Biden was wrong to call Putin a ‘killer’

The right word would have been a ‘murderer’, someone who kills criminally. Every murderer is a killer, but not every killer (for example, a soldier) is a murderer.

I’m glad we’ve cleared up this semantic confusion. But do let’s forgive Joe this little solecism – after all, he learned his oratorial skills from Neil Kinnock. Instead let’s congratulate him on telling the truth.

After four years of Trump’s playing lickspittle to the KGB colonel, Biden’s tough language rang mellifluous, especially since it also included a promise of action. Putin, said Biden, would “pay the price” for meddling in the 2020 presidential election (the 2016 election didn’t get a mention, but let bygones be bygones).

When a US president utters such words, they are never completely empty. They send a diplomatic signal. And the signal is clear: Russia is on notice. Further sanctions are coming, and there will be an escalator built in.

In response, Putin threw his toys out of the pram, that is pulled his ambassador out of Washington. And his loyal poodle Volodin, Speaker of the Duma, explained that insulting Putin means insulting Russia. After all, Russia’s entire landmass fits inside Putin’s chest cavity without remainder, as Volodin explained a few years ago.

When Jen Psaki, Biden’s press secretary, was asked for a clarification, she said her boss “does not hold back on his concerns about what we see as malign and problematic actions” by Russia. Such actions, she added, included not only election interference, but also offering bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan and the poisoning of Alexei Navalny.

Press conferences are usually brief, so it’s understandable that Miss Psaki was reluctant to provide a full list of Putin’s crimes. Had she done so, the jittery hacks would have missed every conceivable deadline. For the list is long.

A cull of opposition leaders and defectors, for whom even civilised countries can’t provide a safe haven; sustained electronic hacking and sabotage; brutal aggression against sovereign states; turning Western financial institutions (which are themselves complicit in such crimes) into giant laundries for purloined trillions; constant threats of nuclear holocaust; support for every conceivable extremist party in the West; a steady torrent of lying, destabilising propaganda – don’t get me going on this.

In Putin’s blood-stained hands Russia has become a malignant, malevolent presence in the world, an implacable enemy of the West. His kleptofascist junta is outdoing even the Soviets in the perfidy of what the Russian General Staff calls ‘hybrid warfare’.

Unlike Trump, who trusted Putin more than his own intelligence services, Biden seems to vector his faith differently. He looked at the report of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence and accepted its conclusion about the flood of Russian disinformation engulfing the presidential election. 

It has to be said that, though the Russians are incapable of producing their own computers, they operate American and Japanese imports with nothing short of virtuosity. For example, the troll factory in Petersburg churns out over 70,000 lies every day.

It’s owned by Yevgeniy Prigozhin, known as ‘Putin’s chef’ because his catering company supplies Vlad’s official dinners. However, his business interests go far beyond gastronomy. For example, Prigozhin finances the Wagner Group that provides mercenaries for Putin’s forays into foreign lands, such as Syria.

His diversified enterprises have earned Prigozhin an indictment by the US grand jury and sanctions throughout the civilised world. But what I admire most is his Petersburg troll factory, officially known as the Internet Research Agency, an organisation much more pernicious than the one sharing the same initials. Prigozhin’s IRA employs a staff of 1,000, working around the clock in two shifts.

Their job is inundating the airwaves with lies, threats, foul abuse and anything else the moment requires. About 600 of them are the frontline troops, with the rest acting in managerial and auxiliary capacities.

They sell their conscience cheaply, for about £500 a month. But that sum is nothing to sneeze at in an impoverished Russia, and in any case it constitutes gross overpayment for that brand of conscience.

Their daily quota is 120 trolls per person a day, which is how I arrived at the overall daily output of over 70,000. The IRA’s activities within Russia are rather crude. For example, the moment Prigozhin’s name appears on the net in any other than a laudatory context, the post instantly receives hundreds of dislikes and dozens of abusive and threatening comments.

I don’t know whether the IRA employs a different group for foreign-language trolling. Suffice it to say that their work is noticeable. Since even insignificant little I have found myself on the receiving end of computer-generated diatribes, one can only imagine the full scale of that op.

And please don’t get the impression that the IRA acts on its own. It merely supplements similar efforts of the SVR, née the KGB First Directorate. This represents a salutary cooperation between the public and private sectors, a sort of criminal equivalent of British medical care.

I must compliment my former countrymen on staying abreast of modern technology. Yet they don’t call this warfare ‘hybrid’ for nothing. Even as the Russians happily combine high-tech murder weapons (polonium, novichok) with common-or-garden guns and car bombs, they don’t rely just on computerised subversion.

Putin’s spymasters are busily recruiting Western agents both wholesale, including whole political parties, and retail, in the shape of journalists, academics and other willing propagandists. Some enter into such Faustian transactions for money, some for ideological reasons, and most are what Lenin so aptly called “useful idiots”.

But today’s specimens of this species are different. If in the past useful idiots were all variously extreme left-wingers, today they are recruited from the right. That, incidentally, reemphasises the difference between right-wing and conservative, even though the two words are often used, or rather misused, interchangeably.

I’m not holding my breath in the hope that Biden’s tough words will be translated into tough actions going beyond a new tranche of mild sanctions. Still, one detects a change of mood in the US administration.

This change is welcome, compared to the four years of Trump’s sycophancy. Lest you accuse me of being a crypto-leftie, this is the only change implemented by the Biden administration that I’d describe as welcome.