Decades hence, when historians consider the fast-moving events that led to the historic Dec. 18, 2019, House vote on articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump, they may see them not as a sudden eruption, but as the culmination of long-standing forces.

In that sense, they may write the chronicle of an impeachment foretold.

President Trump took office vowing to be a disruptive leader who would push American political norms to the breaking point, and perhaps beyond. Democrats were aghast at his behavior from the first. In Washington, political experts were speculating about impeachment – and how it might happen – as early as spring 2016.

President Trump insists impeachment is just the Democrats’ way of refusing to accept their loss in the 2016 election. His combative letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, sent on impeachment eve, referred to it as an “election-nullification scheme.”

Others see it as something President Trump brought on himself – the inevitable result of an Oval Office occupant who chafes against limits on executive power, and at times even appears unaware of where those limits are.

“It felt like just a matter of time before he did something that crossed the line,” says Jeffrey Engel, director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and co-author of “Impeachment: An American History.”

Few surprises, lots of partisanship

How the impeachment process and subsequent Senate trial of President Trump will play out appears foreordained as well. As expected, the House passed articles of impeachment Wednesday in a largely party line vote. Next the Senate will consider the matter, and not convict him.

Twenty or so Republicans, depending on whether Democrats stick together, would have to break ranks and vote against the president to remove him from office. Absent new developments, it appears virtually certain that isn’t going to happen.

This firm split mirrors voters’ partisan views of impeachment proceedings. They’ve moved within only a narrow range since President Trump’s Ukraine dealings burst into the news in late September.

If anything, President Trump’s job approval ratings have inched up since hitting a low point in early November. As of Dec. 18, the FiveThirtyEight rolling average of major surveys put his approval rating at 43% – the highest it’s been since early in his presidency. Revelations that the president pushed Ukraine to announce investigations that could have been politically advantageous to him has done little to affect his popularity with the GOP rank and file.

“There’s a cult of personality around the president, so that the Republican Party is not a party in the sense that we thought of American parties in the past. It’s Donald Trump’s party,” says Chris Edelson, an assistant professor in the department of government at American University.

Impeachment “trivialized”?

Impeachment was perhaps a predictable clash. Its outcome may be predictable. Does that mean its effects will be predictable – even minimal – too?

That’s probably not the case, say experts. There is an aspect of theater to the process, but it could still have long-lasting effects on U.S. politics and the system of American government.

Dr. Engel of SMU, for instance, worries that the remarkable partisanship of our era has “trivialized” impeachment, perhaps turning it into just another political tool.

If Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, it’s possible Republicans would have pushed to impeach her too. She’s been reviled by the GOP for a quarter century, Dr. Engel notes. The chant at Trump rallies was “lock her up.”

Does this mean impeachment will become more common, and less of a solemn historic enterprise? President Trump himself has said that his own impeachment could lead to a GOP House impeaching a Democratic president the next time it has a chance.

Impeachment might be a bit easier, but still not easy, in the future, Dr. Engel believes. A president still has to commit an impeachable act. Democrats might have impeached President George W. Bush, and Republicans might have impeached President Barack Obama, if possible.

“The difference is W. and Obama didn’t do something they could hit on. And they tried,” says Dr. Engel.

The analogy he uses is to a police sobriety checkpoint. The police can set them up as much as they want, but drivers who are not legally drunk can continue on their way.

A sawn-off legislative branch?

Other experts worry that the Trump impeachment process could end up strengthening the executive branch at the expense of the legislative branch, via a Supreme Court ruling.

President Trump has made widespread assertions about executive privilege in the impeachment inquiry. He has stonewalled Congress, ordering official witnesses to not testify while withholding subpoenaed documents.

“If the Supreme Court weighs in on that, then the next time an impeachment happens, you could have a potentially meaningful difference,” says Claire Wofford, associate professor and director of the pre-law program at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

“The process has worked”

And what about the behavior of President Trump that led to the impeachment inquiry in the first place? There was ample testimony from witnesses that the president pressed Ukraine to open investigations that might have politically benefited him. But a number of Republican lawmakers said that whether that was correct or not, it did not rise to an impeachable offense, in their view.

Add to that his behavior documented in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia report, and his public demeanor, such as his ad hominem Twitter attacks or public calls for lower Federal Reserve interest rates or the prosecution of his adversaries.

