Cui Bono? Tackling Russian Illicit Finance

(Matthew McGlynn – RUSI) The concept of cui bono – who benefits? – was first popularised by the Roman statesman Cicero and has been frequently applied in legal cases ever since. Russians have their own version which is more deeply embedded in their political culture: komu vygodno? It carries the same literal meaning but a darker register, shaped by a view that treats the world as zero-sum and assumes visible events are the surface of hidden arrangements. It is the default mode of Russian strategic analysis – and one the West has rarely turned on the offshore Russian wealth that has been estimated to be up to $1 trillion. If we needed any reminder, the last Strategic Defence Review identified Russia as an ‘immediate and pressing threat’ to UK security. The rise of this aggressive and expansionist Russia was enabled in part by a Western financial system that had spent most of the last thirty years accepting the proceeds of Russian kleptocracy. This undermined our deterrence credibility in the eyes of this authoritarian kleptocracy which saw the chasm between our hardline rhetoric and soft touch reality. The crackdown on Russian dirty money following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine was long overdue, and in many respects could have gone further than it has. That said, with energy rightly spent on implementing this domestic crackdown, there has arguably been a failure to assess what impact the outflows have had on Russia itself and the degree to which that is beneficial for us. – Cui Bono? Tackling Russian Illicit Finance | Royal United Services Institute