Editor’s Note: The following remarks are an edited version of the keynote speech given on Dec. 2 by Edward Lucas, author and senior editor at The Economist, at the 10th annual fundraising drive in Kyiv to support Lviv-based Ukrainian Catholic University. An earlier version of this was posted on Europe’s Edge, a publication of the Center for European Policy Analysis think tank, where he is a senior vice president.
Ukrainian Catholic University is the finest institution of its kind in the region and I am honored to be able to help in this important mission.
I will start with a few words about me, and then reflect on the difficulties and opportunities which we now face.
My critics call me a Cold War fossil, which is a label I wear proudly. I spent much of the 1980s campaigning for dissidents behind the Iron Curtain, and working for the freedom of what we then used to call the Captive Nations. I was a foreign correspondent in the communist countries of what we used to call Eastern Europe, and covered the collapse of the evil empire in 1989 and the death throes of the Soviet Union which followed it.
I spent most of the years after 1991 in the region too, particularly living and working in the Baltic states.
It’s a sign of how far we have come that the first lesson which I learned from Ukrainians, Estonians and others in the 1990s, which used to be controversial, is now the conventional wisdom.
Russia is a threat to its neighbors and to the West more generally. We no longer hear people arguing that Russia is a democracy or that as a capitalist country it is destined to be our friend and partner.
Russia wants to restore its sphere of influence. It wants to weaken the rule-based multilateral order we have built up since 1991, and return to a world of bilateral relations in which it can deploy its weight most effectively.
It is little comfort to the frontline states that they have now been proved right.
You were warning us Westerners back in the Boris Yeltsin era that Russia was a dangerous neighbor. You warned us that Russia had not got over its imperial past.
You warned us that Russia was not free of the shadow of the old KGB.
You warned us about its use of the energy weapon, not only to intimidate, but also to export corruption.
You warned us about the reach of the Russian intelligence and security services. You warned us about the role of Russian money in politics.
You warned us about Russian propaganda.
We refused to listen, and did not take the steps then which would have abated the difficulties we face today. That lesson came at a cost, mainly paid by other people. The cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007, the war in Georgia in 2008, the invasion and occupation of Ukraine in 2014, and the attacks on the political systems of Poland and other countries.
But you also understand something else about Russia. The threat you—and we—face is not necessarily military, and certainly not solely military. Apart from the attack on Ukraine, examples of outright military intimidation since 1991 are rare indeed. By far the biggest threat the West faces from Russia is not a straightforward military confrontation, but something more complicated and ambiguous: what we now call hybrid warfare.
It is worth pointing out that from a Russian point of view, this was a Western invention. In the eyes of Russia’s decisionmakers, it was the West which combined propaganda, economic pressure, subversion, diplomatic divide-and-rule and other tactics to weaken and ultimately destroy the Soviet empire. From a Kremlin point of view, Russia faces the same threat today.
The West—at least in Russian eyes—has the ability to create popular uprisings in the form of the so-called color revolutions. The West is a cultural superpower which ruthlessly promotes its political economic and social model in film, music and television. The West has the world’s best intelligence agencies, with formidable abilities to penetrate and manipulate other countries’ institutions. The West runs the international financial and legal systems, which give it unlimited points of influence and insight. It has the world’s best educational institutions, meaning that over time other countries’ elites become increasingly westernised. All Russia is doing is trying to counter the continuing Western assault on its sovereignty and its neighborhood.
This analysis is of course skewed. I wish that Western countries did indeed devote the attention and resources to Russia to the extent that the Kremlin imagines. But it provides the analytical framework from which Russia approaches its relations with the West.
But whereas the Western attempt to divide and dominate Russia is fictional, the Russian counter-attack is all too real. Russia has developed a sophisticated and well-coordinated arsenal of techniques.
The targeted use of corruption;
Cyber-attacks on the confidentiality, integrity and availability of data held on a target country’s computer systems;
Diplomatic divide-and-rule games designed to weaken multilateral rule-based organizations, and to create the perception of the targeted country’s isolation and indefensibility;
The exploitation of economic, ethnic, linguistic, regional, religious, social and other divisions;
Economic sanctions such as import curbs and restrictions on exports and transit;
Interference with energy supplies, especially natural gas;
Stoking financial panics;
Weaponizing history to besmirch the reputation of a target country and hide Kremlin crimes;
Covert information operations such as the hacking and leaking attacks seen in the U.S. and French presidential elections;
Abuse of the international legal system, such as issuing Interpol Red Notices to critics, mounting libel actions and vexatious lawsuits;
Military bluffing and saber-rattling; irregular and regular warfare;
The use of organized crime networks to demoralize decision-makers and public opinion;
Overt and covert payments to buy influence in political parties, think tanks, media outlets and academic institutions;
Physical intimidation of opponents and critics;
Psychological warfare on an individual and collective basis;
The exploitation of religious sentiment, especially among Orthodox believers;
Physical sabotage of critical infrastructure;
The targeted use of social media to affect public opinion;
Subversion of social norms, public confidence and state institutions; and
Support for violent anti-social behavior.