“If Trump gets reelected, and the president after Trump is another Trump-like person, then you have the real, legitimate possibility that his norm-flouting ... is going to become pattern and practice, because it has the legitimacy of an election behind it,” says Dr. Wofford.

Still, in a broad way, the takeaway from the recent months of upheaval and partisan combat in Washington is that the system works, she adds. Things are going as the founders laid out – not easily, not prettily, but still American.

The formal institutions are running as designed in 1787.

“In the biggest scheme of things, government has worked. The Constitution has worked. The process has worked. The country is not going to blow up,” she says.

Editor's note: This story was updated during the evening of Dec. 18, to reflect that the House impeachment vote had occurred.

Even though Shazia Sheikh says her heart was broken by India’s new citizenship law favoring non-Muslim immigrants, the young instructor at a New Delhi child education nonprofit had not joined the massive protests that have rocked India.

Until now.

After security forces stormed a university campus near her south Delhi home Sunday in pursuit of student marchers, and especially when Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave a speech to Hindu nationalists in which he said the demonstrators could be identified by their clothing – a veiled reference to many of the marchers’ Muslim faith – she says she knew she had to turn her sadness into action.

The new law “is the first time a government of India approves legislation based on religion, and that is against our constitution, it is against our secularism, and it is a threat to our democracy,” says Ms. Sheikh, who is Muslim and asked that her real name not be used so she could speak freely.

She asked for and received her father’s blessing to start taking part in the protests.

“He said, ‘Yes, you should go, because if we don’t stop this now we will lose everything,’” she says. “And he didn’t mean just Muslims, but all Indians will lose our secular society,” she adds, “and without that we are not sure if India can survive.”

At first glance, India’s new Citizenship Amendment Act, approved by Parliament this month and signed into law, might not seem worth all the fuss. Hailed by the Modi government as a lifeline to refugees from neighboring countries who have faced religious persecution, the new law essentially fast-tracks citizenship for Hindus, Christians, Sikhs, and other faithful from minority religions in majority-Muslim Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh.

But the law excludes Muslims – who at nearly 200 million strong constitute India’s largest minority – and neighboring countries such as Myanmar with significant Muslim minorities.

And taken together with a number of other actions pursued by India’s Hindu nationalist government – including, for example, the termination of autonomy for India’s only Muslim-majority region, Jammu and Kashmir, in August – the new law has fed a sense of dark foreboding among India’s Muslims, who make up 14% of the population.

Moreover, the citizenship law and other actions have sparked sharp opposition from the political opposition, from constitutional scholars, and from proponents of India’s foundational secularism, who say the new law sets a country comprising dozens of religious, ethnic, and linguistic communities on a dangerous path of religious discrimination.

“Many are seeing this new law as India’s version of a Muslim ban,” says Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

“What it is for sure is part of a series of actions that reflect the BJP’s [or Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party's] very specific and well-articulated worldview, the objective of which is to remodel India as a state that hews closely to pro-Hindu policies, norms, and principles,” he adds. “This is Hindu nationalists declaring, ‘We want to make India great again.’”

A global phenomenon

For some, the unrest in India is reflective of protest movements that have popped up around the world over the last six months in response to unpopular government actions.

“We can connect this with other ‘season of discontent’ movements around the world, from Ecuador and Turkey to Lebanon and of course Hong Kong, where the people are spontaneously rising up and marching in the streets to reject a decision or a direction taken by the government,” says Waheguru Pal Sidhu, an expert in India’s role as an emerging power at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs. “India is the latest to join in.”

The spark that ignited each case is different, he says, adding that in India’s case “we’re seeing a rebellion against a weakening of the principles of the Indian Constitution – really quite far-reaching for its time – which underscored the rights of minorities and established all Indians to be equal citizens.”

In the protests that have spanned India, marchers have held aloft the image of Mahatma Gandhi, India’s founding father, who espoused secularism and religious tolerance. University students have held public readings of the preamble to India’s constitution.

In response to the demonstrations, the government, whether at the national or at state and local levels, has sent out police forces that have in some cases resorted to harsh repressive measures, even firing on and killing some protesters. Beyond that, authorities have also resorted to shutting down the internet in some states and localities – a tactic used in Kashmir after the abrogation of autonomy was announced.

