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.