Should Putin host the G8?

05 July 2006

By allowing Russia to stage the summit we have accepted her as one of us, says Anne Applebaum. This G8 will give its tacit approval to the theft of private assets, the destruction of the rule of law and the violation of human rights

Admittedly, the G8 isn’t as serious an institution as the London Stock Exchange. Although it started its life as a private meeting between the leaders of the world’s largest industrial democracies, the organisation has lately come to resemble nothing so much as a very expensive circus. The Japanese, who consider the G8 a substitute for the UN Security Council they’ll never join, racked up a $750 million bill last time they hosted it. Others, the British Prime Minister included, have chosen elaborate, crowd-pleasing ‘themes’, such as last year’s save-the-Africans extravaganza, to boost their particular agendas. The first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, was allowed to attend meetings on the muddled grounds that making him a member would magically turn Russia into one of the world’s largest industrial democracies. It did not.

Nevertheless, President Yeltsin stayed in. His successor, President Putin, stayed in too, mostly on the equally muddled grounds that it would be too embarrassing to kick him out. Mr Putin has now taken full advantage of this muddle and turned the St Petersburg meeting into a major propaganda offensive, dedicated to the idea that Russia is still a superpower — an ‘oil and gas superpower’ — and a democratic, free-market one at that. Just last week he defended his country’s deployment of gas-pipeline blackmail to disrupt the Ukrainian elections on the grounds that Russia had merely been ‘using free-market principles in the gas trade with some of our neighbour states’. His top adviser held a rare public meeting to announce that Russia is in fact a ‘sovereign democracy’ after all. The Russian government has even hired a powerful American public relations company (Ketchum, whose clients include Disney and Pepsi). Ketchum’s job is to explain (as one Ketchum executive put it) that recent problems are ‘exceptions to the rule’, and more generally to encourage the Western press to join their leaders in ignoring President Putin’s transformation of Russia.