Adnan Abidi/Reuters

Demonstrators throw stones toward police during a protest against a new citizenship law in Seelampur, an area of Delhi, India, Dec. 17, 2019.

Government officials say the internet shutdowns are necessary to halt the spread of “false information” and agitating rumors. But free-speech advocates say the move is a classic tactic used by authoritarian regimes to limit protest leaders’ ability to organize and publicize marches and to sustain their movement.

Citizenship registry

Most experts and many ordinary Indians insist the new citizenship law would not have caused the same outpouring of public ire were it not for the BJP’s long-stated intention to carry out a national citizenship registry, known by the acronym NRC. The project calls for denying rights, including the right to vote, to those who cannot prove with documentation their Indian citizenship.

Muslims fear the aim of the NRC would be to disenfranchise them and many of India’s poor and illiterate, who would not have the means or the documentation (such as deeds proving land ownership) to establish citizenship.

The NRC got something of a test run this summer in the northeastern state of Assam, along the border with Bangladesh, where residents were required to prove they or their ancestors had lived in India since 1971. About 2 million of the state’s 33 million residents failed to prove longtime residency.

Critics note that about 1.4 million of the 2 million who could not prove citizenship are either Hindu or of some other non-Muslim religious minority – and so will be protected by the new citizenship act. But the half-million Assamese Muslims who could not prove citizenship may be out of luck.

The one-two punch of the citizenship act following on the heels of the summer’s citizenship registry explains why Assam has witnessed some of the most violent protests of the past week, some Indians say.

“The whole of the northeast is burning, because people now understand that these citizenship projects from the government are really about making India a Hindu supremacist nation,” says Ajmal Khan (not his real name) a Muslim social welfare academic at a New Delhi university.

“Not just Muslims,” he adds, “but Indians of all types are reacting so forcefully because they are realizing that what is under threat is the constitution and the very foundations of our country.”

“Hindu First” agenda?

The uproar over the citizenship act is taking place against a backdrop of poor economic results for Mr. Modi’s government – leading some to suggest a desire to divert public attention from stagnant job growth and weak results in sectors like manufacturing and agriculture.

“The economic picture is so lackluster that one must wonder if this is happening now as a kind of distraction,” says NYU’s Professor Sidhu.

But Carnegie’s Mr. Vaishnav has a different explanation. He suspects the government is moving forward on the citizenship measures, even when the priority would seem to be to address a weak economy, because the BJP is united behind the “Hindu First” agenda.

“The government’s critics keep asking, ‘Is this really the priority, when growth is slumping?’ but the reality is that there is a clear consensus within the party on the social and cultural agenda,” he says, “whereas when it comes to the economy, there is no such consensus.”

Professor Sidhu says he believes the government could still back down on the citizenship act if mass demonstrations continue, or he says the Supreme Court might come to the rescue by ruling the act unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court announced Wednesday that it will hear challenges to the new law in late January, but it declined to suspend implementation of the act in the meantime.

Ms. Sheikh in New Delhi says the government could end the unrest simply by applying the citizenship act to all persecuted religious minorities seeking refuge in India – including, for example, Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya.

But in the meantime, she says she will now join the protests – not so much to battle against something, but to stand up for something. “I will be marching for our secular constitution,” she says, “and for our democracy.”

Kacper Pempel/Reuters/File

A man holds a laptop computer as cyber code is projected on him. In the past year, more than 70 state and local governments have been subjected to ransomware attacks.

As the director of the Baltimore mayor’s office of emergency management, David McMillan prepares for the worst. He plans for and coordinates the response to power outages, storms, and other hazardous situations. 

In early May, Mr. McMillan faced a new emergency – a ransomware attack on the city’s computers. The malicious software shut off email communications, stopped online bill payments, and locked the city’s files. City employees wandered City Hall, uncertain what to do sans computers.

“The most important role for emergency management during a cyber incident is to ensure continuity of operations,” says Mr. McMillan, in an email. But a growing number of cities, including Baltimore, are beginning to sketch boundaries around what lengths they will go to to return to business as usual.

