They loved Gorbachev because he killed the Bear... They adored Yeltsin because he allowed them to feed on the carcass of the Bear... They now hate and fear Putin because he resurrected the Bear... The global community can sleep better now that the living legend, the great Czar of Eurasia, Vladimir Putin, is back!
Thank God.
Arevordi
May, 2012
Thank God.
Arevordi
May, 2012
***
Vladimir Putin's Presidential Inauguration Ceremony (full video):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNiWnSOsAnE&feature=plcp
Red Square Military Parade (full video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC57RR89qzM&feature=plcp
Teary-eyed Putin addresses 110,000 crowd near Kremlin (2012): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbqJg88UEBo
US infected world with crisis - Putin (2008):http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc3-vqy3N10
Who is Mr Putin? (2008): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oO7oPQDeJhk&feature=user
Putin Q&A: international agenda (2008): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKg2-ny7k8I
Putin suggests circumcision (2007): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryqrqeeTJek&feature=related
***Archive footage of Vladimir Putin’s inauguration (2001): http://freevideo.rt.com/video/11769
The Unknown Putin. Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCU4C6ajgBI
The Unknown Putin. Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRSVNPQKDkM&feature=relmfu
The Great Czar of Eurasia is Back!
A Tsar Is Born
No one is born with a stare like Vladimir Putin's. The Russian President's pale blue eyes are so cool, so devoid of emotion that the stare must have begun as an affect, the gesture of someone who understood that power might be achieved by the suppression of ordinary needs, like blinking. The affect is now seamless, which makes talking to the Russian President not just exhausting but often chilling. It's a gaze that says, I'm in charge. This may explain why there is so little visible security at Putin's dacha, Novo-Ogarevo, the grand Russian presidential retreat set inside a birch- and fir-forested compound west of Moscow. To get there from the capital requires a 25-minute drive through the soul of modern Russia, past decrepit Soviet-era apartment blocks, the mashed-up French Tudor-villa McMansions of the new oligarchs and a shopping mall that boasts not just the routine spoils of affluence like Prada and Gucci but Lamborghinis and Ferraris too.
When you arrive at the dacha's faux-neoclassical gate, you have to leave your car and hop into one of the Kremlin's vehicles that slowly wind their way through a silent forest of snow-tipped firs. Aides warn you not to stray, lest you tempt the snipers positioned in the shadows around the compound. This is where Putin, 55, works. (He lives with his wife and two twentysomething daughters in another mansion deeper in the woods.) The rooms feel vast, newly redone and mostly empty. As we prepare to enter his spacious but spartan office, out walk some of Russia's most powerful men: Putin's chief of staff, his ideologist, the speaker of parliament—all of them wearing expensive bespoke suits and carrying sleek black briefcases. Putin, who rarely meets with the foreign press, then gives us 3 1⁄2 hours of his time, first in a formal interview in his office and then upstairs over an elaborate dinner of lobster-and-shiitake-mushroom salad, "crab fingers with hot sauce" and impressive vintages of Puligny-Montrachet and a Chilean Cabernet.
Vladimir Putin gives a first impression of contained power: he is compact and moves stiffly but efficiently. He is fit, thanks to years spent honing his black-belt judo skills and, these days, early-morning swims of an hour or more. And while he is diminutive—5 ft. 6 in. (about 1.7 m) seems a reasonable guess—he projects steely confidence and strength. Putin is unmistakably Russian, with chiseled facial features and those penetrating eyes. Charm is not part of his presentation of self—he makes no effort to be ingratiating. One senses that he pays constant obeisance to a determined inner discipline. The successor to the boozy and ultimately tragic Boris Yeltsin, Putin is temperate, sipping his wine only when the protocol of toasts and greetings requires it; mostly he just twirls the Montrachet in his glass. He eats little, though he twitchily picks the crusts off the bread rolls on his plate.
Putin grudgingly reveals a few personal details between intermittent bites of food: He relaxes, he says, by listening to classical composers like Brahms, Mozart, Tchaikovsky. His favorite Beatles song is Yesterday. He has never sent an e-mail in his life. And while he grew up in an officially atheist country, he is a believer and often reads from a Bible that he keeps on his state plane. He is impatient to the point of rudeness with small talk, and he is in complete control of his own message. He is clear about Russia's role in the world. He is passionate in his belief that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, particularly since overnight it stranded 25 million ethnic Russians in "foreign" lands. But he says he has no intention of trying to rebuild the U.S.S.R. or re-establish military or political blocs. And he praises his predecessors Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev for destroying a system that had lost the people's support. "I'm not sure I could have had the guts to do that myself," he tells us. Putin is, above all, a pragmatist, and has cobbled together a system—not unlike China's—that embraces the free market (albeit with a heavy dose of corruption) but relies on a strong state hand to keep order.
Like President George W. Bush, he sees terrorism as one of the most profound threats of the new century, but he is wary of labeling it Islamic. "Radicals," he says, "can be found in any environment." Putin reveals that Russian intelligence recently uncovered a "specific" terrorist threat against both Russia and the U.S. and that he spoke by phone with Bush about it. What gets Putin agitated—and he was frequently agitated during our talk—is his perception that Americans are out to interfere in Russia's affairs. He says he wants Russia and America to be partners but feels the U.S. treats Russia like the uninvited guest at a party. "We want to be a friend of America," he says. "Sometimes we get the impression that America does not need friends" but only "auxiliary subjects to command." Asked if he'd like to correct any American misconceptions about Russia, Putin leans forward and says, "I don't believe these are misconceptions. I think this is a purposeful attempt by some to create an image of Russia based on which one could influence our internal and foreign policies. This is the reason why everybody is made to believe...[Russians] are a little bit savage still or they just climbed down from the trees, you know, and probably need to have...the dirt washed out of their beards and hair." The veins on his forehead seem ready to pop.
Elected Emperor
Putin has said that next spring, at the end of his second term as President, he will assume the nominally lesser role of Prime Minister. In fact, having nominated his loyal former chief of staff (and current Deputy Prime Minister) Dmitri Medvedev to succeed him as President, Putin will surely remain the supreme leader, master of Russia's destiny, which will allow him to complete the job he started. In his eight years as President, he has guided his nation through a remarkable transformation. He has restored stability and a sense of pride among citizens who, after years of Soviet stagnation, rode the heartbreaking roller coaster of raised and dashed expectations when Gorbachev and then Yeltsin were in charge. A basket case in the 1990s, Russia's economy has grown an average of 7% a year for the past five years. The country has paid off a foreign debt that once neared $200 billion. Russia's rich have gotten richer, often obscenely so. But the poor are doing better too: workers' salaries have more than doubled since 2003. True, this is partly a result of oil at $90 a barrel, and oil is a commodity Russia has in large supply. But Putin has deftly managed the windfall and spread the wealth enough so that people feel hopeful.
Russia's revival is changing the course of the modern world. After decades of slumbering underachievement, the Bear is back. Its billionaires now play on the global stage, buying up property, sports franchises, places at élite schools. Moscow exerts international influence not just with arms but also with a new arsenal of weapons: oil, gas, timber. On global issues, it offers alternatives to America's waning influence, helping broker deals in North Korea, the Middle East, Iran. Russia just made its first shipment of nuclear fuel to Iran—a sign that Russia is taking the lead on that vexsome issue, particularly after the latest U.S. intelligence report suggested that the Bush Administration has been wrong about Iran's nuclear-weapons development. And Putin is far from done. The premiership is a perch that will allow him to become the longest-serving statesman among the great powers, long after such leaders as Bush and Tony Blair have faded from the scene.
But all this has a dark side. To achieve stability, Putin and his administration have dramatically curtailed freedoms. His government has shut down TV stations and newspapers, jailed businessmen whose wealth and influence challenged the Kremlin's hold on power, defanged opposition political parties and arrested those who confront his rule. Yet this grand bargain—of freedom for security—appeals to his Russian subjects, who had grown cynical over earlier regimes' promises of the magical fruits of Western-style democracy. Putin's popularity ratings are routinely around 70%. "He is emerging as an elected emperor, whom many people compare to Peter the Great," says Dimitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center and a well-connected expert on contemporary Russia.
Putin's global ambitions seem straightforward. He certainly wants a seat at the table on the big international issues. But more important, he wants free rein inside Russia, without foreign interference, to run the political system as he sees fit, to use whatever force he needs to quiet seething outlying republics, to exert influence over Russia's former Soviet neighbors. What he's given up is Yeltsin's calculation that Russia's future requires broad acceptance on the West's terms. That means that on big global issues, says Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution and former point man on Russia policy for the Clinton Administration, "sometimes Russia will be helpful to Western interests, and sometimes it will be the spoiler."
Up from the Ruins
How do Russians see Putin? For generations they have defined their leaders through political jokes. It's partly a coping mechanism, partly a glimpse into the Russian soul. In the oft told anecdotes, Leonid Brezhnev was always the dolt, Gorbachev the bumbling reformer, Yeltsin the drunk. Putin, in current punch lines, is the despot. Here's an example: Stalin's ghost appears to Putin in a dream, and Putin asks for him help running the country. Stalin says, "Round up and shoot all the democrats, and then paint the inside of the Kremlin blue." "Why blue?" Putin asks. "Ha!" says Stalin. "I knew you wouldn't ask me about the first part." Putin himself is sardonic but humorless. In our hours together, he didn't attempt a joke, and he misread several of our attempts at playfulness. As Henry Kissinger, who has met and interacted with Russian leaders since Brezhnev, puts it, "He does not rely on personal charm. It is a combination of aloofness, considerable intelligence, strategic grasp and Russian nationalism" (see Kissinger interview).
To fully understand Putin's accomplishments and his appeal, one has to step back into the tumult of the 1990s. At the end of 1991, just a few months after Yeltsin dramatically stood on a tank outside the parliament in Moscow to denounce—and deflate—a coup attempt by hard-liners, the Soviet Union simply ceased to exist. Yeltsin took the reins in Russia and, amid great hope and pledges of help from around the world, promised to launch an era of democracy and economic freedom. I arrived in Moscow a week later, beginning a three-year stint as a Russia correspondent. I retain three indelible images from that time. The first: the legions of Ivy League—and other Western-educated "experts" who roamed the halls of the Kremlin and the government, offering advice, all ultimately ineffective, on everything from conducting free elections to using "shock therapy" to juice the economy to privatizing state-owned assets. The second: the long lines of impoverished old women standing in the Moscow cold, selling whatever they could scrounge from their homes—a silver candleholder, perhaps, or just a pair of socks. The third, more familiar image: a discouraged and embattled Yeltsin in 1993 calling in Russian-army tanks to shell his own parliament to break a deadlock with the defiant legislature when everything he was trying to do was going wrong.
Yeltsin bombed his way out of the threat of civil war and managed to hang on to power, but Russia was left hobbled. Virtually every significant asset—oil, banks, the media—ended up in the hands of a few "oligarchs" close to the President. Corruption and crime were rampant; the cities became violent. Paychecks weren't issued; pensions were ignored. Russia in 1998 defaulted on its foreign debt. The ruble and the financial markets collapsed, and Yeltsin was a spent force. "The '90s sucked," says Stephen Sestanovich, a Columbia University professor who was the State Department's special adviser for the new Independent States of the former Soviet Union under President Bill Clinton. "Putin managed to play on the resentment that Russians everywere were feeling." Indeed, by the time Putin took over in late 1999, there was nowhere to fall but up.
