Vladimir Putin’s big Trump-Russia mistake comes back to haunt him
Now that Paul Manafort has been sent to jail and is facing new motivation to cut a plea deal, the peanut gallery on social media is once again asking if Manafort is afraid to cut a deal for fear that Vladimir Putin will have him and his family killed. This is, to be perfectly honest, one of the more absurdly nonsensical scenarios I’ve heard yet. But this does serve to underline that Putin screwed up badly when he didn’t bother to murder someone else in the scandal.
Putin is a ruthlessly evil murderer. But he’s also generally been very smart about it. He’s routinely had people killed because they were political opponents, or just plain liabilities to him. But he only ever targets his own Russian citizens, and sometimes Ukrainian citizens. That’s because he knows he can get away with killing his own people; who’s going to stop him?
On the other hand, Putin has consistently made a point of not murdering people from countries that can retaliate against him. We saw this very clearly when Putin screwed up while trying to poison a Russian spy in the UK, and ended up accidentally poisoning a number of British nationals as well. The international sanctions that emanated from that one incident alone ended up costing Putin and his Russian oligarchs huge amounts of money and trouble.
Putin isn’t stupid enough to murder an American citizen like Paul Manafort on American soil. He’d have to be a complete idiot, the stupidest world leader on the entire planet, to do something so monumentally moronic. It would cost dearly. Trump or no Trump, the blowback from the United States and its allies would be so swift and fierce, the Russian oligarchs would lose billions of dollars on the spot. It would leave the oligarchs in a position where they’d have to seriously consider taking Putin out just to get their international financial ambitions back on track.
So, no, Vladimir Putin is not going to have Paul Manafort killed. That narrative is nonsense. But right about now, Putin probably is wishing he’d murdered his own Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik when he had the chance. This month Special Counsel Robert Mueller jointly indicted Kilimnik and Manafort for attempted witness tampering. Suddenly, Kilimnik is – at least theoretically – a major liability. He’s also probably now become untouchable.
Back in early and mid 2017, Putin bumped off a number of his own Russian assets, because he believed they were going to become liabilities in the Trump-Russia scandal. Remember when he had a Russian GRU official dragged away with a bag over his head? Remember the dead Russian intel official in the back of the car? How about the Russian officials who died of “heart attacks” but had visible head wounds? These were precisely the people who have ended up directly or indirectly helping Mueller to build criminal cases against Trump and his people.
Konstantin Kilimnik’s current location is unknown. There is no expectation that Robert Mueller is going to be able to imminently arrest him. So it’s not as if he’s a direct liability to Vladimir Putin yet. But what if Kilimnik eventually decides he wants to be able to travel to countries with extradition treaties? What if his conscience gets the best of him and he wants to come clean? There are various ways in which Kilimnik could end up being a huge problem for Putin. Yet if Putin has Kilimnik murdered now, he takes the risk of escalating things by taking out a guy who was just indicted in the most important criminal case in United States history.
In hindsight, by his own evil and murderous logic, Vladimir Putin should have taken out Konstantin Kilimnik while he still could. Now Putin faces a no-win scenario in which Kilimnik may be a liability to him alive or dead. The complexity of the situation with Kilimnik, a Russian national, serves to underline just how extraordinarily unrealistic it would be for Putin to try to take out an American like Paul Manafort. It’s just not happening. The question, of course, is whether Manafort himself understands that.