This is one type of disaster where money can, in a sense, resolve the problem. As the name suggests, ransomware attackers typically offer to restore full server access – for a price. Cyber insurance can, in theory, help municipalities that have fallen victim to such attacks get back to business quickly. But for many city officials, the idea of using insurance to negotiate with hackers presents an ethical challenge because it rewards cybertheft.

Hackers are undoubtedly aware that cities have access to such insurance policies, says Fleming Shi, chief technology officer at Barracuda Networks, a California-based cybersecurity company. They may feel emboldened to ask for larger sums. “They’re going to see that as a nice fat check,” he says.

More than 70 state and local governments have been subjected to ransomware attacks in 2019, according to research by Barracuda. In December, city governments in Pensacola, Florida, and New Orleans both found their computer systems held hostage. Without insurance, municipalities face the risk of bearing a costly attack all alone. But with insurance, municipalities become capable of potentially a bigger payout for the assailants.  

In June, such insurance checks helped two cities in Florida regain access to their systems at a fraction of the ransom request. When Lake City was charged a ransom of about $460,000, the city itself was only on the hook for a $10,000 deductible; cyber insurance picked up the difference. Riviera Beach used insurance to pay off a roughly $600,000 ransom, after paying a $25,000 deductible.

In both cases, ransomers walked away with a windfall. But the motive behind targeting municipalities with ransomware is not always solely financial.

Voter information or other private, personal information held by municipalities can be stolen in a ransomware attack, Mr. Shi says. In addition to locking the system, attackers can gain access to a system’s files – a problem that paying a ransom does not solve.

Sudhin Thanawala/AP

County Sheriff Janis Mangum stands in a control room at the county jail in Jefferson, Georgia, Sept. 12, 2019. A ransomware attack in March took down the office's computer system, forcing deputies to handwrite incident reports and arrest bookings.

When Baltimore Mayor Bernard “Jack” Young received a ransom demand of about $76,000 in Bitcoin, he refused to pay. That decision meant that the city instead absorbed more than $5 million in systems repair and data recovery.

Over the summer, Mr. Young helped rally his mayoral colleagues behind a pledge to stand “united against paying ransoms in the event of an IT security breach.” The resolution, which he co-sponsored with Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman, was unanimously adopted by more than 1,400 mayors represented by the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

The resolution to not pay ransoms did not prevent Baltimore from investigating and eventually purchasing cyber insurance. In October, Baltimore’s Board of Estimates voted unanimously to purchase two policies, totaling $800,000 for one year of coverage.

The policies’ total coverage of $20 million could be used to offset costs incurred by business interruption, and to pay for investigation and response teams.

The trend over the past five years has been toward having a cyber insurance policy as a best practice, says Josh Zelonis, a principal analyst at the Massachusetts-based market research company Forrester. But Mr. Zelonis called paying a ransom with insurance “a very touchy area.” 

John Fokker, head of cyber investigations for McAfee Advanced Threat Research, also sees overall benefits in cyber insurance.

“No matter how secure your organization is you will always be left with that last piece of risk that you cannot cover with regular IT systems,” says Mr. Fokker, a co-founder of the international No More Ransom Project. “The insurance can cover that part and it will cover any additional costs, which you have to make after an attack takes place.”

Mr. Fokker, who formerly worked in law enforcement and helped author the section on ransomware in the 2020 Threats Predictions Report for McAfee Labs, put it clearly: “Cyber insurance doesn’t protect you against ransomware.”  

As Baltimore’s new cybersecurity committee, created in the wake of the May attack, held its first hearing in November, emergency management director Mr. McMillan fielded council members’ questions about what is being done to prepare and plan for future attacks.

“Lots of other major American cities were reaching out to me,” Mr. McMillan told the committee members. The other cities wanted to know how they can improve and prepare for a cyber incident.

Mr. Shi urges municipal leaders and residents to think about cybersecurity as a regular component of emergency management.

“Just like we test the city’s capabilities to respond to fire,” says Mr. Shi, “we have to have our citizens stand up and say, ‘How is my data protected?’”

Editor's note: This article has been updated to correct John Fokker's affiliation with McAfee. He is head of cyber investigations for McAfee Advanced Threat Research.

In a thick blue notebook, in a neat round script, activist Pinky Mashiane keeps a list of women she has met.