Path to Power
That Russia needed fixing was acknowledged by all. But how was it that Putin got the call? What was it that lifted him to power, and to the dacha in Novo-Ogarevo? Putin's rise continues to perplex even devoted Kremlin observers. He was born into humble circumstances in St. Petersburg in 1952. His father had fought in World War II and later labored in a train-car factory. Putin's mother, a devout Orthodox Christian, had little education and took on a series of menial jobs. The family lived in a drab fifth-floor walk-up in St. Petersburg; Putin had to step over swarms of rats occupying the entranceway on his way to school. Putin's only ancestor of note was his paternal grandfather, who had served as a cook for both Lenin and Stalin, though there's no sign that this gave his family any special status or connections. Putin describes his younger self as a poor student and a "hooligan." Small for his age, he got roughed by his contemporaries. So he took up sambo—a Soviet-era blend of judo and wrestling—and later just judo. From all accounts, he devoted himself to the martial art, attracted by both its physical demands and its contemplative philosophical core. "It's respect for your elders and opponents," he says in First Person, his question-and-answer memoir published in 2000. "It's not for weaklings."
Source: http://www.time.com/time/specials/20...690766,00.html
A Modernizing Czar
Vladimir Putin can take great satisfaction with the legacy he will leave his successor this spring. In 2007, he achieved the goal he set out for himself eight years ago in a document, "Russia at the Turn of the Millennium," just before he took the presidency from ailing Boris Yeltsin: To rebuild Russia at home so that it could regain its status as a great power abroad. Last year saw this Russia on full view, playing a more vocal, visible and at times troublesome role on issues of great importance to Europe and the United States, such as Iran, the Middle East, missile defense, and energy.
Many may find President Putin's methods unsavory and Russia's new face disturbing. But we should give him his due, for the odds against success were formidable. Consider the Russia he inherited. Under President Yeltsin, Russia suffered a socio-economic and political collapse unprecedented for a major power not defeated in a major war. Between 1990-1998, the economy plunged by 40%. The state was dysfunctional, with significant parts privatized by corrupt oligarchs and with regional barons asserting their independence. Russia was humiliated as its finances were run out of Washington by the International Monetary Fund, and outside powers shamelessly interfered in Russia's domestic affairs in support of Yeltsin. Many Russians thought their country was on the path to becoming a failed state; many Westerners were contemplating a world without Russia.
Eight years later, the difference is stark. Mr. Putin has restored Russian pride and enhanced Russia's power. The economy has not only recovered all the ground it lost in the 1990s, but has also developed a robust service sector that was practically non-existent in the Soviet period. Russia has accumulated the third largest monetary reserves in the world after China and Japan. Mr. Putin has rebuilt an authoritative state along traditional Russian lines, highly centralized and personalized, by taming the oligarchs and regional barons and undermining alternative centers of power such as the Duma and the media. Russia is stable; living standards are soaring. It is once again feared and respected abroad. No wonder Mr. Putin is wildly popular among Russians, who now look to the future with greater optimism and confidence than ever over the past two decades.
To be sure, President Putin has been lucky -- lucky that he succeeded a decrepit Yeltsin, lucky that oil prices rose sharply on his watch, lucky that political disarray in Europe and the United States made him shine all the brighter on the world stage. But other leaders have failed to capitalize on such luck. One need look no further than to Leonid Brezhnev, who squandered a similar opportunity in the 1970's and instead prepared the ground for the Soviet Union's collapse in the 1980's. And there were many opportunities for Mr. Putin to falter. Without remarkable macroeconomic discipline, for example, the flood of petrodollars into Russia could have unleashed a devastating inflationary spiral and not the solid growth we have seen.
The time of restoration has now passed, however, and 2008 brings a new, more formidable challenge -- modernization -- that will require new approaches, particularly with the West. Russia needs to make massive investments -- perhaps a trillion dollars over the next decade -- to modernize infrastructure largely inherited from the Soviet Union and starved of funds over the past 15 years. It needs to diversify its economy away from an overlarge dependence on natural resources, particularly into high-tech, if it wants to remain a major power. It needs to rebuild its public health and education systems to produce a competitive workforce. This is all the more imperative because its population will decline sharply over the next decade because of poor health conditions in the past.
Mr. Putin and his entourage have spoken openly about these challenges. The question is whether they are prepared to take the steps needed to address them effectively. Success is threatened by the traditional Russian blight of corruption. Critical to dealing with that threat is to open up the political system to encourage greater transparency and accountability by government officials. Relaxing the current supercentralization will help foster the flow of reliable information, flexibility and innovation that Russia needs to face the challenges and exploit the opportunities of the 21st century.
Success will also require Russia to repair its relations with the West -- to begin with by ratcheting down the vitriolic anti-Western rhetoric coming out of Moscow today. For Russia cannot modernize itself on its own, even if it must play the leading role. The money, know-how and technology it needs can only be found in the West. And Russia cannot guarantee its security at a time of great global upheaval without friends and allies. Only one country has the capability to work with Russia on the full range of its real security challenges, which do not lie in the West but to the South in the guise of a militant radical Islam, to the East in the guise of a rapidly changing geopolitical environment, and globally in the guise of nuclear proliferation and megaterrorism. That country is the United States.
So one big question for 2008 is whether Mr. Putin and his chosen successor, Dimitry Medvedev, can summon up the wisdom to meet the challenges of economic and political modernization and the courage and confidence to build a cooperative relationship with the West, for the sake of Russia's own future.
Many may find President Putin's methods unsavory and Russia's new face disturbing. But we should give him his due, for the odds against success were formidable. Consider the Russia he inherited. Under President Yeltsin, Russia suffered a socio-economic and political collapse unprecedented for a major power not defeated in a major war. Between 1990-1998, the economy plunged by 40%. The state was dysfunctional, with significant parts privatized by corrupt oligarchs and with regional barons asserting their independence. Russia was humiliated as its finances were run out of Washington by the International Monetary Fund, and outside powers shamelessly interfered in Russia's domestic affairs in support of Yeltsin. Many Russians thought their country was on the path to becoming a failed state; many Westerners were contemplating a world without Russia.
Eight years later, the difference is stark. Mr. Putin has restored Russian pride and enhanced Russia's power. The economy has not only recovered all the ground it lost in the 1990s, but has also developed a robust service sector that was practically non-existent in the Soviet period. Russia has accumulated the third largest monetary reserves in the world after China and Japan. Mr. Putin has rebuilt an authoritative state along traditional Russian lines, highly centralized and personalized, by taming the oligarchs and regional barons and undermining alternative centers of power such as the Duma and the media. Russia is stable; living standards are soaring. It is once again feared and respected abroad. No wonder Mr. Putin is wildly popular among Russians, who now look to the future with greater optimism and confidence than ever over the past two decades.
To be sure, President Putin has been lucky -- lucky that he succeeded a decrepit Yeltsin, lucky that oil prices rose sharply on his watch, lucky that political disarray in Europe and the United States made him shine all the brighter on the world stage. But other leaders have failed to capitalize on such luck. One need look no further than to Leonid Brezhnev, who squandered a similar opportunity in the 1970's and instead prepared the ground for the Soviet Union's collapse in the 1980's. And there were many opportunities for Mr. Putin to falter. Without remarkable macroeconomic discipline, for example, the flood of petrodollars into Russia could have unleashed a devastating inflationary spiral and not the solid growth we have seen.
The time of restoration has now passed, however, and 2008 brings a new, more formidable challenge -- modernization -- that will require new approaches, particularly with the West. Russia needs to make massive investments -- perhaps a trillion dollars over the next decade -- to modernize infrastructure largely inherited from the Soviet Union and starved of funds over the past 15 years. It needs to diversify its economy away from an overlarge dependence on natural resources, particularly into high-tech, if it wants to remain a major power. It needs to rebuild its public health and education systems to produce a competitive workforce. This is all the more imperative because its population will decline sharply over the next decade because of poor health conditions in the past.
Mr. Putin and his entourage have spoken openly about these challenges. The question is whether they are prepared to take the steps needed to address them effectively. Success is threatened by the traditional Russian blight of corruption. Critical to dealing with that threat is to open up the political system to encourage greater transparency and accountability by government officials. Relaxing the current supercentralization will help foster the flow of reliable information, flexibility and innovation that Russia needs to face the challenges and exploit the opportunities of the 21st century.
Success will also require Russia to repair its relations with the West -- to begin with by ratcheting down the vitriolic anti-Western rhetoric coming out of Moscow today. For Russia cannot modernize itself on its own, even if it must play the leading role. The money, know-how and technology it needs can only be found in the West. And Russia cannot guarantee its security at a time of great global upheaval without friends and allies. Only one country has the capability to work with Russia on the full range of its real security challenges, which do not lie in the West but to the South in the guise of a militant radical Islam, to the East in the guise of a rapidly changing geopolitical environment, and globally in the guise of nuclear proliferation and megaterrorism. That country is the United States.
So one big question for 2008 is whether Mr. Putin and his chosen successor, Dimitry Medvedev, can summon up the wisdom to meet the challenges of economic and political modernization and the courage and confidence to build a cooperative relationship with the West, for the sake of Russia's own future.
Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1200...googlenews_wsj
Hunting the Russian Bear Why they're after Putin
At times it seems as though we've gone back in a time machine to the darkest, sub-zero days of the Cold War era, when Americans were frantically digging bomb shelters in their back yards, Godless Communism was on the march, and the jackboots of the KGB were just inches away from our waiting necks. Tony Blair, lecturing the Russian leader at the G-8 meeting, opined that the Western world, on behalf of which he presumed to speak, is "becoming worried, fearful about what was happening in Russia today, the external policy." These remarks echoed xxxx Cheney's sally last year against Russia's alleged attempt to use oil and gas as "tools of intimidation or blackmail, either by supply manipulation or attempts to monopolize transportation." That was said in response to Russia's threat to raise the price of energy previously sold at subsidized Soviet-era rates to Ukraine – a capitalistic act that was a bit too radical for the supposedly pro-free-market Cheney.
The Brits' beef with Putin also has to do with oil and gas. The Russian seizure of British oil assets in Siberia is being cited by free-market types as evidence that Putin is moving toward "corporatism," but is this any more "corporatist" than legislation currently on the books in the U.S. that forbids foreign ownership of key industries such as airlines and telecommunications? The hypocrisy is breathtaking.
Who can forget the Dubai port-management brouhaha, when Democratic and Republican lawmakers alike demagogued the issue to score political points by conjuring the alleged threat posed by a Middle Eastern-based company having anything to do with maintaining our – rapidly decaying – "vital" infrastructure? The Dubai episode inaugurated a crackdown by U.S. regulators and inspired a host of economically disastrous yet politically popular measures in Congress that confirm "corporatism" is on the march in Washington at least as much as it is in Moscow.
Remember when Chinese investors sought to buy out the oil company Unocal? The uproar was deafening, and the deal was scotched. So it turns out that British Petroleum is no more badly treated in Russia than Chinese-owned CNOOC Ltd. is in the U.S. – which, come to think of it, is perhaps why the Brits are so irked.
According to the mainstream news media's pampered pet pundits, Russian President Vladimir Putin is the reincarnation of Josef Stalin, and Russia under his rule is rapidly "backsliding" into "authoritarianism." According to Andrei Illarionov, a former economic adviser to Putin and now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, the resurgent Russian military is about to take out its neighbors and seal a reestablished Warsaw Pact in the blood of Georgian, Ukrainian, and possibly even Polish innocents. The British, in particular, have been hyping this "new Cold War" narrative for all it's worth – which, when it comes right down to it, isn't very much.
Is Russia embarked on a return to authoritarianism? The answer has to be an unequivocal no. After all, Putin has not closed down a single Russian "dissident" media outlet – instead, like their counterparts in the U.S., Russian media barons, at the head of vast corporate conglomerates, have bought up the major television networks and newspapers and imposed a Fox News-like unanimity on correspondents and pundits alike. While this may make for boring television and patently predictable punditry, it doesn't make Russia a fascist state, as all too many people who ought to know better are trying to imply.
I had to laugh when I heard the thrilling news that "hundreds of people" marched through the streets of St. Petersburg recently to protest Putin's supposedly repressive regime. This was one of a series of "dissidents' marches" being held by the "opposition" – a seriocomic coalition of chess champion Gary Kasparov and neo-fascist crackpot Eduard Limonov. Hundreds, eh? Hundreds of thousands of antiwar marchers over the years protesting America's policy in Iraq have failed to garner as much publicity as this little band did in record time – now isn't that odd?
