In the last quarter of a century, Zürich’s luxurious five-star Dolder Grand Hotel, strikingly set above Switzerland’s financial capital, has seen more than its fair share of wealthy Russians guests. More often than not they have been visiting the private banks along the city’s Bahnhof Strasse. Though the country’s once legendary banking secrecy laws have been rolled back by rules designed to identify the money of terrorists and drugs barons, Swiss banking remains a byword for confidentiality and the tax-efficient management of vast fortunes via offshore investment centers.
Along with properties and other investments in Cyprus and London, Switzerland has always loomed large in the financial affairs of Russia’s super-rich, whose survival and continued prosperity appears to have much to do with maintaining good relations with the Kremlin. Therefore it may be wondered why Moscow has blundered into an angry row with the Swiss government, stemming from its alleged spying, particularly on Swiss chemistry laboratories.
The Swiss have called in the Russian ambassador to protest a claimed penetration of an advanced chemical facility in Spiez which has been used to analyze nerve agents that are claimed to have been used both in the attack on Russian defector Sergei Skripal in the UK and on civilians in Syria. Moreover, the Swiss laboratory of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), found extensive use of performance-enhancing drugs by Russian athletes, leading to a ban on the country competing at both the 2016 Brazil Olympics and this year’s Winter Olympics in Korea, though individuals could take part. Last year the WADA lab came under a cyberattack, which was traced to Russian actors.
The Kremlin has been all denials. There was no WADA attack and the latest allegations on the nerve-agent test laboratory penetration have been dismissed as “absurd”.
In the greater scheme of intelligence gathering by all countries, the Russian denial is itself absurd. During the Cold War, the rival Soviet and US superpowers, along with their allies, were busy spying on each other, gathering human intelligence as well as trying to raid their computer systems. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War confrontation coincided with the arrival of the dominant role of computers in everything from running power stations and financial markets to the absolute reliance of corporations on the efficiency and security of their computer servers.
Any government that fails to protect its country’s critical digital resources is failing in its duty to its citizens. And part of that duty of care involves seeking to penetrate the computer and communications systems of its rivals and sometimes, even of its allies. The Obama administration struggled to overcome the embarrassing revelation that US cyber-spies had been eavesdropping on the phone conversations of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The Russian narrative is that it is the victim of a Washington-led conspiracy, which has even led it to being accused of interfering in national elections, not least that of US President Donald Trump. Washington and its allies are presenting the Kremlin as a malign international force, murdering its opponents at home and abroad, clearly forgetting US assassination plots, for instance to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Though this war of words is full of cant, its increasing volume has to be a cause for concern.