There is Zodwa*, who told Ms. Mashiane that she was paid less than $5 a day to work full time as a maid in a suburban home; Thandi*, whose employer kept her ID as collateral so she wouldn’t steal; and Buhle*, whose boss once called her a baboon and told her to go back to her own country.

The notebook is a testament to an everyday form of injustice that pulses just beneath the surface of South African life. More than a million people here, most of them women, are domestic workers, a catch-all term for the massive labor force that keeps the country’s middle-class homes tidy, their hedges clipped, and their children cared for.

“Domestic work is the backbone of this economy,” says Kelebogile Khunou, a researcher at the Socio-Economic Rights Institute of South Africa (SERI). “The work they do makes all other work possible.”

In South Africa, the world’s most unequal society, cheap domestic help is a foregone conclusion for those who can afford it, as unconsidered as buying groceries or paying the rent. For those who do the work, meanwhile, it is often one of very few choices. The result is a workforce as exploitable as it is invisible.

“We have beautiful laws in this country [for workers’ rights], but there isn’t enough follow-through,” says Ms. Mashiane, who has cleaned houses for three decades.

So she decided to become that follow-through herself. When she is not scrubbing dishes or ironing socks – and sometimes even when she is – she is organizing protests for better wages and escorting her colleagues to court. She has helped wage a seven-year court battle that recently secured rights for domestic workers in a workers’ compensation law from which they had long been excluded. And in 2018, she co-founded her own union for domestic workers, the United Domestic Workers of South Africa. She now spends her weekends canvassing to prospective members about their rights, and recording their complaints in her blue notebook.

It is slow and often tedious work. Unlike most workers, domestic workers don’t share a workplace, or a single boss. In a country with formal unemployment near 30%, many see themselves as disposable if they complain or demand too much. And then there is the strange intimacy of working in someone else’s private space.

“People here love to say their domestic worker is like family,” says Ms. Mashiane, whose voice crackles with rage when she speaks about her activism. “But who would treat a family member like that?” 

When she says “like that,” she is referring to any number of maltreatments she sees on a weekly basis. On a recent Sunday afternoon, the summer sun hot and furious above, she sat beneath a tree across the road from a shack settlement in the Johannesburg suburb of Benoni and listened to the 15 or so women gathered before her ask about problems they were having at work.

Ryan Lenora Brown/The Christian Science Monitor

Activist Pinky Mashiane takes notes about problems women face as domestic workers. “We have beautiful laws in this country [for workers’ rights], but there isn’t enough follow-through,” says Ms. Mashiane, who has cleaned houses for three decades.

“Does my employer have to pay overtime if I work after hours?” one asked. (Yes.)

“Am I allowed to be paid less than $1 an hour?” ventured another. (No, because that’s the minimum wage for maids.)

On average, a domestic worker in South Africa takes home around $183 a month, which must support a family of about four people, according to a study by SweepSouth, a digital booking service for cleaners. Only 15% reported receiving any paid leave, and 16% said they had been verbally or physically abused at work.

Like millions of South African women, Ms. Mashiane has domestic work in her blood. She was raised by her grandparents while her mother worked as a live-in maid for a white family in another town.

That, she learned young, is what you do: Take care of other people’s families so that you can take care of your own.  

So when she was in 10th grade, she left school to do the same. Each day, she mopped floors and scrubbed dishes. And each night, she stayed up late studying by correspondence for her high school diploma.

The work was hard, she says, but it could have been dignified if not for the wages. Sometimes at the end of a month, she remembers, her employers would offer her old furniture or used clothes, claiming they had run out of cash to pay her.

“I was so angry. I was a breadwinner for my family,” she says. But this was apartheid South Africa. And this was how things had always been.

Karen Norris/Staff

It was only a decade later in the early 2000s, when Ms. Mashiane joined a union, that she realized that in the new South Africa, there were laws in place to protect people like her. The information lit a fire under her, and she began informally working as a negotiator for fellow domestic workers in conflicts with their bosses.

In 2012, she was reading a newspaper when she stumbled across a short brief about a domestic worker named Maria Mahlangu who had slipped and drowned in her employer’s swimming pool. At the time, domestic workers weren’t included in the law that provided compensation for workers injured or killed on the job.