Odder still is the nature of the "opposition" itself: Limonov is a punk-rock skinhead "idol" and sometime novelist whose crazed views are best summed up by his National Bolshevik Party's graphic incorporation of Soviet and Nazi symbols to create the single most repulsive party emblem in all of recorded history. Kasparov, aside from his well-known exploits in the game of chess, is a pawn of American neoconservatives: his real constituency isn't in Russia, where he remains an obscure political figure, but in Washington, D.C., where he stands amid such neocon luminaries as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and James Woolsey as a member of the Center for Security Policy. The Center is a major neocon propaganda outfit headed by longtime neocon activist Frank Gaffney, whose name is virtually synonymous with the military-industrial complex. Kasparov served on the Center's National Security Advisory Council along with Woolsey.
The neocons, by the way, are deeply committed to the Chechen cause and have been in the vanguard of the movement to demonize Putin as a latter-day Stalin: the list of endorsers of the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya replicates the seating arrangements at the front table at an American Enterprise Institute awards dinner. It was Richard Perle, you'll recall, who averred that Russia ought to be expelled from the G-8 on account of Mikhail Khodorkovsky's arrest for crimes ranging from embezzlement to conspiracy to commit murder.
The neocons have allied themselves with the Russian oligarchs, who amassed fantastic wealth in post-communist Russia by means that might meet the approval of Tony Soprano, not the Better Business Bureau. These oligarchs seethe at their expulsion as they plot from abroad to return the country to their clutches. For years now, an unsavory popular front of Chechen terrorists, neoconservative hawks, and shady Russian oligarchs wearing Moss Lipow dark sunglasses and gobs of gold chains has massed at the gates of Moscow, demanding the ouster of the czar – and the clamor has now been taken up by Western governments.
"It would be funny if it wasn't so sad" was Putin's response to the U.S. insistence that Poland and Czechoslovakia put anti-missile technology in place in order to guard against the supposed "threat" from an attack… launched by Iran. The joke is that the Iranians don't have missiles that can reach either Warsaw or Prague. To pretend that these anti-missile systems are aimed at an "enemy" other than Russia is the measure of the West's disdain for Putin: like a schoolyard bully who "accidentally" shoves his victims on the playground, they don't even bother to convincingly conceal their belligerence.
Putin's counterproposal to help set up a missile-interception system in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan is a deft deflection of Western claims that Putin poses a renewed Russian threat to the security of Europe. If the U.S. and Britain are genuinely concerned about a possible Iranian strike at the former Eastern bloc, then they'll sign on to Putin's generous offer. Their hesitation, one has to conclude, speaks volumes about their real motives for putting up the missile shield in the first place. Just as the demonstrators in the streets of Russian cities are seemingly intent on provoking the Russian police into a violent response, so the Western powers – alarmed at the rise of Putin on the world stage as the Americans' chief antagonist and most eloquent critic – are engaged in a series of large-scale provocations, including but not limited to the Eastern European missile shield.
Another irritant to Russia's increasingly fractious relations with the West is the issue of Kosovo's independence. Again, the Western love of double standards comes into play here, with Kosovo's alleged "right" to nationhood being upheld by an American president while the corresponding "right" of Russian-speaking (or pro-Russian) areas of the former Soviet Union, such as Abkhazia and the Transdniester Republic, to independence goes unrecognized by the West.
The real evidence, however, of just how badly relations between Russia and the West have deteriorated is the strange case of Alexander Litvinenko and the mystery surrounding his death. Having covered this subject at length in previous columns, I won't elaborate on the arcane technical and other details of this downright weird episode, which seems like a story straight out of a Hollywood thriller, except to say that the "official" version of how Litvinenko came to be poisoned by a rare radioactive substance, polonium-210, stinks to high heaven.
This narrative, which holds that Litvinenko was targeted by the KGB because of his alleged status as a Russian "dissident" living in exile in London, doesn't hold up under even the most forgiving scrutiny. After all, why kill him with a rare and easily traced substance – and with such an overdose that the cost alone would seem to rule out this method – when a simple shot in the back of the head would suffice? The sheer amount of disinformation and propagandistic nonsense dished out by the British tabloids alone on the subject probably consumed enough paper to deforest half of South America. Nor is the British indictment of Andrei Lugovoi enough to paper over the huge holes in the "official" story. Lugovoi, at any rate, is fighting back, with revelations that the Brits and Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky tried to recruit him to root out the dirt on Putin.
In any case, the Litvinenko affair emanates the aura of a gigantic, somewhat sinister scam, perhaps involving the smuggling of polonium and the involvement of Islamic terrorist cells associated with the Chechens. What ought to worry us is that someone was possibly trying to assemble a "dirty bomb" of the type Jose Padilla was accused of masterminding – in the heart of London.
There seems little doubt the color-coded "revolutions," with Western material and moral support, targeted the former Soviet "near abroad" and aimed at reducing Russian influence and putting Putin on the defensive. The construction of a missile-defense system in Eastern Europe was the last straw. What had been primarily a propaganda campaign aimed at the Kremlin has now taken a decidedly military turn, one that bodes ill for the future and the cause of peace. There are those who never reconciled themselves to the end of the Cold War – that crucible in which the pestilential sect known as the neoconservatives was born and raised – and it seems a supreme effort is being made to revive it.
Today we hear endless stories about how the Russian leader and his country pose a threat to Western interests: Russia is "authoritarian," newly aggressive, "anti-Semitic," and, yes, even "homophobic." As the memory of 9/11 fades and the meaning of that historic disaster is increasingly disputed, the War Party needs fresh enemies whose alleged evil will thrill the popular imagination and satiate their hunger for villainy. Putin, flush with oil money and eager to regain Russia's place in the sun, fits the bill nicely.
The truth is more prosaic. Putin is no dictator, and Russia, far from backsliding into neo-communism, is in a better position than ever to create a middle-class-based liberal democracy with the rule of law roughly comparable to the system that prevails in the West. The general rise in the Russian standard of living, after a catastrophic post-communist decline, puts a brake on any backward-looking authoritarian movement (neo-communist or otherwise) making appreciable progress.
That this occurred under Putin is the reason for the Russian president's enormous popularity and accounts for the marginalization of his opponents. As much as Western liberals and neocons loathe Putin and the prospect of a resurgent Russia, it doesn't look like regime change is on the agenda in the former Soviet Union, in spite of millions being poured into the region by Western governments to aid the opposition. The endless provocations aimed at the Kremlin will only have the effect of irritating the Russian bear – and creating yet more anti-American and anti-Western sentiment. As if we don't have enough of that already…
Russia has come a long way from being the land of the gulags, and it is never going to go back to that – not unless the West succeeds in looting that country, once again, and creating a Russian version of the Weimar Republic. This is precisely why lunatics of Eduard Limonov's ilk have joined the opposition as its noisiest and most visible wing – because the rise of Putin, who created order out of mafia-inspired chaos, short-circuited the Weimar Russia scenario and diverted the Russians down a different path.
Source: http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=11115
Tough-Talking Putin Crafted Image His Way
Few people had heard of Vladimir Putin when Russia's then-President Boris Yeltsin appointed him prime minister in 1999. But the stern-faced former KGB officer triggered a love affair with the Russian population — by starting a popular second war in Chechnya later that year. Soon after hostilities began, the man who later became president surprised the country with the first of what became known as "Putinisms." He issued a threat to Chechen rebels using slang terms usually heard only in Russia's notoriously tough prisons. "If they're in the airport," Putin said, "we'll kill them there … and excuse me, but if we find them in the toilet, we'll exterminate them in their outhouses." When Putin steps down as Russia's president next week, he will leave with approval ratings most leaders can only dream about. More than 80 percent of Russians say he has done a good job in office. His famous tough talk and outbursts might appear crude to foreigners — and even to many Russians — but they're essential to his carefully controlled public image, projected by a highly talented performer.
A Way With Words
Since he was first elected president, in 2000, Putin has systematically rolled back media freedom in Russia. Yet he's also forged a love-hate relationship with journalists. When Putin appears in front of more than 1,000 reporters during his annual news conferences, he owns the room, keeping reporters fascinated for hours by alternating between threats, jokes and flirtation. One journalist said in 2006 that she was speaking for all blond women when she asked why Putin looked so fit and attractive. His answer was that he doesn't drink and plays plenty of sports. He then asked her to convey his greetings to all blond women. Putin has often lost his temper in public. During a 2002 news conference in Brussels, Belgium, the president responded to a question that angered him by inviting a reporter to come to Moscow to be circumcised. "We have specialists in this question, as well," Putin said. "I'll recommend that he carry out the operation in such a way that nothing will grow back."
Crafting His Image
Even some of Putin's biggest critics say he knows how to work an audience. Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister of Russia, says Putin learned how to craft his image in a special educational program at a school for KGB officers. "He studied at KGB school … how to attract people, how to be comfortable. … And I believe that he studied well," Nemtsov says. Natalia Muravieva, rector of Moscow's Academy of Communications and Information, says Putin is a highly dynamic politician whose speeches are intricately crafted. "Putin uses a lot of repetition that builds to a crescendo," Muravieva says. "And his widely reported aphorisms are like gems. They're few and far between, and everyone remembers them." Russians won't necessarily be deprived of such gems just because Putin's term as president is expiring. He's used his tremendous popularity to retain much of his power. His self-appointed successor, Dimitri Medvedev, who was recently elected president and takes office May 7, has said Putin will be prime minister and head of the country's biggest political party. Both platforms will give Putin plenty of opportunity to create new Putinisms.
A sampling of some of Russian President Vladimir Putin's eyebrow-raising comments and actions over the years:
— In 2000, CNN's Larry King asked Putin what had happened to cause the Kursk nuclear submarine accident, which killed 118 crew members in the Barents Sea. Putin made light of the question, answering, "It sank." During the failed rescue operation, Russia had turned down offers of help from other countries, and Putin was criticized for refusing to cut short a vacation.
— Meeting reporters in 2003, Putin said jailed Yukos oil company chairman Mikhail Khodorkovsky's offer to pay back taxes from the 1990s had come too late. "One must always obey the law," Putin said, "and not only when you're grabbed in a certain place."
— In 2005, Putin met with American businessmen in Moscow, among them Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots football team, which had recently won the Super Bowl. When Kraft showed Putin his diamond-encrusted championship ring, Putin surprised his guests by trying on the ring, slipping it into his pocket and leaving. Kraft later said he had given the ring to Putin as a gift and token of respect.
— During a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2006, a Russian journalist overheard Putin talking about Israeli President Moshe Katsav, who had been accused of multiple rapes. "What a mighty man he turns out to be!" Putin said. "He raped 10 women; I'd never have expected that from him. He surprised us all — we all envy him!" The Kremlin later confirmed Putin had made the comments. During a call-in television program, Putin criticized reporters for "eavesdropping" on his conversation with Olmert, saying it was "unseemly."
— When asked by a journalist in 2006 about Russia's possible support for sanctions against Iran, Putin denied accusations that Tehran was developing nuclear weapons, saying, "If a grandmother had certain reproductive organs, she would be a grandfather."
— During a summit of the Group of Eight leading industrialized countries in Germany in 2007, Putin attacked the United States and Europe and described himself as the world's only "pure democrat." "After the death of Mahatma Gandhi," he said, "there's no one to talk to." Putin rejected criticism that he has ended democracy and reinstituted authoritarianism in Russia, accusing European countries of "killing demonstrators in the streets."
— During a news conference in 2008, Putin criticized Western elections observers by quoting a well-known line from a popular television crime drama. "They're trying to teach us something!" he said. "Well, let them teach their wives how to make cabbage soup!"
Source: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...oryId=90083829
Why Are We Baiting Putin?
