It has been a severe diplomatic rebuff for Vladimir Putin’s Russia, given to international policing from the Crimea to Ukraine. This is borne out by the immediate response of the Ukrainian interior minister, Arsen Avakov, who tweeted from the conference room where the vote was held ~ “The Russian candidate has been rejected. This battle is won!” Lithuania’s parliament voted unanimously last Tuesday to consider leaving Interpol if the Russian candidate had won the vote.

Kim Jong-yang of South Korea has been elected as the next president of Interpol, defeating a longtime veteran of Russia’s security services who was strongly opposed by the US, Britain and other European nations. As it turns out, it was a concerted attempt by the West to blackball the candidature of Alexander Prokopchuk on the ground that his election could lead to further Russian abuses of Interpol’s “red notice” system to bring political opponents to heel both at home and in the Russian satellite states.

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Prokopchuk is a general in the Russian interior ministry and serves as the Interpol vice-president. The election of the South Korean candidate is, therefore, the Western powers’ robust expression of no-confidence in the Kremlin’s statecraft. Interpol’s 94 member-states chose Kim at a meeting of their annual congress in Dubai.

He will serve till 2020, completing the four-year mandate of his predecessor, Meng Hongwei, who was reported missing in China in September. His disappearance remains unresolved though Beijing has claimed that he resigned after being charged with accepting bribes.

The victory of Kim has happened at a critical juncture, when South Korea has initiated the process of mending fences with the North. The Kremlin’s reaction would suggest a grudging acceptance of the result. While it has denounced the West’s campaign, it has hastened to add that “there are no reasons not to agree with the vote result.”

The election took place in an atmosphere of unprecedented pressure and interference, the Kremlin spokesman said. “The elections were complicated.” In the event, the contest for helming the Interpol turned out to be one between Russia on the one hand and the 21st-century concert of Europe and the US at another remove, with South Korea gaining as a consequence. In his immediate response to the outcome, Kim has remarkably assessed the geopolitical scenario.

As Interpol’s acting president ~ since Meng resigned ~ and vice-president representing Asia, he is acutely aware that “our world is now facing unprecedented changes which present huge challenges to public security and safety. To overcome them, we need a clear vision: we need to build a bridge to the future.” Kim (57) was previously the chief of police in South Korea’s most populous province.