One of Vladimir Putin’s most effective tactics, says Paul Roderick Gregory, is to accuse his enemies of doing to him exactly what he’s doing to them. It wasn’t Russian-hired mercenaries who started the
war in Donbas, he says, it was Blackwater CIA contractors. It’s US planes that buzz peaceful Russian
fighters, he says, not vice versa. Putin has been uncharacteristically slow applying this rule to the row
over Russian cyber spies interfering in the US election, but he’s catching up. Russian media have just
dropped the “bombshell” that hackers in the pay of the CIA have penetrated the personal accounts
of top Kremlin officials. It’s a far more dramatic charge than anything the US government has
claimed: the Russians are merely supposed to have targeted the Democratic Party, but US spies have
“hacked the entire Russian state”, putting financial and government institutions in jeopardy. To
authenticate all this, four top cyber officers in the FSB have been accused of treason – the same old
“betrayal of Fatherland” charge that fuelled Stalin’s purges – and the Kremlin is demanding an
apology. Such claims won’t convince many outside Russia. But they’ll confuse the issue. They always do. As for the poor scapegoats, they’ll most likely confess to being US spies, just as Stalin’s victims did to being Nazis plotting his assassination. Once again, Putin has turned the truth upside down.