"No legitimate interest is served when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or blackmail, either by supply management or attempt to monopolize transportation," thundered Vice President Cheney to the international pro-democracy conference in Vilnius, Lithuania. "[N]o one can justify actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbor, or interfere with democratic movements." Cheney's remarks were directed straight at the Kremlin and President Vladimir Putin, who is to host the G-8 Conference in July. Cheering Cheney on is John McCain, front-runner for the GOP nomination, who has urged President Bush to snub Putin by boycotting the G-8 summit. What the GOP is thus offering the nation right now is seven more years of in-your-face bellicosity in foreign policy.
What does McCain think we would accomplish – other than a new parading of our moral superiority – by so public an insult to Putin and Russia as a Bush boycott of the St. Petersburg summit? Do we not have enough trouble in this world, do we not have enough people hating us and Bush that we have to get into Putin's face and antagonize the largest nation on earth and a co-equal nuclear power? What is the purpose of this confrontation diplomacy? What does it accomplish? Eisenhower and Nixon did not behave like this. Nor did Ford or Bush's father. Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire" once. But the Soviet Union we confronted in those years was hostile. Until lately, today's Russia was not. Yet the Bush boys are in their pulpits, admonishing the world's sinners every day. What is their beef with Putin's policy?
In January, Putin decided to stop piping subsidized gas to Kiev and start charging the market price. Reason: Ukraine's president, elected with the assistance of U.S. foundations and quasi-government agencies, said he was reorienting Kiev's foreign policy away from Russia and toward NATO and the United States. If you are headed for NATO, Putin was saying to President Viktor Yushchenko, you can forget the subsidized gas. Now this is political hardball, but it is a game with which America is not altogether unfamiliar. When Castro reoriented his policy toward Moscow, Cuba's sugar allotment was terminated. U.S. diplomats went all over the world persuading nations not to buy from or sell to Cuba. Economic sanctions on Havana endure to today. We supported, over Reagan's veto, sanctions on South Africa. We have used sanctions as a stick and access to the U.S. market as a carrot since we became a nation. What, after all, was "Dollar Diplomacy" all about? Cheney accuses Moscow of employing pipeline diplomacy – i.e., using its oil and gas pipelines to benefit some nations and cut out others. But the United States does the same thing, as it seeks to have the oil and gas of Central Asia transmitted to the West in pipelines that do not transit Iran or Russia. "[N]o one can justify actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbor," declared Cheney in Vilnius. How the vice president could deliver that line with a straight face escapes me.
Does Cheney not recall our "Captive Nations Resolutions," calling for the liberation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, which, though free between the two world wars, had long belonged to the Russian empire? Does he not recall conservative support for the breakup of the Soviet Union? Does he not recall conservative support for the secession of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, and more recently Kosovo, from a Serb-dominated Yugoslavia? What concerns Cheney is Moscow's support for the secession of Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia. Georgia's president was also elected with the aid of pro-democracy NGOs, mostly funded by Uncle Sam. All these color-coded revolutions in East Europe and Central Asia bear the label, Made in the U.S.A. When Cheney says, "No one can justify actions that … interfere with democratic movements," he is hauling water for Freedom House, headed by ex-CIA Director James Woolsey, and similar agencies, which Putin wants shut down or kicked out of Russia for interfering in her internal affairs.
We Americans consider the Monroe Doctrine – no foreign power is to come into our hemisphere – to be holy writ. Why, then, can we not understand why Russia might react angrily to our interference in her politics or the politics of former Russian republics? The effect of U.S. expansion of NATO deep into Eastern Europe, U.S. interference in the politics of the former Soviet republics, and U.S. siting of military bases in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia has been to unite Russia and China, and undo the diplomacy of several successive U.S. presidents. How has this made us more secure? If we don't want these people in our backyard, what are we doing in theirs? If we don't stop behaving like the British Empire, we will end up like the British Empire.
Source: http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=8964
Putin the Puppet Master
Vladimir Putin is on a roll. Last month he made it clear that he intends to become Prime Minister -- and keep the reigns of power in the Kremlin -- when his second presidential term ends in March of 2008. Last week in the midst of a bravura “mini-summit” with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mr. Putin wowed the fawning European press by shrugging off a carefully-leaked rumor of an alleged assassination attempt and by speaking fluent German -- a language he mastered as a KGB officer in Dresden during the Cold War. All this apparently took U.S. diplomats and intelligence agencies by surprise. But wait, there’s more. While in Germany, the macho Mr. Putin baldly told reporters -- and therefore all those who might contemplate military action against Tehran, “threatening someone, in this case the Iranian leadership and the Iranian people, will lead nowhere. They are not afraid, believe me.” And just to make sure everyone got his point, two days later he went to Tehran for a “Caspian littoral” summit and reiterated to the world that Russia would block any moves to stop Iran’s nuclear program.
And to ice Mr. Putin’s cake, reputable polls show that more than 70 percent of Russians approve of his leadership. Officials in Washington, London and Paris don’t seem to be worried – but they should be. Mr. Putin’s Tehran gambit is much more than a rhetorical affront to the Bush Administration’s efforts to keep the Iranians from acquiring nuclear weapons. After meetings with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Russian president said, “Iran and Russia are now cooperating on a wide range of issues such as aviation industry and Russia will continue its contribution to Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.” Most of the U.S. and European media “sound-bites” focused on the “nuclear” issue. Some news reports cogently noted that the Russian-built Bushehr light water nuclear reactor is capable of producing weapon’s grade plutonium -- but ignored the arrays of gas centrifuges Iran is using to assure a dual-track approach to building nuclear weapons. Almost no one noticed that the new strategic synergy between Moscow and Tehran goes well beyond Bushehr. First, with petroleum soon to be at $100 per barrel or higher, both Iran and Russia have a financial interest in controlling how Caspian Sea oil makes its way to market. Messer's Putin and Ahmadinejad have now made it clear that they will dictate the terms by which Caspian crude will flow to the highest bidder. Second, Moscow and Tehran share a strategic interest in bad outcomes for the U.S. in Iraq. An American collapse in Mesopotamia gives Iran the kind of regional hegemony that Persians have sought for centuries.
And a precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would confirm Moscow’s assertion that the U.S. is an unreliable partner -- thus undermining NATO’s eastward expansion. Finally -- if the joint statement issued after the so-called Caspian littoral summit is to be believed, Tehran and Moscow have now coerced their neighbors into what amounts to a collective security agreement. According to Mr. Putin, “We are saying that no Caspian nation should offer its territory to third powers for use of force or military aggression against any Caspian state.” Just in case anyone missed the point, Mr. Ahmadinejad added, “The Caspian Sea is an inland sea and it only belongs to the Caspian states, therefore only they are entitled to have their ships and military forces here.” So much for any NATO plans to use air bases in Azerbaijan to launch, recover or re-fuel aircraft striking Iranian nuclear weapons facilities. None of this was forecast by U.S. or allied intelligence agencies. Nor do we know what Presidents Putin and Ahmadinejad discussed in private. We can only hope that Mr. Putin’s “aviation industry” reference doesn’t mean that Iran is about to acquire hundreds of Bal-E anti-shipping missiles or that Tehran is planning to replace its ancient F-14s with a fleet of new Russian-built Su-27s. All we know for certain is that Iran, awash in petro-dollars, can easily afford both and that Moscow is in a selling mood. Importantly, Putin the puppet-master timed all of this to coincide with meetings among U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and their Russian counterparts in Moscow.
According to our State Department, the ostensible purpose of these meetings were to “review security issues of mutual concern in Europe.” To underscore how much we have “misunderestimated” Mr. Putin, President Bush, when asked by reporters what all this might mean to U.S. interests, responded, “I’m looking forward to getting President Putin’s read out from the meeting.” So much for U.S. intelligence and diplomacy.
Source: http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=22930
Russian Analyst Says Putin to Become Monarch of Post-Soviet Space
Professor Igor Panarin, who grabbed headlines last November with his prediction that the United States would disintegrate, told the Izvestia newspaper that numerous factors, including last year's war with Georgia and the weakness of the global financial system, suggest that a new union will emerge around Russia. The new bloc, a result of step-by-step economic integration, would "not be formed on the model of the Soviet Union, but on the model of the European Union...
In describing the leader of such a union, I would use the word that Machiavelli liked to use - a prince," Panarin told the paper."The prince of the post-Soviet space would be Vladimir Putin. His main asset is that, firstly, he has authority among the national elites of the post-Soviet republics, and secondly, has produced effective results in the eight years he has led Russia. Our country is centralized and stable, and last August passed a test of its strength."
He called the August conflict between Russia and Georgia a turning point in Eurasian integration, as "Russia was then seen by the eyes of the world." The Americans and the Chinese decided not to interfere in the conflict, with the result that they lost all influence in the Caucasus region, he said. The conflict also had wider-reaching repercussions, he added. "We can see now that countries have essentially stopped hurling allegations at us, continual attacks. A few days ago the EU admitted that Georgia was wrong in its actions." Russia did not only succeed in ending the genocide in South Ossetia, but also "signed deals on placing military bases," setting the right political and military conditions for "processes of integration in the post-Soviet space." Under the world system envisaged by Panarin, there will be three centers of power - China, the European Union, and the Russia-led "EU-2."
The first to join Russia's union will be Belarus and Kazakhstan, whose president Nursultan Nazarbayev recently proposed a single currency for the region; the rest of the ex-Soviet republics, including eventually the Baltic States, will join later, he said. He noted China's support for Russia's idea of a new global reserve currency. "China should conduct integration in the Pacific region, and Russia in the post-Soviet space, based on their national currencies. The ruble and the yuan could become centers of gravity for the two countries, the basis of the new world super-currency." Panarin said that with the challenges facing the world amid the financial crisis, the process of integration in Eurasia can already be seen.
"The global economic and political system is on the verge of colossal changes. Now is the right time to think about the future of the global architecture - and its contours can already be seen."
"A unique situation is developing. Until recently there were many factors holding back the integration process in the post-Soviet space, but today the logic of the financial crisis demands new actions, which must succeed. In literally the past few days, several breakthrough foreign policy meetings have been held. An agreement was signed in Moscow on integration between Moldova and Transdnestr - the first breakthrough in 10 years. The unprecedentedly long talks between the presidents of Russia and Belarus - this is also no coincidence."
He suggested 2012 as a likely date for the process of forming a new union to be complete, with Putin initially elected for a five-year term. When asked about the current system of leadership in Russia, with Putin as prime minister and Dmitry Medvedev as president, he said it is bound to end soon. "The 'president-premier' system is very unstable for Russia. Our entire history has shown that two centers of power cannot strategically exist for long," he said. Panarin, 50, heads the international relations department at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and has authored several books on information warfare.
Source: http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090401/120860766.html
The West May Yet Come to Regret its Bullying of Russia
Putin has no interest in a new cold war and is struggling to modernise his economy. Yet he is rebuffed and insulted. Countries too have feelings. So I am told by a Russian explaining the recent collapse in relations between Vladimir Putin and his one-time western admirers. "We have done well in the past 15 years, yet we get nothing but rebuffs and insults. Russia's rulers have their pride, you know." The truth is that Putin, like George Bush and Tony Blair, has an urgent date with history. He can plead two terms as president in which he has stabilised, if not deepened, Russian democracy, forced the pace of economic modernisation, suppressed Chechen separatism and yet been remarkably popular. But leaders who dismiss domestic critics crave international opinion, and are unaccustomed to brickbats. Hence Putin's outburst at the Munich security conference this month, when he announced he would "avoid extra politesse" and speak his mind. Putin's apologists ask that he be viewed as victim of an epic miscalculation by the west. Here is a hard man avidly courted at first by Bush, Blair and other western leaders. After 9/11 he tolerated US intervention along his southern border with bases north of Afghanistan. Yet when he had similar trouble in Chechnya, he was roundly abused. When he induced Milosevic to leave Kosovo (which he and not "the bombing" did), he got no thanks. When Putin sought to join Nato in the 1990s he was rebuffed. Then Nato broke its post-cold-war promise and advanced its frontier through the Baltics and Poland to the Black Sea. It is now planning missile defences in Poland and the Czech Republic and is flirting with Ukraine and Georgia. Against whom is this directed, asks Putin.
