Putin on a show: Russia’s resurgence

Hello and welcome to The Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Yesterday, Amsterdam's mayor announced proposals to reform the city's famed red light district. Some campaigners are pushing for more, to criminalize the purchase of sex. A look at other countries shows that approach gravely endangers sex workers. And inside the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that melted down in 2011, piles of robots have been left for dead. Cleanup efforts have stalled because existing robots just can't bear the conditions inside nuclear facilities. Now there's a big research push aiming to make them tougher and smarter. But first, Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin is visiting Rome, where he can expect a warm welcome. Italy has the most pro-Putin government in Western Europe. Italian politicians, including Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte and his deputy Matteo Salvini, have been supportive of Mr. Putin. They've called for Russia to be allowed to rejoin the G7 group of world powers. The country was suspended after annexing Crimea in 2014. Mr. Salvini Salvini of the far-right Northern League party has called too for the lifting of sanctions on Russia. Mr. Putin has done much to infuriate the international community, but this Italy visit is the latest in a series of meetings and media appearances aimed at rehabilitating Russia's standing in the world and building fresh alliances.

If you sit in the Kremlin, look at the events of the past few days. Russia has been readmitted to the Parliamentary Assembly and the Council of Europe. President Trump again praised Putin, saying he's a great guy.

Arkady Ostrovsky is The Economist's Russia editor.

Rewarded him with a one-to-one meeting, even though previously Trump said he would not meet him until Ukrainian sailors who've been effectively abducted and arrested— Trump previously wanted to see those sailors released. The Ukrainian sailors are still in jail, and now Trump is meeting Putin, and he is getting a lot of praise from the Italians. Salvini sees him as a sort great symbol of anti-liberal values. So, okay, the sanctions are still in place, but Russia could have learned to live with them. And look, Russia is back on the stage of great nations.

Well, and getting plenty of attention in the media.

Yes. And the other thing that happened, of course, was that Putin gave this 90-minute-long interview to the Financial Times. And he is not talking about Russia's domestic problems, really. He is not addressing the issue of his own falling popularity. He's talking about his views of the world, the death of liberalism. He's sort of lecturing, hailing his version of the truth.

And so what do you think that taken together all of this tells us about his state of mind?

Well, interestingly, in the interview, he talks about liberal idea being obsolete. An authoritarian leader telling the world that freedom is bad and non-freedom is good is not exactly shocking. What it does tell you though is it provides a sort of insight into the way of thinking that he has, that he doesn't see himself just as Russia's president anymore. Almost in the same way as the communists in the Soviet Union saw themselves as just a starting point for the revolution everywhere, in a way Putin assumes the same role. Okay, it's not about communism anymore, but it is actually about ideology. He now sees himself as somebody who's sort of outgrown Russia. That he is greater than just the president of Russia. It is sort of his mission to stand up to American expansionism and liberalism and all those things that dictators all over the world hate. And he has assumed that sort of global role much more so than the Chinese leader Xi Jinping has done. So Putin is now carrying the flag of anti-liberal movement.

But it's not clear to me that what he's talking about when he talks about liberalism is what we talk about when we talk about liberalism.

Yeah, so basically, in order for him to do that, he needs to twist the definition of liberalism. Uh, to him, liberalism is focused on just migration, on LGBT, on anti-religious views. To him, liberalism is an affront to traditional values. He talks about homosexuality, even though he says he has no problem with gay people, by bringing this subject into the heart of the argument about liberalism. Effectively, what he's saying, at least to the Russian people, is, look, the liberals are homosexuals, they're blasphemers, they want migrants to come and take your jobs. He is scaremongering, basically. He is narrowing it and marginalizing the liberal idea in order for himself then to bash it. It would be a much harder task for him to attack liberalism if he took it for what it is, which is equal rights, property rights, justice, all the things that Russia doesn't have. If that was liberalism, it would be much, much harder for Putin to attack it.

So what about Russians themselves? What do they think liberalism is, or are they just hearing only his message?

