Yulia Latynina: Russia and rouble have become hostages of Putin’s international hooliganism

The fate of the rouble will largely depend on the bill prepared by democrats and republicans, in which there’s a mention of freezing the assets of Russian banks, including Sberbank.

This line in a draft legislation is the main factor that causes the dramatic fall in the rouble. Other sanctions, including those announced by the State Department in relation to the poisoning of Skripals, are less important. In Russia, people store savings in dollars rather than euros or roubles and they were scared that these dollars kept in such banks as Sberbank would be simply frozen.

And of course, if assets cease working, it will make Russian government do something about that – like giving this money back at the rate of one dollar/one rouble. For savers, it would mean an absolute disaster.

A bill in question, in reality, hasn’t been even introduced to Congress yet and it isn’t published on the official website of Congress. But there are rumours of it, it’s been written about in the Kommersant newspaper and it was the reason why the rouble suffered a dramatic crash on Wednesday.

What happens next depends on whether this bill would appear in the form it is currently talked about and be passed by a majority of votes. If the demand to freeze assets disappears from it, it blows over, and the whole situation calms down a bit, rouble must slowly return to a more normal state.

The rouble has experienced a similar situation before, and this was due to sanctions as well. There aren’t any objective reasons for one dollar costing 68 or more roubles rather than, let’s say, 62-64.

But the thing is that objective reasons don’t work in modern Russia.

We live in a time when the exchange rate of the rouble is determined not only by the price of oil, like it was in the previous 15-16 years of Vladimir Putin’s rule but by his foreign-policy gambles and reactions to them. That’s why, if sanctions continue, the rouble won’t decrease against the dollar, but will only rise further.

In other words, Russia and the exchange rate of the rouble have become the hostages of Putin’s international hooliganism that had gone unpunished for a long time.

Many people must have already forgotten about the beating of Polish diplomats in Moscow and riots surrounding the Bronze Soldier of Tallinn that have not resulted in any implications for Russia. Litvinenko’s poisoning didn’t lead to any sanctions against Russia, and now Mr Lugovoy is a victorious member of the Russian parliament. A blind eye was turned to the Russo-Georgian war as well, after which the then president of the United States Obama declared a «reset» of relations with Russia.

That’s why Moscow had been euphoric for a while – it was like we poop in their garden, and they do nothing in response. The West was in a very difficult position because it’s always hard to react to the actions of the bully.

One knows how to treat a normal neighbour. One knows how to treat a neighbour who turned out to be a murderer or a burglar – call the police.

But how to deal with a neighbour who just does mean things – tortures your cat, disembowelled your dog, throws garbage over the fence into your garden? There’s no good course of action in this case because the problem is your neighbour, not you. If you turn a blind eye to garbage thrown over your fence, a neighbour grows bolder and views every compromise as an excuse for a new offensive. But if you call the police, a neighbour genuinely takes offence – it means you don’t like him, you are a bad person – and in retaliation, he does something even nastier.

When it came to Putin, the West has for a long time resorted to the first strategy – tried to negotiate with Russia, turned a blind eye to the things it did, thinking that nothing could be decided in Europe without Russia after the Russo-Georgian war anyway.

Nowadays the West increasingly uses the second strategy – and, as far as I understand, people in the Kremlin are genuinely confused because they don’t understand what happened. They’ve done the same things before, but now there are consequences to their actions. And there are two explanations for how it’s come to this.

One explanation is that Kremlin has really outdone itself this time. International bullying is like a drug to them – they need to raise the dose all the time. And they overdosed.

The second tragic for Kremlin circumstance lies in the fact that Russian international bullying has become an internal theme of American politics. More than that, it has become an important pre-election topic. And in America, everything is defined by elections to the same extent as everything is defined by stealing in Russia.

The current situation is that Russia doesn’t exist as an independent factor anymore. Democrats will be using Russia against Trump and because of that Republicans who have always been harsher towards Russia than Democrats will, in turn, take an even tougher line in order to show that there’s no collusion.

In the end, this situation works for all sides except Russia. And, with all my disgust towards Kremlin’s policy, I still think that Russia isn’t the scariest factor on the world arena right now. Islamism, for one, is a far greater concern, and it’s much harder to fight against. But it’s especially pleasant to fight against Russia precisely because it’s easier.

Thanks to Kremlin’s actions, we find ourselves in a remarkable situation, having become a country that can be easily criticized and fought against without risk of creating the slightest problem.

Because if you even breathe a word against women looking like letterboxes, like Boris Johnson did, you risk receiving backlash from your own party. But if you start railing against Putin, you receive backlash from no one other than perhaps TV network RT that has hardly any real influence.