The west grovels before Opec, but when Putin proposes a gas Opec it cries foul. America seizes Iraq's oil, but when Putin nationalises Russia's oil that, too, is a foul. Meanwhile, every crook, every murdered Russian, every army scandal is blazoned across the western press. True, Russia is still a klepto-oligarchy that steps back as often as forward, but what of America's pet Asian democracies, Afghanistan and Iraq? In his Munich speech Putin asked why America constantly goes on about its "unipolar world". Does Washington really seek a second cold war? Russia is withdrawing from Georgia and Moldova. Why is Nato advancing bases in Bulgaria and Romania? The west is handling Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran with the arrogance and ineptitude of 19th-century imperialists. Is it surprising Russia is seeking allies where it can, in China, India, Iran and the Gulf? At an Anglo-Russian conference in Moscow last weekend I was bemused by the talk of a return to "east-west" confrontation. Diplomats have a habit of listing complaints like marriage counsellors inviting couples to catalogue what most irritates them about each other. The list seems endless, but it surely points to a proper talk rather than a divorce. Don't they really need each other after all? Having visited Russia three times since the demise of the Soviet Union, I remain impressed by its progress. Debate and comment are open. Russia is not squandering its energy wealth but setting $100bn aside in an infrastructure fund. The links between Russia and western business are worth $30bn in inward investment. Cultural and educational contacts are strengthening. Moscow and St Petersburg are booming world cities, their skylines thick with cranes.
The west views pluralist democracy as so superior that any state coming to it fresh must surely welcome it with open arms. When there is backsliding, as in former Yugoslavia, Ukraine, Russia and parts of Africa, let alone the Arab world, the west behaves like a peevish car salesman whose client has not obeyed the repair manual. If the west can do fair elections, market capitalism, press freedom and regional secession - after a mere two centuries of trial and error - why can newly free states not do them overnight? The tough response to Putin is easy. It is the one he has from Washington and Nato. We won the cold war. You lost. Shut up. If, as Russia's top general said last week, you want to withdraw from the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty, then withdraw. If you think gas and oil enables you to play the superpower again, see what happens. Bush and Blair may be screwing up "Islamistan", but their successors will be more canny. Our defence budget is bigger than yours and we have you surrounded. All this makes for good realpolitik. But what Putin actually said in Munich reflected not belligerence but puzzlement at the aggressive course of western diplomacy. In the old days, he said, "there was an equilibrium and a fear of mutual destruction. In those days one party was afraid to make an extra step without consulting the others. This was certainly a fragile peace and a frightening one, but seen from today it was reliable enough. Today it seems that peace is not so reliable."
Putin is hardly seeking a return to the certainties of the cold war. He has no more interest than the west in stirring the hornet's nest of Islamic nationalism, stretching as it does deep into Russian territory. His desire for "ever closer union" with Europe and Nato after 1997 was sincere and was surely welcome. While Putin appears to have been conducting his diplomacy over the past decade from weakness and the west from strength, the reverse has been nearer the truth. Britain and America have been led by essentially reactive politicians with no grasp of history. A terrorist outrage or a bombastic speech and they change policy on the hop. When Bush and Blair go, they will leave a world less secure and more divided in its leadership than when they arrived. Their dismissive treatment of Russia's recovery from cold war defeat has been the rhetoric of natural bullies. Russia and the west have everything to gain from good relations. Putin has struggled to modernise his economy while holding together a traumatised and shrunken Russian federation. The west may feel he errs towards authoritarianism, but second-guessing Russian leaders is seldom a profitable exercise. This is a huge country, rich in natural and human resources. It is hard to think of somewhere the west would be better advised to "hug close". Instead, Putin will hand his successor an isolated and bruised nation. Under a less confident president, it could retreat into protectionism and alliances the west will hate. To have encouraged that retreat is truly stupid.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/st...017668,00.html
Worried About Putin's Russia?: Read on
For the past several years, the Russia of Vladimir Putin has been sending very clear signals that it is no longer the weakened, troubled and Western-dependent state that it was following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia is once again a proud and assertive nation, increasingly recognizable by its actions to historians of its czarist and Communist predecessors. Many will say that its recovery is based on shallow foundations, in fact that it rests almost totally upon the high price of oil and gas - and Russia's fortunate possession of vast supplies of those vital commodities. That is true. But oil revenues, if invested wisely (as has been done by two countries as different as Norway and Dubai during the past decade), can enhance national infrastructure, industrial and technological developments, and military security. Not only is Putin's regime making smart strategic investments - in infrastructure, laboratories, a modernized military - its flow of energy wealth is giving the Kremlin the confidence to pursue assertive foreign policies, secure for the moment in a set of global circumstances that has hobbled the United States, turned the attention of China and India elsewhere (toward growth and internal modernization), and given all the world's oil-producing states immense leverage.
Right now, the list of Moscow's unilateralist actions is probably only exceeded by those of the White House over the past six years. Take an obvious example: Russia uses its veto power on the UN Security Council to support Serbia and crush Kosovo's hopes of independence, just as the United States uses its privilege to protect Israel and block pro-Palestinian resolutions in the world organization. In a similar negative way, Russia controls what the Security Council may, or may not, do regarding actions against Iran and North Korea. The list goes on. Putin's ministers are adept at using what has come to be called "pipeline diplomacy" to force neighbors like Belarus and Ukraine to bend to Moscow's will and recognize their dependence upon Russian energy supplies, and it is clear that this is intended to have a secondary intimidation effect upon the states of Western Europe as well. Estonia and Latvia are browbeaten over what are regarded as anti-Russian acts, such as the removal of Soviet war memorials or treatment of Russian-speaking citizens. Western oil companies are discovering that a contract for control of energy resources is not necessarily viewed by the Moscow government as a sacred legal obligation. Thus, massive international corporations such as BP and Exxon, long regarded as powerful independent actors, are now, literally, being put over the barrel, forced to recognize their weaker bargaining position.
Many of their chief executives must have rubbed their eyes at the reports that Russia has just claimed extensive rights at the North Pole, with implications for rights to the exploitation of seabed energy resources. Moscow seems to be advancing its international claims with about the same speed that it denounces arms-control accords. If all of this is unsettling, it is by no means unusual. Actually, Russia's actions are rather predictable. They are the steps taken by a traditional power elite that, having suffered defeat and humiliation, is now bent upon the recovery of its assets, its authority and its capacity to intimidate. There is nothing in the history of Russia since Ivan the Terrible to suggest that Putin is doing anything new. "Top-down" policies from the Kremlin have a thousand-year provenance. If they seem more noticeable at this moment in time, it may simply be because of two (possibly temporary) factors: the modern world's dependence upon petroleum, and the Bush administration's obsession with Iraq and terrorism. All Putin is doing is walking through an open gate - opened, by and large, by the West. So the reports from Russia that interest me most are not those concerning drone submarines under the Arctic icecap, or putting the screws upon Belarus to pay backdated oil charges. What intrigues me are the broader and more subtle measures being instituted by the Putin regime to enhance national - and, even more, nationalist - pride. They point to something much more purposeful, and potentially quite sinister.
Two examples will have to suffice here: the creation of a patriotic youth movement, and the not-too-subtle rewriting of Russia's school history books. The youth movement called "Nashi" (it translates as "ours") is growing fast, encouraged by government agencies determined to instill the right virtues into the next generation and to use this cadre of ultra-Russianists to buttress Putin's regime against domestic critics. The policies that Nashi advocates are eclectic. Among the main features are reverence for the Fatherland, respect for the family, Russian traditions and marriage, and a detestation of foreigners; it is hard to tell whether American imperialists, Chechen terrorists, or Estonian ingrates are at the bottom of their list of those who threaten the Russian way of life.
Right now, Nashi is training tens of thousands of young diligents; right now, they are in summer camps where they do mass aerobics, discuss "proper" and "corrupt" politics, and receive the necessary education for the struggles to come. Vast numbers have recently been mobilized to harass the British and Estonian ambassadors in Moscow, following Moscow's disputes with those two countries. According to The Financial Times, Nashi is training 60,000 "leaders" to monitor voting and conduct exit polls in elections this coming December and March. I find this all pretty creepy. So, too, are the reports that Putin has personally complimented the authors of a new manual for high school history teachers that seeks to instill a renewed pride in teenagers of their country's past and encourage national solidarity. As a historian, I always shrink from the idea that education ministries should approve some sort of official view of the national past, although I know that bureaucrats from Japan to France do precisely that, that Beijing's leadership would get highly upset if it learned that schools in China could choose their own textbooks, and that American fundamentalists try to put their own clumsy footprint on what children should actually be exposed to.
But it is one thing for French kids to be told about Joan of Arc's heroism or American kids about Paul Revere's midnight ride; everyone is entitled to a Robin Hood or William Tell or two. It's a bit more disturbing to learn that the new Russian history manual teaches that "entry into the club of democratic nations involves surrendering part of your national sovereignty to the U.S." and other such choice contemporary lessons that suggest to Russian teenagers that they face dark forces abroad. What does this all mean? Should oil prices collapse - should pigs fly - then Putin's efforts at a Russian nationalistic renaissance might also tumble. But there is no doubt about the coherence of this plan to rebuild Russian pride and strength from the top down and the bottom up. Over the longer run, the current street agitation against Britain's ambassador and the tearing down of the Estonian flag by Nashi extremists may be obscure footnotes to history. By contrast, the deliberate campaigns to indoctrinate Russian youth and to rewrite the history of the great though terribly disturbed nation that they are inheriting might be much more significant for the unfolding of our 21st century.
Source: http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/.../edkennedy.php
Why Putin Should Scare us
He’s an ethnic nationalist with a mystical sense of Russian destiny. Cold and pragmatic, he won’t play by the world’s rules.
Possessing a clear vision of where he wants to go and the ruthlessness to get there, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is the world's most effective national leader in power. He also might be the most misunderstood. Grasping what Putin's about means recognizing what he isn't about: Despite his KGB past and his remark that the Soviet Union's dissolution was "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th century, Putin isn't nostalgic for communism. By the time he joined the KGB in the mid-1970s, the organization was purely about preserving the power structure — not upholding abstract philosophies. Far from being a Marxist, Putin belongs to a long tradition of aggressive Russian nationalists. A complex man, he's cold-bloodedly pragmatic when planning — as both his rise to power and his preparations for the recent invasion of Georgia demonstrated — yet he's imbued with a mystical sense of Russia's destiny. The ambitious son of a doctrinaire communist father and a devout Orthodox mother, Putin's straight from the novels of Feodor Dostoevski (another son of St. Petersburg)
Putin's combination of merciless calculation and sense of mission echoes an otherwise different figure, Osama bin Laden. In both cases, Western analysts struggle to simplify confounding personalities and end up underestimating them. These aren't madmen but brilliant, driven leaders who flout our rules. Nonetheless, Putin did carry over specific skills from his KGB career: As a former intelligence officer myself, I'm awed by his ability to analyze opponents and anticipate their reactions to his gambits (Russia is, of course, a nation of chess masters). Preparing for the dismemberment of Georgia, the prime minister accurately calculated the behavior of that country's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, of President Bush, of the European Union and of the Russian people. He knew he could get away with it. Putin has a quality found in elite intelligence personnel: the ability to discard all preconceptions when scrutinizing a target. And when he decides to strike, he doesn't look back. This is not good news for his opponents, foreign or domestic. Among the many reasons we misjudge Putin is our insistence on seeing him as "like us." He's not. His stage-management of the Georgia invasion was a perfect example: Western intelligence agencies had been monitoring Russian activities in the Caucasus for years and fully expected a confrontation. Even so, our analysts assumed that Russia wouldn't act during this summer's Olympics, traditionally an interval of peace.