To complicate matters further, these tactics are not applied in a static or even linear formation. Russia’s spymasters are not stupid. They develop new approaches, especially new combinations and sequences of tactics, tweaking them based on what works and what doesn’t. We think we are looking at a picture; our adversaries are writing a screenplay.
Almost all these tactics, though sometimes in crude or rudimentary forms, were witnessed in the Baltic states in the 1990s, as well as in other parts of the former Soviet empire. They are now being deployed on a much larger and more audacious extent. Two years ago it would have seemed inconceivable that Russia would dare to interfere directly in the presidential election in the United States of America, to mount a high-profile information operation in Germany aimed at stirring up fears about migration-related crime, or that it would brazenly try to place the blame for the accidental shooting down of a civilian airliner on a wholly innocent other country.
Our counter-measures are still rudimentary. In the race to develop next-generation political warfare, the Kremlin is many laps ahead. Put crudely: we are dealing with the bit of the threat that we can see, and with the tools that we have most conveniently to hand. That is unlikely to succeed, because the people running Russia are not stupid. They watch with interest as we stumble round the first lap, trying to catch up. When necessary, they change their speed or direction.
It is worth pointing out that for the most part, these vulnerabilities exist because we have allowed them to develop. Looked at in absolute terms, Russia is weak and we are strong. But our system is fragmented, while Russia’s is networked. We do not just face the Russian state, with its diplomats, officials, soldiers and spies. We face groups of patriotic hackers who may involved in cyber-crime, people working in banks, in energy companies, in media organizations, nominally independent think-tanks and universities, members of the Russian diaspora, plus a huge array of sympathisers and witting or unwitting collaborators ranging from biker gangs to religious groups.
The first difficulty we face is that we are surrounded by fog. We do not have the kind of battlefield intelligence which we take for granted when we are dealing with military conflict. We urgently need ways of measuring the Russian penetration of our societies. Two questions stand out: First, where is the money going? Second, who is consuming Russian propaganda and why?
During the Cold War taking money from the Kremlin was tantamount to treason. We would not have accepted Soviet sponsorship in our universities or think-tanks. Doing business with the Soviet bloc was a politically sensitive affair. Anyone doing big deals or making large amounts of money needed to explain themselves.
I should stress that I do not want to go back to the era when the West and East were hermetically sealed from each other. It is one of the great triumphs of the 1990s that Russia is integrated into the world economy. Tens of millions of Russians have traveled abroad for business, pleasure or study. Rather fewer Westerners go to Russia, but these contacts should be cherished not curbed. Ultimately, they are greatly to the West’s advantage. They undermine the toxic anti-Westernism of the Kremlin’s media empire. When Russians go abroad, they can see for themselves that our countries are not run by pedophiles or warmongers. They can also see that the rule of law, human rights, independent institutions and political freedoms are not the cynical sham portrayed by their media at home, but actually work.
But we need to do a much better job in monitoring the effect of Russian money in our society. The United States has the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Breaking that law is crime, as senior officials from the early weeks of the Trump administration are finding out. The principle is simple: if you take money from a foreign government, or from an entity close to it, you have declare the amount you have received, and what you have done in exchange. I would like to see FARA tightened, and enforced more rigorously. But it is truly shocking that almost no other Western country has anything similar on its statute book.
This has pernicious effects: In most NATO countries, if you receive money from the government of the Russian Federation, or from some other source acting on its behalf the only thing you have to worry about is the tax authorities.
We also need to be a lot tougher on lobbyists. These act as conduits for influence into our political system. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, but the amounts paid and received must be public.
We also need to enforce our laws on retirement jobs. It is all too easy for Russia to promise a well-paid retirement job to a politician, lawmaker or official in return for decisions made while they were in public office.
Money and information are the two main vectors of Russian influence in our societies. Sometimes they overlap. it would have been inconceivable for the Soviet Union to own or subsidize a mainstream newspaper or broadcaster. Journalists who took gifts or consultancy payments from the other side of the Iron Curtain were risking their careers. Of course, we had Kremlin-friendly news outlets, such as the Morning Star in Britain, but these were to a large extent pariahs within out societies. A job on a Kremlin mouthpiece would be the end of your career, not a step on it.
We know a lot more about how our societies’ tastes in toothpaste or chocolate than we do about how we consume Russian disinformation. No country has so far carried out a public study about the reach and impact of Russian disinformation. Which social and economic groups read, watch and listen to it? Are they old or young, rich or poor, provincial or metropolitan, highly educated or the opposite? What is their ethnic composition? Equally important is motivation. Once we have identified the people who actually consume Russian propaganda, we need to ask why they do so? Is it out of curiosity? A desire to balance what they hear in the mainstream media? Is it simply to confirm their existing outlook? Or does it actually shape their beliefs and perceptions?