Well, this is the irony that for a lot of Russians, particularly of the younger generation. And we see this in the internet, we see it on social media, we see it in the protests which were unfolding in Moscow recently in defence of a journalist who had drugs planted on him, Ivan Golunov. For those Russians who are brave enough to come out, for those who follow somebody like Alexei Navalny, liberalism is about universal human values. And in that sense, they are the drivers of liberalism inside Russia itself. And while political leaders in the West are flirting with the idea of saying maybe this authoritarian way has some attraction, while Salvini is praising Putin for his views and arguing for Russia getting readmitted into the club of G7 becoming G8, the Russian people who suffer from this lack of freedom see that as an offence. And in fact, they're being more liberal than a lot of Western leaders. And I think that is a big, big problem. Because in the communist days, the Soviet intelligentsia, the dissidents took comfort from the fact that the West was standing up for their ideas in which they also believed. Now, a lot of them feel betrayed by the West, saying that you're not standing up for your values and you're not therefore standing up for us, you're allowing this to happen. And of course, countries like Ukraine and Georgia, which have been on the receiving end of Russia's aggression, feel that particularly strongly. Both countries walked out from the Parliamentary Assembly and the Council of Europe. And of course, sadly, this is coming from one place which mattered most, Washington. Because when President Trump praises Putin, saying he is a great guy, and then jokingly says, don't interfere in elections, He effectively validates Putin's ways.

Thank you very much for your time, Arkady.

Thank you.

Amsterdam's famed red-light district could soon be a very different place. Yesterday, the city's mayor announced proposals to restrict the practice of sex workers using window displays to drum up business. The public and the city council will weigh in on the proposals later this this year. But for now, there are no plans to ban the purchase or sale of sex. That's disappointing to campaigners who've been pushing for the Dutch to criminalize the buying of sex. They gathered enough signatures on a petition to force a discussion in Parliament about what's called the Swedish model.

The Swedish model refers to a package of laws that criminalize the buying of sex, but not the sale of sex.

Anna Lankes writes about Europe for The Economist.

It was considered quite revolutionary when it was first introduced in Sweden in 1999 because it decriminalizes part of sex work. The idea of the law was that it would drive down demand and support sex workers who wanted to get out of the job. That idea has since spread to Norway, Iceland, Canada, Ireland, France, Northern Ireland, and most recently in December, Israel.

And so does it work as intended? Does it reduce the demand?

It's really hard to say because the Swedish government has so far not shown any conclusive evidence that it works, that it either drives down demand or supply or even human trafficking. The only thing that they have been able to show is that after the introduction of the law, the number of women selling sex on the streets of major cities in Sweden fell. But it began to creep up again after. Demand, we don't know if it has fallen because the way that the government has tried to measure this is through self-reported surveys, and people are less likely to admit that they have committed a criminal act, you know, so we just don't know if demand has actually fallen. And with human trafficking, the government just hasn't been able to show conclusively that it drives it down.

If it's not clear that it succeeds in driving down the amount of sex work, the supply or the demand, does it at least succeed at helping the sex workers themselves?

Absolutely not. And this is where it's had the worst and most obvious effects, because men are so afraid of breaking the law that they have changed their behavior and made working conditions more dangerous for sex workers. So in Ireland, where the law was passed in 2017, reported violent crime against sex workers shot up by almost 80% in the year after the law was passed. In France, in a study of over 500 sex workers, Almost 40% said that it had become more difficult for them to negotiate condom use and that their prices had fallen. I spoke to Astrid. That's not her real name, but I spoke to Astrid, who is a Swedish sex worker who works around Europe. So she told me that in Sweden, it's really hard to work out which are the good clients and which are the bad ones.

Because they're so scared of the police, they don't want to give me any identifying information, which makes me feel unsafe, you know. So in another country, they might write like, I don't know, here's a picture of my passport or here's my address or whatever, you know, that I ask for. And none of that would be possible in Sweden because people are just so scared of the cops.

And that the type of client is different than the client that she may receive in Amsterdam, for example.

A lot of those clients that would be like a good guy client, someone I have a lot in common with, who's like reasonable and friendly and doesn't commit other crimes or whatever. They all disappear and the ones we're left with are more shady individuals with less to lose, I suppose.