Putin had been conditioned to read the strategic cards differently: The world's attention would be focused on the Games, and key world leaders would be in Beijing, far from their crisis-management staffs. Europe's bureaucrats and senior NATO officials would be on their August vacations. The circumstances were ideal. It has also become a truism that Putin's foolish for relying on oil, gas and mineral revenue while failing to diversify his economy. But Russia's strongman knows what he's doing: He prefers a wealthy government to a wealthy society. Putin can control a handful of oligarchs whose fortunes flow from a narrow range of sources (once Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky sits in prison for crossing the Kremlin), but a diversified economy would decentralize power. Putin's obsession with control — another national tradition — serves an overarching purpose: restoring Russia's greatness. He realizes he can't restore a Soviet Union that sprawled deep into Europe. What he hopes is to reconstruct the empire of the czars, from eastern Poland through Ukraine and the Caucasus to Central Asia. Putin's expansionist model comes from Peter the Great, but his methods resemble those of Ivan the Terrible, not least when it comes to silencing dissent. The main thing the prime minister has salvaged from the Soviet era is the cult of personality. He knows what Russians want — a strong czar — and his approval ratings have exceeded 80%.
Does this ruthless, focused leader have a weakness? Yes: his temper. Despite his icy demeanor, Putin's combustible. He takes rebuffs personally and can act impulsively — and destructively. Instead of lulling Europeans into an ever-greater dependence on Russian gas, he angrily ordered winter shut-offs to Ukraine and Georgia, alarming Western customers. Rather than concealing the Kremlin's cyber-attack capabilities, he unleashed them on tiny Estonia during a tiff over relocating a Soviet-era memorial — alerting NATO. Putin's invasion of Georgia was also personal. In addition to exposing the West's impotence in the region, he meant to punish Georgia's defiant president. The lengths to which Putin was prepared to go in a personal vendetta should worry us all. Such outbursts of temper suggest that Putin's campaign to restore Russia's greatness could end very badly. We needn't take his dispatch of a naval squadron to Venezuela or bomber flights over U.S. Navy carriers seriously — they're staged for his domestic audience and militarily absurd. But Putin's willingness to use naked force against regional democracies suggests that, like so many strongmen before him, he'll ultimately overreach. Meanwhile, our next president will have to cope with this brilliant, dangerous man. That's going to require the experience and skills to exploit every element of our national power; to convince Europe that appeasement will only enlarge Putin's appetite; and to draw clear lines while avoiding drawn guns. Above all, our president will have to take Putin's measure accurately and not indulge in wishful thinking. Managing Putin's Russia could emerge as our No. 1 security challenge.
Source: http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2008/...tin-shoul.html
Putin's Hold on the Russians
BBC News profiles Vladimir Putin, whose presidency has seen Russia make a bold bid to justify its place among the world's most powerful nations.
His face may not adorn the rouble, but Vladimir Putin's image is very much stamped on 21st-Century Russia and its citizens are only too aware that the money lining their pockets was largely minted under his presidency. After the hungry, often desperate years of the Yeltsin era, it is a prosperity few Russians may stop to question. But his critics believe that it has come at the cost of some post-communist democratic freedoms. Mr Putin rapidly ascended the political ladder in 1999 when Boris Yeltsin first made him prime minister, then acting president in his place. The former Federal Security Service (ex-KGB) director's talents and instincts continue to show through: to his admirers he represents order and stability, to his critics - repression and fear. Yet he strikes a chord with those who remember the chaos of the 1990s, when basic machinery of state such as the welfare system virtually seized up and the security forces looked inept. Investor confidence has climbed back since the nadir of the 1998 rouble devaluation, and economic recovery, buoyed by high prices for oil and gas exports, has helped restore a sense of stability not known since communist times. Political opposition is weak, partly because of a genuine feel-good factor but also because his rule has discouraged democratic debate. In the 2000 election, he took 53% of the vote in the first round and, four years later, was re-elected with a landslide majority of 71%. The 2004 ballot result "reflected [Mr Putin's] consistently high public approval rating", outside (OSCE) observers noted, but also talked of the contest's "dearth of meaningful debate and genuine pluralism".
Black belt
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin became a KGB spy after graduating from university, and served in East Germany. He enjoys a macho image, helped by election stunts like flying into Chechnya on a fighter jet in 2000, and his possession of a black belt in Judo. He has been described as a workaholic by his wife and mother of his two daughters, Lyudmila. For many Russian liberals, Mr Putin's KGB past is disturbing, with its authoritarian associations. A decade after Boris Yeltsin famously offered Russia's regions "their fill of sovereignty", Mr Putin brought in a system of presidential envoys seen by some as overseers for elected governors. Putin allies control much of the media and his rule has seen creeping controls over foreign-funded non-government organisations, which largely focus on exposing human rights abuses. The man who sent troops back into Chechnya as prime minister in 1999 has kept it under Moscow's control through military force, direct or proxy, and strict non-negotiation with the rebels. The price has been increasingly violent attacks by the separatists, which reached a horrifying level in 2004 with the Beslan school seizure. Mr Putin's patriotic rhetoric and evident nostalgia for the USSR - he once famously called its collapse "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe" of the 20th Century - play well with much of the public. But the flip side may be a disturbing rise in nationalism, taking its most sinister form in hate crimes directed at ethnic minorities such as African foreign students.
Wielding clout
Mr Putin has gradually eased liberals out of government, often replacing them with harder-line allies or neutrals seen as little more than yes-men. Yeltsin-era "oligarchs" like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky - businessmen who grew rich in the chaos of the first privatisations - have ended up as fugitives living in exile abroad. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once head of oil giant Yukos and Russia's richest man, is now in jail for tax evasion. Mr Putin's Kremlin is accused of abusing its huge energy clout, allegedly punishing fellow ex-Soviet states like Ukraine with price hikes when they lean to the West. Further abroad, Mr Putin allied himself with Washington's "war on terror", comparing Chechen separatists to al-Qaeda, but he also opposed the invasion of Iraq and caused consternation in the US by inviting Hamas to Moscow for talks after their Palestinian election victory. The biggest diplomatic test may still lie ahead, as Iran defies the US with a nuclear programme based largely on Russian technology. Mr Putin is due to leave the Kremlin by 2008 since by law he cannot stand for a third consecutive term. Rather like Boris Yeltsin in 1999, he has no obvious successor but, unlike Russia's first elected president, he has no convincing rival yet. And, following revelations that he is considering a bid for the position of prime minister, it seems Mr Putin may continue to play a central role in Russian politics for years to come.
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/667749.stm
Vladimir Putin Rescued Russia From Disaster: So Let’s Just Leave Him Be
Our correspondent defends the Russian President and his legacy
Yet again President Putin’s fingers are being rapped: he has apparently been trying to hang on to power. Russia’s Constitution was written more or less to Western order, back in the days when free markets and democracy were supposed to reign. Models were consulted. The French one has a president with powers such that the prime minister is a glorified office-boy; but, in Russia, as in the American model, presidents are not supposed to run for office more than twice in case it goes to their heads. Vladimir Putin may retire to run Gazprom but instead, quite astutely, he is finding a way to hang on to power. He can put himself forward as deputy for the reigning party, then become prime minister, and push forward, as nominal president, a man in his mid-sixties whom he can control. Such devices are not at all without precedent in Russia. Moving an older or even an aged man, without ambition, into a high office so that he can be controlled from behind has long origins, beyond even communist times. If Vladimir Putin is finding a way to hang on to power, then he is doing so within the tradition. And the very first thing to be said is that he has been a very successful leader of the country.
Not so long ago, Russia was being written off. Wise persons shook their heads. Moscow was like Berlin in the latter days of the Weimar Republic – Cabaret, complete with rampaging inflation, old women selling their husbands’ medals in the underpasses of the ring roads, prostitutes all over the place (every businessman had his story), a collapsing birthrate, gangster-capitalism raking it in and making whoopee in hotels in Monte Carlo. There was even a school of thought to the effect that the whole of Eurasia was turning into a Latin America: a Slavonic culture disintegrating as the overall Spanish culture of Latin America had done, into oil-rich turbulent Venezuelas on the one side, and weird, atmosphere-poor Bolivias on the other, while wars went ahead between assorted Hondurases and Nicaraguas. Under Putin, Russia has not turned into Latin America. Quite the contrary. Reality on the ground in Russia nowadays is different, and this is not just to do with the recent rise in oil prices. If you go to the provincial towns east and south east of Moscow – Vladimir, say, or Saratov – you can see a successful change going ahead, as people set up businesses such as furniture factories to make up for that lack of consumer goods that marked the old Soviet Union. The university in Saratov has state-of-the-art computers; even agriculture is said to be improving.
The horrors of Chechnya are receding into the past and the International Herald Tribune, not a lover of Putin, recently carried an article about the return of order there: the planes fly back and forth and Grozny is being restored after two decades of vicious nonsense including that horrible massacre of schoolchildren three years ago. Of all things, tourism is being encouraged, and the Chechen insurgency seems to be a horror story of the past. There are other encouraging signs. In old Russia, the Tatars were a very important element, not backward Muslims as was sometimes casually supposed: they were good traders, and their habit of sobriety made them stand out. Now, Tatars have been adding their creative element (two instances that will have British resonance: both Nureyev and Barishnikov are Tatar names, Nur from “light” and Barish from “peace”). The Russians are even marketing an aircraft that will challenge Boeing and Airbus. So if Putin thinks that he has done well by his country he is not wrong, and masses of ordinary Russians agree. Now, Russia is recovering, and is back on the world’s stage. Why should a successful president be held back by some constitutional formality?
There is no real reason for constitutions to be set in tablets of stone. Referendums were staged elsewhere in the old Soviet continent for successful and popular presidents to stay in office, and it is maybe a measure of Putin’s lack of self-confidence that he shrinks from that. Does he really have to fear the criticism of Europeans, let alone Americans, who now seem to be settling into their own pattern of dynastic politics? Of course his regime is not pure, in the approved Scandinavian manner. It has had to deal with horrible problems of terrorism, and no government can ever be entirely without sin in conditions of that sort. But Putin has highlighted an aspect of Russia that anyone in London should recognise. Russia, like Britain, is a country with a capacity for tissue regeneration. In the Seventies, you would have written Britain off. And then, lo and behold, in the Eighties she struck back – many, many things wrong, of course, but back just the same. It is an odd fact that English literature translates best into Russian, and vice versa. Two countries on the European edge, with the same diagonal approach, and very interested in each other. We should not be criticising Putin: rather, encouraging him to stage that referendum.
Not so long ago, Russia was being written off. Wise persons shook their heads. Moscow was like Berlin in the latter days of the Weimar Republic – Cabaret, complete with rampaging inflation, old women selling their husbands’ medals in the underpasses of the ring roads, prostitutes all over the place (every businessman had his story), a collapsing birthrate, gangster-capitalism raking it in and making whoopee in hotels in Monte Carlo. There was even a school of thought to the effect that the whole of Eurasia was turning into a Latin America: a Slavonic culture disintegrating as the overall Spanish culture of Latin America had done, into oil-rich turbulent Venezuelas on the one side, and weird, atmosphere-poor Bolivias on the other, while wars went ahead between assorted Hondurases and Nicaraguas. Under Putin, Russia has not turned into Latin America. Quite the contrary. Reality on the ground in Russia nowadays is different, and this is not just to do with the recent rise in oil prices. If you go to the provincial towns east and south east of Moscow – Vladimir, say, or Saratov – you can see a successful change going ahead, as people set up businesses such as furniture factories to make up for that lack of consumer goods that marked the old Soviet Union. The university in Saratov has state-of-the-art computers; even agriculture is said to be improving.
