Leaders | Russian dirty tricks

Doping and hacking

Russia is waging a silent war on the international order

IT HAS been a good few days for Russia’s dirty-tricks squad. On July 24th the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced it would not ban the Russian team as a whole from next month’s games in Rio de Janeiro, even though an investigation concluded that the country’s government had been running an extensive doping programme for athletes. Two days earlier WikiLeaks, a whistleblowing website, had published embarrassing e-mails from officials of the Democratic National Committee, which is meant to be neutral between Democrats, disparaging Bernie Sanders. Security experts determined the e-mails had been stolen by Russian government hackers.

Compared with the other misdeeds of Vladimir Putin’s regime, these ones may seem tame. Russia is, after all, a country that stripped the markings from its soldiers’ uniforms in order to invade Ukraine while lying about it, and assassinated a defector in London by putting polonium in his tea. But cheating at sport and hacking e-mails to sway an American election are serious offences too. More important, they reflect a broader pattern of behaviour. In arena after arena, Russia is not only violating the rules; it is trying to break the international order, to splinter any body or group that might hold it to account.

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The Russian government routinely humiliates domestic opponents using kompromat (embarrassing surveillance material, often sex tapes) gathered by its spooks. But using the technique in a Western election is something new. The Russians clearly wanted to help Donald Trump (see article), whose isolationist tendencies delight Mr Putin (and whose top campaign official and foreign-policy adviser have ties to Russia). Besides professing his admiration for Mr Putin, Mr Trump has suggested that America should not defend its allies unless they have, in his judgment, fulfilled their commitments (see article). This is music to the ears of Mr Putin, who knows that without its guarantee of mutual defence, NATO is dead.

A timeline of Vladimir Putin’s unshakeable popularity

Russia’s efforts to sow discord in NATO mirror its attempts to divide the European Union. In eastern Europe, Russia funds anti-EU political parties and uses its Russian-language television channels to support them. A Russian bank has provided loans to France’s anti-immigrant National Front; Russian groups supported French conservatives’ campaign against legalising gay marriage. In Germany, Russian propagandists cooked up a media frenzy over a bogus sexual assault to foment discord over Muslim immigration. In 2015 Russia even hosted a “separatists’ convention” in Moscow, attended by secessionists from Northern Ireland and Catalonia (and Hawaii). The goal is to render the West too divided to respond to Russian aggression, as it did by imposing sanctions over Ukraine.

America and the EU struggle to cope with these tactics. But one might have hoped that the IOC, of all international bodies, would respond firmly to Russian rule-breaking. Sport is nothing without rules; permitting cheating risks destroying the whole enterprise. Yet even in the face of a state-run doping programme affecting hundreds of athletes, the IOC would not ban the Russians entirely, but instead kicked the issue down to the governing bodies of individual sports. Russia trumpeted this as proof that the doping was a matter of a few bad apples and the investigation an American-led witch-hunt.

Western governments and voters may not be able to stop Russia from hacking politicians’ servers, spreading disinformation or assigning intelligence officers to unscrew the lids on urine samples. But they can stop Russia from pitting them against each other. Mr Putin is exploiting Western democracies’ divisions for his own ends. They should not let him.

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline "Doping and hacking"

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