20 September 2018
Own Goals
Post World Cup Russia.
By Neil Tidmarsh
Headline of the week? “Man lied after shooting himself in the genitals”. It announced the curious story of Taylor Joseph Guthrie, 19, “a Missouri man who accidentally shot himself in the genitals while taking a gun from a car” in a trailer park. The police came to his aid, but he lied to them – either out of sheer embarrassment or to cover up a crime (the infuriatingly brief article didn’t clarify who the gun and the car actually belonged to) – telling them that someone else had shot him from the park’s entrance and then run away. But the police found the spent shell casing at his feet, not at the entrance, and charged him with making a false report.
You may have missed that fascinating story (it made barely one and a half column inches tucked away on page 46 of last Saturday’s The Times), but there were other cases of “own goals” and “friendly fire” in the news this week which made more of a splash.
Most spectacular was the account of the Russian airforce spy plane shot down by Assad regime forces in Syria on Tuesday. Russia is, of course, Assad’s ally; indeed, Assad has the Russian airforce to thank for his very survival. Piling irony on irony is the fact that the Russian Ilyushin 11-20 surveillance aircraft was shot down by a Russian S-200 missile; Moscow apparently supplied Damascus with the S-200 anti-aircraft system 30 years ago, and serviced and up-dated it for Assad two years ago.
Moscow is blaming Israel, claiming that four Israeli F-16 fighter planes, on a bombing raid on Syria, ‘pushed’ the Ilyushin 11-20 into the path of the missile. Whatever credibility that claim might have is seriously undermined by Moscow’s regular habit of crying wolf (see More Maskirovka, Shaw Sheet Issue 149 – “But does Russia appreciate that maskirovka is a double-edged sword? After all, the mean Bad Kid had to shout louder and louder to make himself heard, until in the end no-one believed him at all, no-one even listened to him.”)
Reactions this week to last week’s hilarious appearance of Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov on RT confirmed that the whole interview was a serious own-goal for Moscow. It convinced no one of Moscow’s innocence; it convinced many of its guilt. It made Ruslan and Alexander and the organisation to which they might belong a laughing stock. By sponsoring their appearance on tv and backing up their story, President Putin has involved himself more closely with the two men and their actions rather than distancing himself from them.
It increasingly appears that the Salisbury novichok attack, which is now generally accepted as the work of the GRU (Russian military intelligence), was itself a massive own goal. The careless and cack-handed operation of this bungled undertaking has damaged the reputation of Russia’s secret services. It has cancelled out any goodwill gifted to Putin by this year’s successful World Cup (which itself, coincidentally, set a record for own goals – a total of 12 – with Russia scoring the most – 2). It has made Putin’s job of persuading the West to relax sanctions well-nigh impossible. The expulsion of Russian ‘diplomats’ from Russian embassies round the world must have set any number of Russian spy-rings adrift and cut international Russian secret service activity off at the knees.
There was an interesting photo of President Putin in The Times last Saturday. Yes, he’s bare-chested – but for a change he isn’t posing as the lord and master of birds, beasts and fishes. Quite the contrary – he’s undergoing some sort of humbling and penitential ritual, dominated by the towering and dark-clad figures of icon-brandishing priests.
Good grief, I thought in amazement, he’s doing a Henry II!
Henry II was the most powerful man in twelfth century Europe – Duke of Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine, Count of Anjou, King of England, etc – but he was most often depicted on his knees, naked but for a loin-cloth, dominated by whip-brandishing monks who are brutally scourging him. Why? Because his cry of “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?” sent a bunch of military thugs to Britain to assassinate a man in an English cathedral city, a man who the king considered to be a traitor and turn-coat. The murder of Thomas Becket shocked the whole of Christian Europe, and Henry, whether he had consciously and personally ordered the crime himself or not, had to do penance for it. He walked to Canterbury cathedral from the outskirts of the city, bare-foot and clad only in a pilgrim’s woollen smock, and prostrated himself in prayer in front of Becket’s tomb. Then he removed the smock and submitted himself to a scourging from the assembled monks – about seventy of them, each giving him between three and five lashes with their whips. After that he spent the night lying there in prayer, with nothing to eat or drink.
But no. The photograph had nothing to do with military thugs trying to assassinate a traitor in the English cathedral city of Salisbury. Taken last January 19, it showed Putin immersing himself in water blessed by Orthodox priests in the Feast of the Epiphany’s traditional ritual of cleansing and renewal. It was illustrating an article by Neil MacGregor, formerly and famously the head of the British Museum, about Putin’s ‘weaponising’ of the Russian Orthodox church. Most Russian leaders since the revolution have repressed the church; but in more recent years, Putin has been championing it, in order to harness its deep and widespread popularity among ordinary Russians to his own cause.
Another story in the news this week, however, suggests that this partnership of politics and religion has itself led to something of an own goal. The Russian orthodox church has always held sway over the church in Ukraine, which has given Putin huge ‘soft-power’ inside his otherwise hostile neighbour. But now the Ukraine church – lead by Patriarch Filaret, a critic of Putin – has successfully broken away from the church in Moscow; the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, “the spiritual leader of the world’s orthodox Christians”, has granted it autocephaly (self-governing status). Ukraine’s political leaders are of course delighted at this weakening of Russian influence in their country; Moscow is enraged by it. The Russian orthodox church is threatening to sever ties with Constantinople – an extraordinarily serious move which would be on a par with Britain’s break with Rome in 1530. And there are reports that Fancy Bear, the Russian hacking outfit often linked with Russian military intelligence, has been targeting the emails of Bartholomew, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.
Now, I wonder what’s Russian for “…this turbulent priest”?
