Doping and hacking

IT HAS been a good few days for Russia’s dirty-tricks squad. On July 24th the International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced it would not ban the Russian team as a whole from next month’s games in Rio de Janeiro, even though an investigation concluded that the country’s government had been running an extensive doping programme for athletes. Two days earlier WikiLeaks, a whistleblowing website, had published embarrassing e-mails from officials of the Democratic National Committee, which is meant to be neutral between Democrats, disparaging Bernie Sanders. Security experts determined the e-mails had been stolen by Russian government hackers.Compared with the other misdeeds of Vladimir Putin’s regime, these ones may seem tame. Russia is, after all, a country that stripped the markings from its soldiers’ uniforms in order to invade Ukraine while lying about it, and assassinated a defector in London by putting polonium in his tea. But cheating at sport and hacking e-mails to sway an American election are serious offences too. More important, they reflect a broader pattern of behaviour. In arena after arena, Russia is not only violating the rules; it is trying to break the international order, to splinter any body or group that might hold it to account.