Russian Organized Crime - Putin
Putin’s power was founded on his links to organised crime. Putin has a close circle of criminal oligarchs at his disposal and has spent his career cultivating this circle. Karen Dawisha’s book, "Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia" documents how during Putin's time as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg he was alleged to be was involved with the local Mafia, ex-KGB apparatchiks and bureaucrats in schemes involving the diversion of municipal funds, illegal arms shipments, the food shortage scandal of 1991, the local gambling industry, and money laundering for the Cali drug cartel through the Real Estate Board of St. Petersburg.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has created a "mobilization state" by taking control of Russian organized crime, which is the most widespread in the world. Mark Galeotti, a well-known British political scientist and senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations in Prague, spoke about this in April 2018, The political scientist stressed that since 2014, Putin's campaign against Western countries has become more acute - he created in Russia not a totalitarian state, not North Korea, but a "mobilization state." “There is independent business here, and gangsters, and politics, and civil society, but the state reserves the right to come to absolutely anyone at any time and say: we need you to do something. And the consequences are clear: if you if you don't, something bad will happen to you, we have seen how it went with businesses that were forced to create fake positions for spies implanted in the West, we have seen how journalists were forced to become propagandists, and we also see that the same is happening with organized crime," he said. According to Galeotti, one can clearly observe how the organized crime of the Russian Federation becomes a tool in the hands of the Kremlin: “Sometimes creating so-called volunteer units for local self-defense, as was the case in Crimea, in order to legitimize the actions of the Russian armed forces, these are also many militants who fight on Donbass, but in fact they are criminal groups that are now under the guise of political and economic power, we see this in other places, including in the West." Whereas terrorists aim to substitute the essence of the state itself, organized crime [OC] seeks to be a complement to state structures. The Governmetn of Russia [GOR] strategy was to use OC groups to do whatever the GOR cannot acceptably do as a government. As an example, Kalashov worked for Russian military intelligence to sell weapons to the Kurds to destabilize Turkey. The GOR takes the relationship with OC leaders even further by granting them the privileges of politics, in order to grant them immunity from racketeering charges.
The disappearances and murders of politicians, businessmen and journalists objectionable to the authorities are exactly the same in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The logic of these phenomena in recent years, as the speakers stated, allows to conclude that there is a deeply secret state structure, the activities of which are coordinated by the authorities in all three countries mentioned. "Disappearances of politicians are the highest manifestation of organized crime, often backed by very specific people. Very high-ranking government officials often order political assassinations and disappearances. And to fulfill their will, special units are involved to suppress dissent," he said in an interview with Deutsche Welle » Vladimir Stretovich, head of the parliamentary committee to combat organized crime and corruption. Gennady Petrov was believed to be the head of a prominent ring known as the Tambov organized-crime group, and was alleged to have ties to Putin and members of Putin's inner circle that stretch back to their days in St. Petersburg. Petrov got his start as a co-owner of the Bank Rossia in 1998-99, together with close Putin friends Nikolai Shamalov, Viktor Myachin, and Yury Kovalchuk. All three were founding members of the Ozero collective, which was formed in 1996 and included Putin.
Petrov used Spain as a base to carry out criminal activities mainly in Russia, including murder, arms trafficking, drug smuggling, extortion and fraud. Petrov was arrested during a raid on his villa in Majorca in 2008 in a sweep that also netted 20 other suspected members of the Spanish branch of the Tambov gang. In a surprise move, Spanish judges granted bail to Petrov, who was out on house arrest as of January 31, 2010. He was later allowed to travel to Russia and has been living peacefully in St. Petersburg ever since. Russia doesn’t allow the extradition of its citizens, and Spain doesn’t try people in absentia.
A 488-page petition to the Central Court in Madrid filed in 29 May 2015 was the product of a decade of investigations into Russian organized crime during the Putin era. It depicts they links between the criminal enterprise and top law-enforcement officials and policy makers in Moscow, including some of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies - Viktor Zubkov, the chairman of gas exporter Gazprom who was prime minister and first deputy premier from 2007 to 2012, and Zubkov’s son-in-law, former Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov.
In the mid-1990s several vory v zakone began to enter Spain. Since 2004 Spanish prosecutors have created a formal strategy to "behead" the Russian mafia in Spain. This has been a top-down strategy done through extensive investigations of criminal actions by these vory v zakone living in Spain. These individuals have no known jobs and unknown sources of income, yet they live in large mansions. Spanish prosecutors have concluded that money-laundering was likely involved and the challenge has been how to prove this. Spain's longtime experience in fighting drug traffickers' use of money laundering has proven valuable in this regard.
There are two reasons to worry about the Russian mafia. First, it exercises tremendous control over certain strategic sectors of the global economy, such as aluminum. The US has a strategic problem in that the Russian mafia was suspected of having a sizable investment in General Motors via its interest in Canadian auto parts maker Magna International.
The second reason was the unanswered question regarding the extent to which Putin was implicated in the Russian mafia and whether he controls the mafia's actions. Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian intelligence official who worked on OC issues before he died in late 2006 in London from poisoning under mysterious circumstances, that the Russian intelligence and security services - Grinda cited the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), and military intelligence (GRU) - control OC in Russia.
By 2010 the FSB was "absorbing" the Russian mafia but they can also "eliminate" them in two ways: by killing OC leaders who do not do what the security services want them to do or by putting them behind bars to eliminate them as a competitor for influence. The crimelords can also be put in jail for their own protection.
Certain political parties in Russia operate "hand in hand" with OC. For example, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was created by the KGB and its successor, the SVR, and was home to many serious criminals. Grinda further alleged that there are proven ties between the Russian political parties, organized crime and arms trafficking. Some cite the strange case of the "Arctic Sea" ship in mid-2009 as "a clear example" of arms trafficking.
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
