Putin toys with Obama as Syria burns and Snowden runs free

Reflecting Putin’s opportunism, the Kremlin is now suggesting this situation is an opportunity to create an extradition treaty between Russia and the United States. This would be a grave blow to human rights, and the mere suggestion of such a thing illustrates the dangers of treating an authoritarian state like a democratic nation. An extradition pact assumes that the signatories play by similar rules of justice and have similar values. Imagine an agreement between North and South Korea in which Northerners escaping that colossal gulag were forced to return to misery and death simply because Pyongyang requested it. Putin would use such a treaty to persecute innocent Russians who have escaped his grasp by fleeing the country. Disobedient businessmen, disloyal functionaries, and opposition activists—these are the “criminals” the Kremlin wishes to pursue. An extradition treaty with a country that keeps political prisoners would be a moral outrage.

As for the other direction such an accord would cover, consider the case of Andrei Lugovoi, the former KGB agent wanted by British authorities investigating the 2006 murder by radioactive polonium-210 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London. Lugovoi was the prime suspect, leaving a radioactive trail and accused by the victim on his deathbed. Not only did Putin refuse to extradite Lugovoi to be questioned in the U.K., but he allowed him to become an anti-Western propaganda star who soon won a seat in the Russian Parliament (Duma).

This whole Snowden charade is entirely in keeping with Putin’s technique of having it both ways. He gets to look like a tough guy for standing up to Obama on an issue that matters to Putin not at all while at the same time he pretends he is cooperating as best he can. If Snowden were actually valuable there would be no public show. He’d be in a bunker deep under KGB headquarters, and the Kremlin would be in full denial mode. Or he’d likely never have been let out of China. And as at the G8 meeting, other leaders are too afraid to challenge this flagrant hypocrisy, which further emboldens Putin.