Russia is furious. That means the sanctions are working.

[applegrove]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/russia-is-furious-that-means-the-sanctions-are-working/2017/10/27/2b8f63dc-bb33-11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.24d061441986

By Anne Applebaum at the Washington Post

"SNIP...........

In yet another display of spitting fury, the Russian state this week put Bill Browder on the Interpol list, an international register of “most wanted” criminals. This was the fifth time Russia had issued an international arrest warrant for Browder, a businessman who once worked in the country. Wearily, Interpol lifted the warrant on Thursday. But the gesture once again confirmed something few have yet acknowledged: The sanctions on Russia are working.

Browder’s real “crime”? He persuaded another government, this time the Canadians, to pass a “Magnitsky Act,” a bill applying sanctions on Russian tax officials and police involved in a vast scam, one that involved changing the names of companies, hijacking their bank accounts and using them to steal money from the Russian state. Browder’s lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, discovered the scam. He was investigated and imprisoned, beaten and deprived of medical care until he died. Ever since, Browder has crusaded to punish those responsible by depriving them of access to Western banks, Western vacation homes and Western educations for their children.

As I’ve argued before, the Russian government really, really hates the Magnitsky sanctions, and it hates them with disproportionate fury. Recently, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, jeered at Browder during a news conference. The Russian lawyer who met with Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. in June 2016 — the one whose fixer dangled the tantalizing offer of “official documents and information that would incriminate” Hillary Clinton — was seeking to have the Magnitsky sanctions lifted, too.

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Inside Russia, the sanctions have created a good deal of elite anger, some directed at Europe, the United States and Browder, but some directed, quietly, at Putin himself. Even Russian businessmen not immediately affected by the sanctions say they are far more constrained now in what they can do — and they know whom to blame. The Canadian decision on Magnitsky sanctions will add to the conviction that this won’t end soon. The gloom is building, adding to a broader sense that Putin’s Ukraine policy was a mistake and has to be amended. And this, of course, was the point of the sanctions in the first place.


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[RandomAccess]

1. This scares me to death

Russia has been responsible for a few rather provocative acts since the Inauguration, and Trump keeps showing himself constitutionally unable to criticize Putin let alone stand up to him and make him back down. I felt at the time the provocations were mostly boundary-testing exercises.

If Putin chooses to really smack back at us -- and he has a LOT within his power to do with is army of hackers -- it could be very bad.

I hope I'm wrong.