So it's forced people to work in more precarious conditions. So it's just become more difficult to negotiate exactly how business is conducted. And if anything does happen, it's much more difficult to take that to the police. They may be prosecuted for other crimes. So for example, in Norway and in Ireland, The law doesn't just criminalize the buying of sex, it also criminalizes the use of third parties like pimps and letting premises that are used for selling sex. Astrid also told me that the law presents new risks for sex workers, especially migrant ones.

If you're a migrant, you get deported. You know, if you are a national, you can also lose a lot, like you can get evicted or they take your children away from you. Partners have been put in jail for like dating a sex worker because then they're pimp. There's just a lot, a lot to lose.

So how does all of this play into the bigger question of people trafficking and the fact that that is in turn tied up with all kinds of, all kinds of other immigration anxieties?

Well, fears about human trafficking have in part led to the spread of this law, and we can see the way that this specifically affects migrants in the places where the law has recently been passed. So, for example, since the introduction of the law in Ireland in since 2017, police have arrested one man for buying sex, but they've arrested 55 sex workers, almost all of them foreigners, under these kind of third-party laws, right? So you're not allowed to keep a brothel, and that means that if you're working with a friend, you can be prosecuted for brothel keeping. So I also spoke to someone at the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women who told me that by pushing sex work further underground, it makes it harder for trafficking victims and migrant sex workers to access justice services and health services.

So it sounds as if this kind of legislation fails on pretty much every count. Why is it spreading? Why are there still new places taking this on?

So somebody from the International Committee on the Rights of Sex Workers in Europe put it this way to me: if the law were passed in America, it would be a step forward because there you currently have full criminalization in almost every state. There it would constitute progress. In Europe, where sex work is kind of in a gray area, it's often allowed, but aspects of it are criminalized. This is a step backward because it pushes sex workers further underground. There are different reasons for which it may be spreading. It might have to do with the spread of conservatism in politics across the rich world right now, and because there have been fears of human trafficking, and maybe legislators don't know exactly what to do, and they think that this is one way of tackling the issue. But Some people may overestimate the amount of human trafficking in sex work that exists. So in a large study of this in India of over 5,000 sex workers, less than 4% had said that they were forced into the job. In the Netherlands, it's around 8 to 10%. So while it is a huge issue, it's also important to remember many people will choose this job out of an extremely limited set of options, maybe because there are flexible working hours, maybe because they think that they can get higher pay, maybe because it's easier to get into this job than others. And so it's important to bear that in mind, that though it might be hard for some people to kind of comprehend, some people choose freely to go into this job.

So what's the right answer then? If this kind of legislation is definitively not the way to go about things, then what is to keep everything as safe and happy and decent as it can be?

So one option is to fully decriminalize sex work. That's the case in New Zealand and in the state of New South Wales in Australia. New Zealand decriminalized sex work in 2003, and a report by the government found that the vast majority of people involved in the sex industry were better off. So they were safer and happier and felt more like their rights were being respected under this law. So that's one option. Many people I spoke to said that you can't just adopt that option and copy in other countries because one of the reasons it may be working so swimmingly in New Zealand is that New Zealand is really far away. You might not get this massive influx of migrant workers that you have had in Europe. What's important to remember in this discussion is that no country has ever gotten rid of prostitution under any legal regime. That's because many people want more sex than they can get without paying. And so instead of trying to work out how to completely abolish it, sex workers I spoke to said that we should think about harm reduction. If the law is supposed to help sex workers by taking away the bad guys that abuse them, all the evidence suggests that the clients are getting nastier, violence against sex workers is going up, and it's pushing sex workers further underground. So vulnerable people are being pushed into even more precarious positions. Yes, there are vulnerable people in this industry, and yes, it is an industry that is rife with misogyny and racism and violence and all sorts of problems, but pushing it further underground just compounds those problems. It doesn't fix them.

Anna, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

Yes, Rolo the robot, the chromium-plated butler, is just a daydream after all.

But not so, Rolo. All those little brother and sister robots, the millions of small mechanical servants that never ask for afternoons off, the amazing machines and gadgets that almost seem to think for themselves.

People have long predicted that robots would do jobs once performed by humans. But there are some tasks most people are happy to hand over to the machines.