The horrors of Chechnya are receding into the past and the International Herald Tribune, not a lover of Putin, recently carried an article about the return of order there: the planes fly back and forth and Grozny is being restored after two decades of vicious nonsense including that horrible massacre of schoolchildren three years ago. Of all things, tourism is being encouraged, and the Chechen insurgency seems to be a horror story of the past. There are other encouraging signs. In old Russia, the Tatars were a very important element, not backward Muslims as was sometimes casually supposed: they were good traders, and their habit of sobriety made them stand out. Now, Tatars have been adding their creative element (two instances that will have British resonance: both Nureyev and Barishnikov are Tatar names, Nur from “light” and Barish from “peace”). The Russians are even marketing an aircraft that will challenge Boeing and Airbus. So if Putin thinks that he has done well by his country he is not wrong, and masses of ordinary Russians agree. Now, Russia is recovering, and is back on the world’s stage. Why should a successful president be held back by some constitutional formality?
There is no real reason for constitutions to be set in tablets of stone. Referendums were staged elsewhere in the old Soviet continent for successful and popular presidents to stay in office, and it is maybe a measure of Putin’s lack of self-confidence that he shrinks from that. Does he really have to fear the criticism of Europeans, let alone Americans, who now seem to be settling into their own pattern of dynastic politics? Of course his regime is not pure, in the approved Scandinavian manner. It has had to deal with horrible problems of terrorism, and no government can ever be entirely without sin in conditions of that sort. But Putin has highlighted an aspect of Russia that anyone in London should recognise. Russia, like Britain, is a country with a capacity for tissue regeneration. In the Seventies, you would have written Britain off. And then, lo and behold, in the Eighties she struck back – many, many things wrong, of course, but back just the same. It is an odd fact that English literature translates best into Russian, and vice versa. Two countries on the European edge, with the same diagonal approach, and very interested in each other. We should not be criticising Putin: rather, encouraging him to stage that referendum.
Source: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/com...cle2582598.ece
Russia's foreign policy under Vladimir Putin: achievements and failures
1. Russia regained its status as a leading world power. Economic revival and stable economic growth have increased Russia's international prestige. Some countries like Russia and other countries don't; some are helping it to spread its influence and others are resisting it. Its views now carry far more weight in the international arena than they did in the 1990s, when Moscow's opinion on international crises was generally ignored. This goal has been achieved without a substantial increase in nuclear or other capacities, or not only due to such increases. Russia's increased importance as an exporter of oil and gas also played a role, along with the inclusion of Russia in the group of the most rapidly developing emerging economies (the BRIC, comprising Brazil, Russia, India and China). One more important factor was the rehabilitation of the "sick man of Europe," which many people did not expect to see.
2. Restoration of Russians' self-confidence. A nation's well-being is a key element of its coexistence with other nations and a crucial goal of its foreign policy. Today all Russians, whether at home or abroad, from ambassadors to tourists, feel that they are citizens of a large, strong, growing and respected state. In the 1990s, it was said that Russia was governed from Spaso House, the U.S. ambassadorial residence in Moscow. Today every Russian and foreigner knows that Moscow may disagree with Washington, or other capitals, on foreign or domestic issues, and uphold its stance without facing negative consequences. Few states can do this now.
3. Resistance to the wave of color revolutions in neighboring states. When manipulations of public opinion during elections brought anti-Russian regimes to power in neighboring states, some people thought that this would provoke the dissolution of the CIS and an economic and political crisis in Russia. They were disappointed. A failed "tulip revolution" in Kyrgyzstan, accompanied by chaos and pogroms in the capital, frightened the local political elites and population but strengthened Russia's stance in Central Asia. The color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia lost their appeal following subsequent negative events there. Russia's foreign policy emerged as the victor in these crises because it reacted calmly to them, proving that sometimes it is better to do nothing.
4. Preservation of integration mechanisms (CIS, CSTO, etc.) and establishment of new ones (SCO). Russia's policy towards the former Soviet states during the 1990s was unsustainable and bound to change, as became evident at the beginning of Vladimir Putin's first presidential term. The only question was what policy would replace it. It became clear over the last eight years that the majority of post-Soviet states need some CIS functions and mechanisms, and so they are being reformed. At the same time, the military union of several CIS states - the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) - was preserved, and Russia is changing the post-Soviet policy of supplying cheap energy to political allies. It is developing new relations with Kazakhstan and a new model of international cooperation in Central Asia, which involves not only the former Soviet states in the region but also China (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization). Foreign policy in the post-Soviet space is being increasingly split into a Western and a Central Asian policy, which are quite separate and, therefore, more realistic.
5. Restoration of lost positions in traditional zones of influence (Vietnam, the Middle East, India, China) and development of ties with new partners (Latin American countries). In the 1990s, Russia's foreign policy lost its global reach. Partner relations established in the Soviet era were broken and foreign trade shrank, while pro-market reforms in Russia put trade in the hands of private business, for the first time in decades. The Russian authorities in the 1990s did not have a clearly defined view of economic and political goals in different parts of the world. The situation changed under Putin, with state-controlled and private businesses establishing ties in nearly all countries, supported by a special policy of promoting their interests.
Failures:
1. Inability to become the top partner of close neighbors such as China and India. Russia's economy was not strong enough to become the leading influence even in countries that would have welcomed this. The era of unions formed for political reasons is over, and the ability of business to become a competitive leader in foreign markets is now crucial. Russian business has neither the experience nor the resources for attaining this goal. Russia is not the top partner for any of its main economic partners (such as Germany and China, as well as the CIS, notably Kazakhstan). At best, it is one of their 10 largest partners. This has weakened Russia's ties, including political ones, with these states.
2. Inability to become a global leader in lifestyle, culture and arts. This is not only a failure of Russian foreign policy. We must admit that Russia today cannot do what the Soviet Union did in the sphere of winning hearts and minds abroad. The territory in which the Russian-language is spoken is shrinking, and the prestige of Russian culture and arts abroad is declining. In this sphere Russia's foreign policy (or rather, related sectors) is lagging far behind many other countries, which have a multitude of technologies to promote their cultures beyond their national borders.
3. Inability to elaborate an effective policy of relations with the Russian diaspora abroad. New ideas appeared in that sphere in the early 1980s, but to this day the millions of Russians living abroad have not become drivers of Russia's development in economic and other spheres, unlike the Chinese and Indian diasporas.
4. Loss of influence in Georgia and Ukraine. Moscow proved unable to mobilize the seemingly huge resources of goodwill in neighboring states, including those with a large ethnic Russian population. Moreover, it has taken actions that worsened the position of its supporters in those countries, and the situation was further complicated by the successful actions of its opponents. It apparently caught the "American disease" - an over zealous feeling of righteousness and renewed strength. A stark example is sanctions against Georgia, which infuriated Georgians, even those who were dissatisfied with their government's policies.
5. Defeat on the market for military-technical cooperation (Algeria, India). During the 1990s, this sphere of international cooperation kept afloat nearly half of Russia's foreign policy, notably its relations with countries with which trade was lagging, such as China. It was seen as the core of a new model for foreign trade based on the export of technologies rather than raw materials. The volume of military exports increased in the early 2000s, but other arms suppliers also stepped up competition. However, this cannot be said to be the only reason that buyers of Russian-made weapons and equipment often refuse to take delivery of them and complain of unjustified delays. The never-ending reforms in the sector have not brought the desired goal of improving the prestige of Russian-made weapons any closer.
Source: http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080228/100269538.html
Texas Blogger’s ‘Man Crush’ on Putin Leads to Lengthy Heart to Heart
Gayne C. Young, a high school English teacher from Fredericksburg, Tex., is not a specialist in foreign policy. The blog he writes for Outdoor Life, a magazine for hunters and fishermen, focuses on subjects like his Labrador puppy, unusually large carp and a subdivision near his home that has been overrun by feral hogs.
Nonetheless, last week Mr. Young scored a journalistic coup, publishing a lengthy written interview with Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Young approached the Russian government last year after blogging repeatedly about his “man crush” on Mr. Putin, and the questions he sent the Russian prime minister were, shall we say, softballs. They included, “Are there Yetis or Russian ‘wood goblins’ in the taiga?” and “Are you the coolest man in politics?”
The decision to grant the interview appears to be part of an attempt by Mr. Putin to soften his image in the West. During the three years since Mr. Putin entered a power-sharing arrangement with President Dmitri A. Medvedev, the president has been cast as the smiling face of a “reset” in the relations with the United States. In the eyes of Western observers, that has left Mr. Putin as the bad cop, which could pose a problem if he decides to return to the presidency next spring.
Nonetheless, last week Mr. Young scored a journalistic coup, publishing a lengthy written interview with Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Young approached the Russian government last year after blogging repeatedly about his “man crush” on Mr. Putin, and the questions he sent the Russian prime minister were, shall we say, softballs. They included, “Are there Yetis or Russian ‘wood goblins’ in the taiga?” and “Are you the coolest man in politics?”
The decision to grant the interview appears to be part of an attempt by Mr. Putin to soften his image in the West. During the three years since Mr. Putin entered a power-sharing arrangement with President Dmitri A. Medvedev, the president has been cast as the smiling face of a “reset” in the relations with the United States. In the eyes of Western observers, that has left Mr. Putin as the bad cop, which could pose a problem if he decides to return to the presidency next spring.
“There is some truth in this argument, and I think Putin has realized he needs to care about his image in the West,” said Alexander Rahr, a Russia specialist at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “The only argument which really speaks for Medvedev is this Western thing. That is his trump card. Putin has to counter it.”
The Outdoor Life interview — at times an exercise in mutual back-slapping — is not likely to have much impact, especially since it was released the same day as a much-anticipated news conference by Mr. Medvedev. But it does show Mr. Putin trying to present himself in a softer, more friendly light. In between discussions of tiger poaching, Ernest Hemingway and the fragility of human existence, Mr. Putin tells Mr. Young that the United States and Russia have been powerfully drawn to each other since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The recent improvement in relations “seems to point to the fact that the vast majority of barriers between our peoples were unnaturally and artificially forced upon them,” Mr. Putin said. “Ordinary people always want to live in peace rather than in war and to be able to freely socialize, interact and make friends, if you wish. For too long, we had been cruelly held apart from each other, so it was only natural that the fall of the Iron Curtain generated a huge wave of interest toward Russia.”
Mr. Putin also plays up his image as an avatar of manliness, which has been established by photos of him riding shirtless on horseback, shooting a tiger with a tranquilizer gun or offering judo instructions. Asked about an episode last summer, when he shot a dart at the exposed back of a gray whale from a rubber dinghy, Mr. Putin drifted into Hemingway territory.
“All that surrounded me — the low sky, the stormy sea and, of course, the whales — was magnificent,” he said. “Besides, these elegant giants showed us a real performance, leaping out of the water in front of our boat.”
On that occasion, a reporter asked Mr. Putin whether it was dangerous, and the prime minister responded, “Living in general is dangerous.” In the Outdoor Life interview, he elaborated, saying that a human being is “still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth,” barraged by disease, disaster and criminality. “However, this is not a reason to hide away from life,” he said. “One can truly enjoy his or her life only while experiencing it, and it is inevitably related to a certain level of risk.”
It was the gray whale episode that especially captivated Mr. Young, 42. After he began writing about his “man crush,” his blog hits grew so high that his editors asked him for more, and he published an open letter to the prime minister proposing that the two men go hunting together.
Before long, Mr. Young was communicating with the press attaché in the Russian Embassy in Washington and with Ketchum, a public relations firm that represents Russia. “My editors were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ ” Mr. Young said. But early in the spring, he was told that Mr. Putin was in the process of answering Mr. Young’s questions — at considerable length. The draft originally sent to Outdoor Life was almost 8,000 words long and had to be edited down by almost 3,000 words, Mr. Young said.