Only once we have cleared the fog can we start trying to work out how to counter the effect of Russian propaganda and Russian money. It may be that in many cases the best thing to do is nothing. If the effect of the Kremlin’s efforts is negligible, then we are better off devoting our efforts elsewhere.
The Kremlin’s efforts work best at the weakest points in our system, which tend to be the gaps between what is moral and what is legal. Russia has a keen eye for hypocrisy. If it can see a loophole, it will exploit it. Anything which makes our decision-makers and public figures look like hypocrites is a bonus for the Kremlin.
So the first big difficulty we face is in fostering a culture of public integrity. One way of doing that is ending the climate of impunity for those who break the rules. Here espionage is the unifying thread. Not all Russian activities against us are full-fledged espionage operations, but there is usually some espionage involvement. It may be in spotting the targets who will be bamboozled, bribed or bullied into cooperating. Or in using a previously-recruited agent of influence. We need to be a lot tougher on this. If Russian intelligence officers are caught, they must face consequences. If they are under official cover, they must be sent home, and we must make sure that they are never given visas to any Western country ever again. If they are under non-official cover, they must face prosecution.
The people they recruit must face consequences too: professional disgrace, demotion and prosecution. It is not good enough to send someone to South Sudan as a punishment. This has no real deterrent effect. Denmark has provided an illuminating lesson here in the case of Timo Kivimäki, a Finnish academic who was spying on his international relations students in return for cash payments from the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service. What’s strange about this is that if Mr Kivimagi had been sleeping with his students, he would have merited considerable opprobrium. But spying on his students was somehow not so bad. After serving a brief prison sentence in Denmark, he has resumed his academic career.
Ending the climate of impunity does not guarantee integrity, but it certainly encourages it.
But the biggest difficulty we face is communication. We need to build trust between the different silos of our society. We can’t respond to Putinism by Putinizing ourselves. I don’t want to live in a society where NATO tells me what to write, or tells an oil company who its customers should be, or tells a university what kind of history it should teach, or uses religious organizations as part of our security policy. Our society should be proud of the legal, ethical and professional boundaries between different walks of life. A soldier is not a politician. A politician is not a businessman. A journalist is not a prosecutor. An intelligence officer is not an academic. The fact that these professions are different is not bad for trust, it is good for trust. We can only trust people we deal with when we know who they really are.
Yet at the same time we are not just our professional selves. We are also citizens of our countries, and we are rightly concerned about the welfare of others. We would intervene to prevent an accident or a crime if it was happening in front of us. We are willing to give evidence in court in order to ensure justice is done. We are members of a wider community beyond our private and professional interests.
This is the area we need to cultivate if we are going to restore the kind of security culture we need to combat the Putinist threat. We need to find ways to meet and talk across the divides between public and private, military and civilian, classified and non-classified, government and opposition, intellectual and practical.
Small countries tend to be better at this. It helps if the country’s elite tends to have been to the same university, to have close family and friendship ties, and to know each other personally and directly. This is one of the great strengths of countries such as Estonia and Finland.
Moreover, just because Russia is the first adversary in most cases to exploit these weaknesses does not mean it will be the last. What we are facing from Russia today we may well face from China tomorrow. So we need to start plugging these soft spots now, while we are dealing with what is fundamentally a weak adversary, before we are faced by a really strong one.
On all these issues we in the West have a great deal to learn from you in Ukraine. You are wrestling with these issues as existential threats to your national security, identity and survival. Your costly experience on the military battlefield is invaluable to us. But so is your hard-won experience on the information front. StopFake and other initiatives are world leaders in analyzing and countering Russian disinformation. I am delighted to be able to help Ukrainian activists and analysts in bringing to the West their message on this and other issues to our policy-makers.
I want to conclude by highlighting the importance of UCU.
I have known Bishop Borys (Gudziak, president of Ukrainian Catholic University), my dear friend, since we were students together in Krakow (Poland) in 1986. I was delighted to renew the friendship after he refounded UCU, and I have watched with pleasure and admiration as the university has grown from modest beginnings to the impressive institution that it has become today.
I cannot stress enough how much UCU means as a symbol of integrity and excellence in Ukraine. It is a university where admission and the awarding of qualifications are based on academic achievement, not cash and connections. It plays a hugely important role in educating the Ukrainian elite of the future. Already many of its alumni are in high positions in Ukraine and in other countries. Many more will follow.
But UCU is not just a factory for producing the high achievers that Ukraine needs for its future. What makes it truly special is its deep Christian ethos. For me the most marvelous feature of UCU is that it combines its commitment to scholarly excellence with a spirit of humility and service, bringing people with learning disabilities into the heart of the academic community.
The words “Ukrainian” and “University” are important in its title, but the most distinctive word is the central one, “Catholic.”
UCU to me epitomises the greatest intellectual, social and moral traditions of the Catholic Church. It sets high standards for the strong, while treating the weak with gentleness. I urge you all to open your wallets and to contribute with great generosity to UCU’s fundraising. But even more, I urge you to open your hearts to the message for which it stands.