Well, a lot of people worry about robots taking our jobs, but because there's some jobs we don't really want to do. Or at least many people wouldn't. And one of those, of course, is going inside a dangerous place like a nuclear reactor.

Paul Markely is The Economist's innovation editor.

Apart from the risk of radioactivity damaging your body, which means you can only spend a limited time in such a place, you'd also have to wear very heavy protective clothing, which is exhausting, has its own air systems, and it's really hard work. So it's very difficult to work inside these places, even if you are allowed anywhere near. And some of the radioactivity, of course, is extremely dangerous, especially if there's been an accident and you don't really know what's there.

So that sounds like a very clear-cut case for sending in the robots.

That's what you would think, and that's what they thought in Japan after 2011 and the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant suffered a series of meltdowns after a tsunami there. Now, the problem with that site is it's turned into something of a graveyard for robots because many were dispatched inside and some got stuck, some broke down, and a number had their circuits fried by intense radiation. So the robots indeed were not very successful.

And so we just simply need a different kind, a radiation-hardened robot?

Radiation-hardened is one factor. You need to have electronics and mobility systems that can do this. But the main problem is these are not really robots. What they are are remote-controlled devices, and they're being operated by somebody sitting at a safe distance using the equivalent as if you fly a radio-controlled model aeroplane or an electric toy car. And it's very hard to judge and manipulate these things accurately or pick things up properly. And hence you can make mistakes and the robots get stuck and fail to pick things up or simply don't do what they're told to do. So the answer there is, well, what can we do about that?

So how can they be made more suitable for cleaning up places like Fukushima?

Well, one of the ideas is the work of the National Centre for Nuclear Robotics, which is a collaborative effort involving several British universities and led by Rustam Stolking at the University of Birmingham. And their idea is to add a little bit of artificial intelligence into this mix. Now, that's not to say that the robots are suddenly sort of let loose with their own intelligence to run around inside nuclear power plants, because, I mean, this is a very conservative industry and they You really don't want that to happen. But there are ways that you can use AI to help the robot do what it's supposed to do and its human operator keep control of it. One of the things is picking things up properly. Now, these robots are capable of looking at a number of objects, working out what they are, identifying how best to pick them up and how to move them. So if you wanted to move them, a human operator would use a fairly sophisticated joystick to sort of move in the direction he wants to do and work as if they were doing it over a normal remote control. Control operation, but the AI would take care of the details because it will already have worked out how best to pick this up, the angle to move, how to move the arm without colliding with anything else, and how to put it down into a safe container to move it away. So let the AI look after the details and the human being just control the basic operation with the joystick.

So it sounds as if the artificial intelligence, the sort of awareness that you're talking about, is letting the robot think about its sort of local environment and sort of the people on the end worry about their end of things.

That's right. It's a sort of working together operation. Some people call this cobots in factories, but because nuclear power plants, particularly if there's been an accident, aren't structured environments like a factory, so you have to be prepared for— well, they don't know what they've got to be prepared for. And there's other ways of doing this. For instance, one part of this group flew some robotic drones recently over the Chernobyl nuclear facility. And because they can fly lower than conventional aircraft and search more carefully, They, they managed to find some radioactive hotspots that previously weren't known about. Another idea being worked on is these robots can use lasers to look at the pattern of light reflected from different materials. Now, that allows them to identify what some of these materials are. Indeed, they can possibly even recognize different types of plastic.

This sounds like cracking a problem that might have application in other fields.

Indeed, there are. The nuclear industry is not that huge. They think there's a much broader market for some of this technology, being able to pick things up carefully and more accurately. Of course, there's various uses in industry and in research labs. Flying drones over land that can identify, you know, what's below could be used to maybe look for rare earth materials and deposits of minerals. A robot that can identify different materials, I mean, that could be very useful sorting out plastics in a recycling facility, for instance.

Or identifying, I suppose, materials on far-flung planets, moons, asteroids.

Indeed. I mean, if we're off to Mars, there's plenty of room for cobots there as well, working with us to explore the secrets of the red planet.

Thanks very much for your time, Paul.

That's a pleasure.

That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts. And you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/radiooffer. 12 issues for $12 or £12. See you back here tomorrow.