To my mind, a stronger EU military force, combined with a more formal agreement with Ukraine was not only indicative of a shift in power within the EU but of increasingly bold push-back against Russia – who had effectively rolled across the UK and US without any real resistance.
The EU also recognised it needed to give its investigative departments teeth, rather than rely on referrals back to domestic governments to act or ignore the issues raised. Just after the union’s defence announcement, twenty Member States reached a political agreement on the establishment of the new European Public Prosecutor's Office259, under what they termed “enhanced cooperation.” Once in place, the independent EU public prosecutor would be equipped with the power to investigate and prosecute criminal cases affecting the EU budget, such as corruption or fraud with EU funds, or cross-border VAT fraud. By design, it would be a strong, independent and efficient body specialised in fighting financial crime across the member states. This would target the exact type of offences I had discovered in respect of Le Pen and also cover that election misspending of Farage and UKIP, which the UK had failed to act upon. On the announcement, Commissioner Günther H. Oettinger, who is in charge of Budget and Human Resources, said: “We have zero tolerance for fraud against the EU budget. Every cent of it needs to be spent for the benefit of EU citizens. With a strong, independent and efficient European Public Prosecutor we are strengthening our efforts in protecting taxpayers' money by ensuring a European approach to the criminal investigation and prosecution of criminal offences affecting the Union budget. This will be a substantial addition to the current means at Union level, namely the work of OLAF in the area of administrative investigations.” According to the Commission, every year at least fifty billion Euro of revenues from VAT alone are lost from national budgets all over Europe through cross-border fraud. Transnational organised crime was, they said, making billions in profit every year by circumventing national rules and escaping criminal prosecution. Outside the area of VAT, in 2015 the Member States detected and reported to the Commission fraudulent irregularities for an amount of around six-hundred-and-fifty million Euro.
Identifying national prosecutors' tools to fight large-scale cross-border financial crime are limited, the new EU prosecutor would be in place to conduct swift investigations across Europe, and to provide a real-time information exchange which does not currently exist. The European Public Prosecutor's Office would operate as a single unit across all participating Member States, set up outside the existing union institutions and services. It would not seek nor take instructions from EU bodies or national authorities, making it lethal to any of the toxic groups currently abusing the system. “We have worked hard to bring as many Member States as possible on board and I am very glad that we now have 20 founding members of the European Public Prosecutor. This is a big success and it ensures that the European Public Prosecutor's Office will be efficient from day one. This is a good day for the European taxpayer. The European Public Prosecutor's Office will complement the important work of Eurojust, the EU criminal justice agency, allowing it to dedicate more resources to the fight against terrorism, human trafficking or other crimes,” Commissioner Věra Jourová, EU Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, said.
The European Public Prosecutor will be organised with a central office at EU level and a decentralised level consisting of European Delegated Prosecutors located in the Member States, who will also continue their function as “double hat” national prosecutors. The central level would supervise the investigations and prosecutions carried out at a national level, the Commission said: “To ensure effective coordination and a uniform approach throughout the EU.” Interestingly, the plan sets out that, if the Office takes up an investigation, national authorities will not exercise their powers for the same criminal activity. This indicates a supposition domestic justice is, in specific circumstances, ineffective or, at worst, corrupted.
While the European Public Prosecutor's Office would be responsible for criminal investigations, OLAF was also set to continue its administrative investigations into irregularities and fraud affecting the Union's financial interests in all Member States of the Union. “This approach will ensure the widest possible protection of the EU's budget by increasing the conviction and recovery rates,” the EC said on the announcement.
With increasing responsiveness to the changing world climate, the Commission also began making a renewed call to further accelerate the roll-out of the European Border and Coast Guard project260 and to fill persistent gaps in manpower and equipment as swiftly as possible. Between the lines, they had put in pace significant measures to stem the tide of people displaced by war, not only to break the back of the real problems and shut down far-right narratives but also – from a diplomatic standpoint – to tell Russia the jig was up.
The EU-Turkey agreement had already delivered significant results, shown by a consistent reduction in irregular crossings to Greece, and in the successful resettlement of over six thousand Syrians given safe and legal pathways to Europe. Giving an update, the European Commission First Vice-President Frans Timmermans made a statement for the EC, saying: “Two years after the launch of the European Agenda on Migration, our joint efforts to manage migratory flows are starting to bear fruit. But the push factors for migration to Europe remain and the tragic loss of life in the Mediterranean continues. As the weather improves, we must redouble our cooperation – working with third countries, protecting our EU external borders, together giving refuge to those who need it and ensuring that those who have no right to remain in the EU are quickly returned. We can only effectively manage migration in Europe if we all work together in a spirit of solidarity and responsibility.”
