Why would Russia hijack a Malaysian airliner and lead the world on a wild goose chase?
It doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Unless you understand the man who makes the decisions in Russia, and how he sees the world.
Vladimir Putin was a KGB officer stationed in East Germany when the Berlin Wall fell. Like many patriotic Russians, Putin experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union not as the blossoming of freedom, but as the humiliation of a once-great power. Territory that had once been considered the heartland of the empire split off into independent states. Putin later called it “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
Under communism, all wealth belonged to the state, including Russia’s vast oil, timber, and mineral reserves. In the brave new world of capitalism, all that was up for grabs. Tremendous fortunes were amassed overnight by people connected enough and ruthless enough to grab them. Entrepreneurs with shady connections grew obscenely wealthy while the majority slid into poverty. Birth rates plunged and the life expectancy of the average Russian male fell from 64 in 1990 to 58 in 1994. The nation was literally dying.
A coalition of organized crime, robber barons, and the security forces emerged to hold the society together. In the West, these groups rarely intersect, but in Russia they’re a Venn diagram with a lot of overlap. “A mafia state as conceived by an advertising executive,” is how journalist Michael Weiss memorably described it.
Putin’s rise illustrates the interdependence of these elements. In 1999, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first democratically elected president, was teetering. He and his coterie of oligarchs had looted the country and amassed great wealth, but there was a danger that once Yeltsin stepped down they would be prosecuted and jailed. To prevent that, Yeltsin selected Putin, then a little-known functionary from St. Petersburg, to be the new head of the FSB, the successor agency to the KGB. Soon after, he anointed Putin as his chosen successor.
When Putin took power, his first official act was a decree that Yeltsin and his family would not be prosecuted.
No one thought Putin would last. He was a political nobody, and headed up a wildly unpopular government that seemed doomed to fall. But in September of 1999 the country was galvanized by a series of deadly bombings that struck four apartment buildings in quick succession, first in Buynaksk, then Moscow and Volgodonsk. Nearly 300 people were killed and more than 1,000 were injured. The government blamed Chechen terrorists, and launched a war of reprisal in which as many as 200,000 civilians were killed. Putin’s popularity soared.
The blasts’ timing was unlikely the product of good luck on Putin’s part. Kremlinologists believe that Russian security forces carried out the apartment bombings as a pretext for a war that would boost Putin’s popularity and shift public attention away from government corruption. Among the evidence: unexploded explosives found in the basement of another apartment building that were determined to have been planted by members of the FSB. Arrested by local authorities, the FSB agents were ordered released by Moscow.
Putin ruthlessly consolidated power, jailing oligarchs who failed to toe the line and assassinating journalists who asked too many questions. He was determined to build a strong central idea around which to rally the population, but in the wake of communism’s disaster, no abstract ideology would do. Instead, Putin spun together a notion of national Russian-ness that combined a strong central state, patriotism, Orthodox Christianity, and a mythologized vision of Russian history. Putin positioned himself as a combination of tsar and echt-Russian everyman, riding horseback shirtless like a cossack, straddling a motorcycle, and flying an ultralight to guide the migration of endangered Siberian cranes.
Beneath the shiny new veneer of nationalism, the machinery of corruption rumbled along as before. After a spectacular run of growth from 1996 to 2008, the Russian economy stalled in the wake of the worldwide financial crisis.
In 2013, deteriorating conditions in neighboring Ukraine sparked a full-blown crisis. The country had been led by Viktor Yanukovych, a Kremlin ally. But a people power revolution in February 2014 toppled Yanukovych and replaced him with an interim government that sought closer ties with the West. From the Kremlin’s perspective, this represented not a popular yearning for freedom but an act of aggression by the United States and its allies against a country that lay within Russia’s proper sphere of influence. It could not be allowed.
Russia had the military might to simply roll its tanks over the border and take control of Ukraine. But it couldn’t afford to trigger a world war. Instead, it decided to act undercover by using a military doctrine that Russian forces have been developing since before the Second World War. Called maskirovka, it encompasses a broad range of techniques for multiplying the effectiveness of one’s forces by deceiving and distracting the enemy.
On February 27, 2014, men wearing military uniforms without insignias or badges seized key government buildings in Crimea, eventually annexing it. The operation was designed to look like an internal uprising, but the troops belonged to elite Russian military units, including the powerful and wide-ranging military intelligence agency known as the GRU.
Inside Russia, the move was wildly popular. Putin’s approval ratings skyrocketed. To ordinary Russians, he had stood up to foreign predation and burnished the nation’s greatness. Outside Russia, the reaction was outrage and fear. The crisis in Ukraine dominated headlines as Western politicians weighed sanctions.
With the deception phase underway, a distraction was needed.
Remember when Air France flight 447 disappeared en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, in 2009? It was a huge news story, eclipsing everything else at the time. I believe that Russian intelligence watched that story carefully—and learned that under certain circumstances, it would be possible to make a state-of-the-art airliner appear to vanish into thin air. At the cost of a few hundred civilian lives, you could create a worldwide news sensation, a kind of informational smoke screen to be deployed when you wanted to divert attention from something else.
In early March, international tensions rose as Russia tightened its grip on Crimea. European and American officials issued messages of condemnation. Then, on Thursday, March 6, President Obama took punitive action, signing an executive order imposing sanctions against “individuals and entities responsible for activities undermining democratic processes or institutions in Ukraine.”
Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, declared that sanctions “would inevitably hit the United States like a boomerang.”
The following day, MH370 disappeared.
CNN went to its round-the-clock coverage of the missing plane. Media everywhere turned their attention away from the unrest in Ukraine. Western governments continued to exert diplomatic pressure on Russia to withdraw, but the public was not engaged.
Just about four months later, on Wednesday, July 16, Obama announced new sanctions against Russia. Putin responded with a public statement warning that sanctions “generally have a boomerang effect,” and added, “I am certain that this is harmful to the U.S. Administration and American people’s long-term strategic national interests.” The next day, during a phone call with Obama that had been scheduled the day before at the Russians’ request, Putin broke the news of the MH17 shoot-down.
Why did Russia destroy MH17? For many, the lack of an obvious motive made it hard to believe that the Kremlin was responsible. But they were missing the point. “In this kind of warfare,” writes U.S. Air Force Brigadier General Alex Grynkewich, “attribution and intent are challenging if not impossible for friendly forces to ascertain.”