia’s business community in exchange for support from his government. He also threatened defectors, thus reiterating the rule of the “social contract” struck in 2000. In the subsequent months, business moguls who expressed criticism of the Russian government lost their valuable assets. Russian billionaire Oleg Tinkov, for instance, who slammed the “crazy war” against Ukraine on Instagram, reported selling his 35 percent stake in Tinkoff Bank—one of Russia’s largest lenders—to a company controlled by Vladimir Potanin, a Putin confidant and Russia’s richest man. According to Tinkov, the shares he traded were worth “ten times more” than what Potanin purchased them for. Another public critic of the war in Ukraine, billionaire Oleg Deripaska, lost the $1 billion hotel and marina complex in Sochi, ostensibly for condemning the Russian invasion. In December 2022, Putin supported a legislative initiative that would confiscate the assets of the Russian citizens who fled abroad and criticized the war.

The perceived threat to disloyal tycoons’ lives has compounded the risks of asset appropriation. During the first year of the war in Ukraine, a total of thirty-nine influential Russian figures, including fifteen Russian business leaders and executives, died under mysterious circumstances. The stream of inexplicable deaths by “suicide” or illness rocked the Russian business elite. The fact that the perished wealthy businessmen were predominantly from the oil and gas sector and many had ties to Putin led to speculation over the Kremlin’s involvement. Regardless of whether the Russian government, which has a long history of dubious “poisonings” and “window-fallings,” participated in the demise of these prominent Russians, the deaths engendered widespread fears in the oligarchs’ circles, effectively preventing them from speaking openly against the Russian government’s actions abroad.

The Russian state has also, notably, kept its promise to support loyal tycoons. After more than a thousand Western firms departed Russia, they left hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of assets behind. The Russian state has nationalized these assets in retaliation for the freezes of Russian assets abroad. Moscow expropriated Exxon Mobile assets valued at more than $4 billion, and confiscated Shell’s shares in a Sakhalin project with Gazprom. Apart from the state itself, Putin’s loyalists have enjoyed the benefits of this wealth redistribution. Putin ally Gennady Timchenko, for example, was awarded a new state contract to sell Russia’s liquified gas to China. Yuri Kovalchuk, known as “Putin’s banker,” now owns most of the Russian Internet. A Chechen business leader close to Ramzan Kadyrov acquired a factory and what was left of Starbucks in the Russian-seized Ukrainian city of Mariupol.

To cushion the impact of sanctions on the wealthy Russians, Putin also endorsed changes to the Russian tax code that exempt sanctioned individuals from paying personal income tax and other taxes on frozen income and assets. Additional amendments to the Russian Criminal Code terminate criminal responsibility or soften the punishment for the most egregious cases of tax evasion in Russia. Simultaneously, new Russian laws criminalize calls for foreign sanctions against Russia or support in their implementation, and prohibit cooperation with international bodies “to which Russia is not a party,” such as the International Criminal Court.

The new measures implemented by the Kremlin to shield its loyalists from the sanctions’ pernicious effects have strengthened Putin’s crony capitalist system. Russia’s wealthiest individuals emerged $154 billion richer in March 2023 compared to a year ago. This is the wealth that the Russian government is eyeing for a new one-time war tax to patch gaps in the state budget. The current individual sanctions regime is too weak to pose an existential threat to oligarchs’ wealth—a kind of hypothetical threat that would have forced them to seek to change Russia’s policies and institutions. To weaken the symbiotic relationship between power and wealth buttressing Putin’s system, individual sanctions would have to be considerably broadened and deepened.

Oligarchs have enjoyed unrestricted access to their wealth by transferring legal titles for their assets to family members. Given this, sanctions would have to be applied to any nominee who has the formal rights to property of the sanctioned business elite. A critical vulnerability of the opaque web of trusts, off-shore companies, and subsidiaries owned by Russian billionaires is a small and secretive network of financial experts who manage the tycoons’ wealth. Identifying and sanctioning these wealth managers, who have previously escaped scrutiny, would likewise have debilitating consequences for the Russian oligarchs.

Effectively detecting and capturing tycoons’ assets requires the sharing of financial, banking, and intelligence information among countries. This has been achieved by the multilateral Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs (REPO) Task Force, in which intelligence services of the United States, Australia, France, Canada, Germany, Japan, Great Britain, and the European Commission cooperate. The efforts of REPO, however, would have to be extended to more countries. The interests and assets of Russian business moguls are spread across the globe. Sanctioned Russian moguls have been welcomed in Israel, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates, among other states. The threat of secondary sanctions and reputational costs would have to be imposed on countries providing sanctuaries to Russian business elites and their business ventures.

The REPO Task Force countries must move quickly to simplify and expedite the seizure of the Russian tycoons’ assets for their use for Ukraine’s benefit. Freezing an asset is easier than confiscating it. The seizure of an asset typically involves a lengthy legal process, which is complicated by the burden of identifying its owner. Another challenge facing sanctioning governments is that they become responsible for the expensive maintenance costs of luxury properties or must allow their owner to access funds to upkeep their estate. As the Russian oligarchs have already filed lawsuits against sanctions in several jurisdictions, the REPO Task Force countries’ authorities need to establish mechanisms for asset seizure.

Last but not least, the United States, the UK, and other Western countries need to garner the political will to close loopholes for tax evasion and anti-money laundering mechanisms. In the United States, for example, the richest 1 percent of Americans have been able to hide more than 20 percent of their income using opaque ownership structures and complex trusts, especially in the real estate sector and offshore businesses. These are the same loopholes that once made Western real estate markets and tax haven jurisdictions hospitable to Russian oligarchs’ investments. Increasing the transparency of assets’ ownership and financial transactions and spreading the application of the anti-money-laundering rules to the real estate and offshore sectors will likely meet domestic resistance. Indeed, these same rules, which attracted Russian “dirty money,” are benefiting wealthy business people, celebrities, and politicians in the West.

Dr. Mariya Y. Omelicheva is a Professor of Strategy at the National War College, National Defense University.

Alexander Sukharenko is the Director of New Challenges & Threat Study Center in Vladivostok, Russia.

Image: Shutterstock.