The pace of relocation programmes – taking immigrants and refugees from landing hubs in Greece and Italy and distributing them across the EU, had significantly increased in 2017 with over ten thousand people relocated since January alone — a fivefold increase compared to the same period in 2016. Of course, this isn’t without issues. “Regrettably,” the Commission stated, “despite these repeated calls, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, in breach of their legal obligations stemming from the Council Decisions and their commitments to Greece, Italy and other Member States, have not yet taken the necessary action. Against this background, and as indicated in the previous Relocation and Resettlement Report, the Commission has decided to launch infringement procedures against these three Member States.”
Despite this, progress on resettlement continued to be well on track with nearly three-quarters of twenty thousand resettlements agreed in July 2015 having already been carried out. Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship Dimitris Avramopoulos said at the time: “Our Union is based on solidarity and the sharing of responsibility. These fundamental values apply to all our policies and migration is no exception. We cannot and we will not leave those Member States with an external border on their own. And when it comes to relocation, let me be crystal clear: the implementation of the Council Decisions on relocation is a legal obligation, not a choice.”
The number of daily crossings from Turkey to the Greek islands had stabilised at around fifty per day and, despite some tragic incidents, the number of lives lost in the Aegean had fallen substantially. Overall, arrivals had decreased by ninety-seven percent since the EU-Turkey Statement became operational. The pace of return operations had also seen some positive developments with an additional three hundred returns carried out since the previous report in March 2017, bringing the total number of migrants returned to almost two-thousand. However, arrivals still outpaced the number of returns from the Greek islands to Turkey, leading to pressure on the reception structure on the islands. Progress in other areas of the Statement also remains ongoing, with the continuing efforts by the EU and Turkey to accelerate the delivery of the financial support under the Facility for Refugees in Turkey. Almost all of the funding for 2016-2017 had quickly been allocated (almost three billion Euro) and co
ntracts had already been signed for a total of one-and-a-half billion Euro. In June 2017, more than six-hundred-thousand refugees in Turkey were being supported by the Emergency Social Safety Net and the number of Syrians supported through direct cash transfers was expected to increase to almost one-and-a-half million. Russian was unhappy with this blockage and it is likely this prompted a threatening announcement from their ally, Erdogan, that the six hundred thousand Syrians would be pushed to Europe. Undeterred, however, the Commission also set out the results and lessons learned under the Partnership Framework on Migration, which came a year after its launch. They stated progress was made in the fight against traffickers with “closer cooperation with key countries in Africa to tackle migration flows through the Central Mediterranean route, with a strong focus on cooperation with Libya.” The EU Trust Fund, they said, had supported political priorities, mobilising around two billion Euro for projects to address the root causes of migration and supporting better management in countries of origin and transit.
Due to Brexit, the UK faces having its border controls returned from France and it will be excluded from both the European Defence project and the new Independent Prosecutor’s Office. Subsequently, the country will remain vulnerable to Russia while also being ineffectively equipped to combat those working in collaboration with Putin’s Federation, who will be absorbed back into national politics as the UK’s parliamentary presence in the EU is closed down.
Investigating this whole mess, it struck me that the unmitigated success of the Russian hybrid conflict largely arose because of the stale organisation of Western democracy. And not just the institutions which the EU are rapidly transforming. The stagnation ended up with a certain type of person becoming the only acceptable entrant into politics or the security services – something particularly evident in Britain where the private school model has long been the norm in both. Russia, on the other hand, embraced a new style, undergoing a fluid transition from a state with criminal links to a criminal organisation with state machinery. Over the past twenty years, the role of Russian organised crime shifted considerably and Russian criminals now operate less on the street and more in the shadows, often described as “allies, facilitators and suppliers for local European gangs and continent-wide criminal networks.” The Russian state has also increasingly become criminalised and the interpretation by some, of the “criminal underworld and the political upperworld,” has led Putin’s regime to use criminals from time to time as instruments of its rule. While there is now no doubt this incorporates hacking and disinformation, combined with political provokatsiya, Russian-based organised crime groups in Europe have been used for a variety of purposes, including as sources of dark money, human traffickers and smugglers, and even to carry out targeted assassinations on behalf of the Kremlin. According to one detailed assessment I read261, Russian-based organised crime is responsible for around one-third of the heroin on Europe’s streets, a significant amount of non-European people trafficking, as well as most illegal weapons imports. It is described as a “powerful and pervasive force on the European continent.” However, it is also true the operations take different forms in different countries and largely works with – or behind – indigenous European networks and criminal gangs. European policing is – and I know this from experience – behind the curve when it comes to fighting Russian-based organised crime, mainly due to an understanding of these gangs which is outdated. (Police are often still chasing down the street-level gangs first identified as “colonised” in the 1990s, rather than delving behind the scenes of established organised crime to expose their Russian backing.)