Ms. Mashiane couldn’t believe it. So she helped the family find a lawyer, and for the next seven years shepherded them through court dates and media interviews. Finally, earlier this year, a court ruled that the provisions barring domestic workers were unconstitutional. (That change must now be confirmed by the country’s Constitutional Court. A court will hear the challenge, brought by lawyers from Ms. Khunou’s organization, SERI, next year.)

To Ms. Mashiane, it’s proof of the value of just showing up. “When you try to silence me,” she says, “I will sing like a bird.”

But she has struggled to build membership in her union. Ms. Mashiane says she counts 300 members, but some months, only 10 people pay the dues of 20 rand ($1.36). When she goes out each weekend to give presentations to domestic workers in far-flung suburbs of Pretoria and neighboring Johannesburg, she often pays her own way to get there.

Still, she says these meetings are essential for explaining to domestic workers that they have rights at all.

“I’ve learned that if I don’t speak up, nothing will change,” says Pauline Mnisi, who came to the Benoni meeting to ask advice about a boss who keeps her at work six days a week without paying overtime. “Ma Pinky is telling us we have to fight.”

As the shade peels back from the space under the tree where the women have gathered, Ms. Mashiane shuts her notebook. After nearly two hours, she has a long list of problems she’s promised to follow up on. There are labor inspectors to be called and unfair dismissal complaints to be lodged. But for now, she needs to catch the first of four buses that will take her home, to a township north of Pretoria.

Tomorrow, after all, she has a house to clean.

*Women’s names have been changed to protect their privacy around ongoing workplace disputes.

Mark Humphrey/AP/file

The Russian team marches behind the national flag at the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia. New sanctions for doping will prevent Russian teams from hoisting their flag or wearing national uniforms.

All of sports is based on the concept of fair play, a level playing field on which the best athlete or team competing that day wins. The world’s best athletes should also set a world-class ethical standard.

The penalties imposed Dec. 9 on Russia’s international sports teams for doping athletes to give them an unfair advantage signal that cheating and a “win at all costs” approach is not acceptable. 

Many athletes and observers in other countries have found these new sanctions too soft. But they may accomplish the most important goal: Depriving those who cheat of the public adulation they crave.

In 2014 Russia sought to win the approbation of the world by not only hosting the Winter Olympics in Sochi, itself a $50 billion extravaganza, but by making sure that it dominated the competition too. Russia won the most medals. Then the widespread and systematic scheme of doping its athletes was uncovered, forever tarnishing that event.

The International Olympic Committee did permit some Russian athletes, after clearing rigorous drug tests, to compete at the 2018 Winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. But they could not wear their national uniforms or fly their flag. They competed as “Olympic Athletes from Russia.”

The most recent penalties on Russia from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) include a four-year ban on taking part in or hosting major international athletic events. But, again, individual Russian athletes who can show they did not take part in the doping scheme and are drug-free will be allowed to compete.

Part of WADA’s renewed outrage was the discovery of a Russian attempt to cover up its 2014 doping scandal and to pin it on an innocent individual. 

The ban applies to the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo and the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. Russia also will lose the right to host three world championships: volleyball in 2022, ice hockey in 2023, and water sports in 2025. The Russian team at the 2022 soccer World Cup in Qatar will not be allowed to wear its national uniform.

These bans will affect a generation of Russian athletes, some of whom may be tempted to emigrate and compete for another country. The vast majority will stick it out, hoping that their careers will extend beyond the years of sanctions.

Many sports officials in other countries had hoped for a stronger ban. Travis T. Tygart, CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, called WADA’s ruling a “devastating blow to clean athletes, the integrity of sport and the rule of law.”

But the sanctions are also the strongest imposed on a country since South Africa was denied entry into the 1964 Olympics because of its racial policies of the time. Russian President Vladimir Putin, a sports enthusiast, has tried to make his country into a sports superpower and sports achievements a source of national pride. That effort has been dealt a severe blow.

“When [Russians] win the medals the anthem and the flag go up,” Jonathan Taylor, the head of WADA’s compliance committee, told CNN. “That’s what they care about. That’s when you get the shot of President Putin. You’re not going to get that [now].”

Russia has a long road ahead to persuade the international community that it will make real and sincere reforms. Until then, its athletes must compete under the shadow of a corrupted system.