Having followed the work of Luke Harding, a former Russia correspondent for some time, it was clear what makes Russian organised crime a particularly serious challenge is the direct connection between the criminal networks and the Kremlin’s state security apparatus, notably the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), military intelligence (GRU), and the Federal Security Service (FSB) – all three of whom are also engaged in the subversion of democracy across the West. These organised crime groups, according to the work of Mark Galeotti, have already been used by the Kremlin and are likely to become an even greater problem as Russian’s campaign to undermine Western stability and military unity continues. Even back in the 90s, Boris Yeltsin expressed his concern that Russia was becoming a “superpower of crime” and, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the old-school tattooed mobsters of the so-called vorovskoi mir and their vor v zakone leaders were succeeded by a new generation of avtoritety (“authorities”). These are more hybrids: gangster-businessmen who were able to enthusiastically take advantage of crash privatisation, legal anomalies, and state incapacity which characterised Yeltsin’s era. One former, senior commander of the police in Moscow said at the time: “These were days when we knew the bandits had not just money and firepower on their side, but they had a better krysha [meaning “roof” and referring to political protection in Russian slang] and we just had to accept that.” There was, according to academic studies, a very real fear the country could become, on the one hand, a failed state, and on the other, a very successful criminal enterprise. It became the latter. The 1990s saw organised crime spread like cancer, evolving until, by the end of the decade, a series of violent local, regional, and even national turf wars to establish territorial boundaries and hierarchies were coming to an end. The wealthiest avtoritety partnered with the vast resources of their oligarch counterparts, who had used the collapse of the old state to seize control of markets and assets. They were also joined by some small groups within the military and security structures, motivated by both perverse nationalism and their own personal interests, who acted as provocateurs aiming for a renewal of Russian state power. This is how they all came together, in the end, to put a stop to constant disorder and build something new from the ashes.
Even before Vladimir Putin was elevated to acting president in 1999, then confirmed as Yeltsin’s successor in 2000, the battles were ending and, while criminals at first feared Putin was serious about his tough law-and-order rhetoric, it was soon understood his offer was a new contract with the underworld. Gangsters could go about their business without a systematic crackdown, on the condition it was accepted the state was the “biggest gang in town and they did nothing to directly challenge it.” The underworld complied and, so the story goes, “indiscriminate street violence was replaced by targeted assassinations; tattoos were out, and Italian suits were in; the new generation gangster-businessmen had successfully domesticated the old-school criminals.”
“This was not just a process of setting new boundaries for the criminals; it also led to a restructuring of connections between the underworld and the ‘upperworld’, to the benefit of the latter,” wrote Galeotti adding: “Connections between these groups and the state security apparatus grew, and the two became closer to each other. The result was not simply institutionalisation of corruption and further blurring of the boundaries between licit and illicit; but the emergence of a conditional understanding that Russia now had a nationalised underworld.” In short, the gangsters were expected to comply with the requests of the state and, during the Second Chechen War, for example, Moscow was able to persuade Chechen gangsters not to support their rebel compatriots. The same thing, it is alleged, recurred during the 2011 State Duma elections – where criminal gangs were used to ensure a Putin vote while disrupting opposition campaigns. The genesis of managed democracy.
As a result of Putin’s bold moves, and some apparent degree of growing paranoia, Russia then entered a new phase of this national step-change and the Kremlin came to consider itself at war with the West. It is no surprise, understanding this, the tactics for waging this war include using organised crime as an instrument, and this is the face Western intelligence agencies – in particular the UK, with its genetic code of private education and subsequent non-exposure to criminality – simply failed to recognise.
The hybrid conflict we find ourselves in is, in part, a war of the
old ways and this new hybrid. The dead languages versus the modern. If you really want to know how all of this came down so hard and fast, I believe the answer is traditional privilege met contemporary criminality and couldn't recognise it for what it was: sharper than Latin.
Twenty:
As my own investigations came to their end, after months of speculation the former Director of the FBI, James Comey – relieved of his position by Donald Trump in May – finally took the stand before the United States Senate Intelligence Committee on the 8th of June 2017. His personal fall outs with President Trump were not my concern – these were grown men after all – but my journalistic poking around had exposed the wholesale interference in the 2016 presidential election, authorised at the highest levels of the Russian government. I wanted to hear the words said out loud and Comey's testimony did not disappoint me. He confirmed everything within the opening minutes of his testimony262.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is led by North Carolina's Republican, Richard Burr, and Virginia's Democrat, Mark Warner, both of whom had been investigating the Russian operation. In opening the June hearing, Burr explained the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence exists to certify for the other eighty-five members of the United States Senate and the American people that the intelligence community is operating lawfully and has the necessary authorities and tools to accomplish its mission and keep America safe.
“Part of our mission,” he continued, “beyond the oversight we continue to provide to the intelligence community and its activities, is to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 US elections” adding: “This committee is uniquely suited to investigate Russia’s interference in the 2016 elections. We also have a unified, bipartisan approach to what is a highly charged partisan issue.” Burr sombrely set out the absolute risks of failing to carry out the inquiry, saying: “Russian activities during 2016 election may have been aimed at one party’s candidate, but as my colleague, Senator Rubio, says frequently, in 2018 and 2020, it could be aimed at anyone, at home or abroad.”
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