“I got to tell you, I’m more in love with the guy than ever,” he said. In an interview from his home in Texas, Mr. Young said Outdoor Life was hoping to send him to Russia to go fishing with Mr. Putin, who is not a keen hunter. It seemed Mr. Young’s ardor does not extend to Mr. Medvedev, since a mention of the Russian president’s name was met with silence on the other end of the line. “You’re going to have to remind me who that is,” Mr. Young said.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/world/europe/22russia.html
Putin Says Russia is the "Guardian of Christianity"
Russia is "the guardian of Christianity," President Vladimir Putin said Monday, following a visit to a monastery in the Solovki islands, in the White sea, Russian agencies reported. Recalling that his country was traditionally known as "Saint Russia," Putin said the "country is bestowed with a special role as the guardian of Christianity." Without the Orthodox religion, "Russia would have difficulty in becoming a viable state. It is thus very important to return to this source," said the former head of the KGB -- which massively persecuted the clergy and faithful during the Soviet era. But Russian leaders have once again given prominence to the Orthodox church, after decades in which atheism was imposed by the Communist rulers. Putin rarely misses an opportunity to make public church appearances. The Solovki monastery is famous not only as a place of pilgrimage, but also for housing one of the Soviet Union's first prison camps. According to the president, the Orthodox church, unlike the Roman Catholics during medieval times, has always insisted on the equality of all peoples before god. "Our spiritual prayers have taught us over the centuries to respect all peoples. It is important to remember that today," said Putin. Human rights activists have denounced Moscow's discrimination against minority groups, particularly those from the Caucasus. Russia forces have fought two wars against Chechen separatists. People from the Caucasus are frequently labeled "black arses" by the population. Putin is currently on holiday in the north of the country.
Source: http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b82fce1464b.htm
Putin’s Grasp of Energy Drives Russian Agenda
The titans of Russia’s energy industry gathered around an enormous map showing the route of a proposed new pipeline in Siberia. It would cost billions and had been years in the planning. After listening to their presentation, President Vladimir V. Putin frowned, got up from his chair, whipped out a felt pen and redrew the map right in front of the embarrassed executives, who quickly agreed that he was right. The performance, which was carried on state television in 2006, was obviously stage managed, but there was nothing artificial about its point. It was a typical performance for a leader who has shown an uncanny mastery of the economics, politics and even technical details of the energy business that goes well beyond a politician taking an interest in an important national industry.
“I would describe it as very much his personal project,” said Clifford G. Gaddy, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington and an expert in Russia’s energy policy. “It is the heart of what he has done from the very beginning.”
Indeed, from his earliest days in power in 2000, Mr. Putin, who left the presidency in 2008 and became prime minister, decided natural resource exports and energy in particular would not only finance the country’s economic rebirth but also help restore Russia’s lost greatness after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Just this month, Mr. Putin’s personal immersion in the topic was on full display as he ordered natural gas shut off to Ukraine, in the process cutting supplies to Europe. It was portrayed by the Kremlin as a protracted commercial dispute with Ukraine. But the hundreds of thousands of shivering gas customers in the Balkans and Eastern Europe sent an unmistakable message about the Continent’s reliance on Russian supplies — and Mr. Putin’s willingness to wield energy as a political weapon. When talking about energy, he often rattles off obscure statistics not often heard outside a Houston boardroom, like average daily production of fields and throughput capacity of pipelines.
Mr. Putin “clearly knows as much about BP’s business in Russia as I do,” Anthony B. Hayward, BP’s chief executive, once said after a meeting with him. In fact, the standoff in Ukraine was just one part of a far larger Russian playbook on natural gas policy under Mr. Putin. In the past year, Russia has formed a cartel-like group with Middle Eastern nations with the goal of dampening global competition in natural gas, sewn up sources of supply in Central Asia and North Africa with long-term contracts to thwart competitors and used its military to occupy an important pipeline route in Georgia. And this broader struggle extends over a dozen countries from Azerbaijan to Austria. In its sprawl and slow pace, it is often compared to the 19th-century struggle for colonial possession in Central Asia known as the Great Game. In the modern variant, Mr. Putin, a master strategist, has proved far more effective than his European counterparts.
“He has been thinking for some time, ‘What are the means and tools at Russia’s disposal, to make Russia great?’ ” said Lilia Shevtsova, a researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center. In the post-Soviet world, she said, Mr. Putin concluded that “military power would no longer be sufficient.”
A spokesman for Mr. Putin, Dmitri S. Peskov, said that the energy market “was, is and will remain a strategic sphere for Russia” and that government leaders in Moscow should be versed in the topic. Mr. Peskov denied the Kremlin used exports for political purposes. Of Mr. Putin’s deep personal knowledge of the business, he said the prime minister showed a similar attention to detail in other matters, too. In this contest, Russia’s overarching goal is to prevent the West from breaking a monopoly on natural gas pipelines from Asia to Europe. Boris E. Nemtsov, a former Russian first deputy prime minister who is now in the opposition, said: “It is the typical behavior of the monopolist. The monopolist fears competition.”
As they did two years ago after a similar supply disruption, European officials have promised in the wake of the Ukraine dispute to take steps to diversify the Continent’s sources of gas to end its reliance on Russia, which supplies nearly 30 percent of the total. European dependence is expected to grow as North Sea gas fields decline. At a conference in Budapest on Tuesday, Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek of the Czech Republic called for a renewed effort to build the long-delayed Nabucco pipeline to bring Central Asian gas to Europe without passing through Russian territory. But there is a reason the project has never gotten off the ground: as determined as Europe is to end its reliance on Russian gas, Mr. Putin is equally adamant about extending it.
The Nabucco pipeline was proposed in 2002 by executives from European energy companies with the express intent of undercutting Russia’s gas monopoly. It would pass through Turkey and Georgia to the Caspian Sea. Under the best of circumstances, building an international pipeline is an intricate and arduous process, technically, financially and politically. However, Nabucco’s planners rapidly discovered that their biggest obstacle was not a mountain chain or a corrupt local politician, but Mr. Putin himself. When OMV, the Austrian energy company, formally created a consortium for Nabucco in 2005, he responded with a competing idea: a pipeline called South Stream that would terminate at the same gas storage site in Austria, but originate in Russia and bypass Ukraine by traveling under the Black Sea.
In a contest often compared to chess, this Russian countermove, like all good chess moves, was both offensive and defensive. To pay the hefty upfront construction costs, a pipeline needs both an assured source of supply and a market for the gas it transports. The South Stream pipeline would flood the gas market in southeastern Europe, locking up the customers the bankers behind Nabucco were counting on to finance the project. At the same time it would undermine Ukraine’s domination of gas lines headed west, one of the biggest obstacles to Russian domination of the European gas market. But Mr. Putin did not stop there. Leaving nothing to chance, he also took steps to choke off potential sources of upstream gas supplies deep in Central Asia.
The race to secure these rich sources of natural gas unexpectedly accelerated in 2006 with the death of the eccentric and isolationist dictator of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov. While energy executives around the world rushed to Ashgabat, the Turkmen capital, to meet the new leader, Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, a former dentist, Mr. Putin was the first to cut a big deal. Smiling and holding shovels at a televised ceremony to mark the start of construction, Mr. Putin and Mr. Berdymukhammedov agreed in 2007 to build a pipeline north, to Russia, depriving Nabucco of potential supply. It was not until 2008 that European Union officials got to Ashgabat with a memorandum of understanding for a trans-Caspian pipeline that could link to Nabucco. It has yet to be acted upon.
Farther west, it was the same story. In February 2008, Mr. Putin signed an agreement with Bulgaria — over the objections of the United States and in spite of Bulgaria’s status as a new NATO member — making it a partner in the South Stream pipeline. And in April 2008, Mr. Putin was in Athens, cutting a deal for a spur of South Stream. In this flurry of diplomacy he again beat his Western opponents. The United States State Department’s point man on Eurasian pipelines, Matthew J. Bryza, in Athens the next day, could only rue the signed deal. Mr. Bryza was left explaining to the Greeks: “If you have only one supplier of feta, you’re in a vulnerable position. The same for gas.” The West still had an important pipeline partner in Georgia, a critical geographical link. But that all but evaporated in the brief war last summer.
By 2007, a pipeline section had been laid across Georgia, the Baku-Erzurum pipeline, which is now used for local distribution but will become a part of the Nabucco pipeline, if it is ever built. This brought the struggle for Nabucco to a pivotal stage, for it was now playing out along a storied trade route in the petroleum business, and one highly sensitive to the Russians. In the 19th century the Rothschild banking family and the Nobel brothers of Sweden had built a railroad and pipeline across Georgia to sell Baku oil, undercutting the near monopoly in the business, Standard Oil of the United States, which was supplying Europe with kerosene produced in America.
After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the revival of this pre-Bolshevik energy corridor became a major foreign policy goal of the United States, intended to strengthen the economic independence of former Soviet states and diversify world oil supplies away from the Middle East. At a narrow point, the pipeline route passes just south of the Russian-controlled enclave of South Ossetia and north of another Russian ally, Armenia. The August war sent a chill through boardrooms in the West when, for example, Russian tanks scurried back and forth over one of the buried pipelines and one crew occupied a pumping station. Russia, said Svante Cornell, a specialist on Central Asia and the Caucasus at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, sent a simple message: “We can blow this up at any time.”
While his track record is very strong, Mr. Putin is not infallible. Last summer he made a rare mistake by locking in long-term contracts for Central Asian gas at close to the height of the market — $340 for 1,000 cubic meters in 2009. While Mr. Putin achieved his goal of depriving Nabucco of more potential sources, Russia is now selling that gas in a down market to Ukraine for an average of less than $240 per 1,000 cubic meters — one possible reason, energy experts have said, that Mr. Putin tried to force Ukraine to pay more for gas this winter. Despite its best intentions, Europe is likely to remain dependent on Russian energy supplies for the foreseeable future and, perhaps, indefinitely if Mr. Putin has his way. And that reflects his long-held beliefs.
As far back as 1997, while serving as deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Mr. Putin earned a graduate degree in economics, writing his thesis on the economics of natural resources. Later, when scholars at the Brookings Institution analyzed the text, they found 16 pages had been copied without attribution from a 1978 American business school textbook called “Strategic Planning and Policy,” by David I. Cleland and William R. King of the University of Pittsburgh. Mr. Putin has declined to comment on the allegation. Tellingly, the passages they say were plagiarized relate to the indispensable role of a chief executive in planning within a corporation — the need for one man to have strategic vision and control.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/29/wo...tml?ref=europe
"What is a 'unipolar’ world?
It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign--- one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within. It has nothing in common with democracy, which is the power of the majority in respect to the interests and opinions of the minority. In Russia, we are constantly being lectured about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves." Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address to the Munich Conference on Security Policy 2-10-07
The deployment of the US Missile Defense System in Eastern Europe is a de-facto declaration of war on the Russian Federation. As Russian President Putin said in a recent press conference, "If this missile system is put in place, it will work automatically with the entire nuclear capability of the United States. It will be an integral part of the US nuclear capability." This will disrupt the current configuration of international security and force Russia to begin work on a new regime of tactical nuclear weapons. This is a very serious development. Russia will now have to rethink its current policy vis a vis the United States and develop a long-range strategy for fending off further hostile encroachments into former-Soviet states by NATO.
Welcome to the new Cold War.
Putin cannot ignore the gravity of the proposed system or the threat it poses to Russia’s national security. Bush’s Missile Defense is not defensive at all, but offensive. It thrusts US military bases--with nuclear infrastructure and radar--up to Russia’s doorstep giving the US a clear advantage in "first-strike" capability. That means that Washington will be able to intimidate Russia on issues that are of critical international importance. Putin cannot allow this. He must force Bush to remove this dagger held to Moscow’s throat.
Bush’s Pyrrhic Victory at the G-8
The central issues on the docket at the G-8 meetings were downplayed in the media. The press primarily focused its attention on the "anticipated" conflict between Bush and Putin. But, the brouhaha never materialized; both were respectful and gracious. President Bush, however, was adamant that his plan for missile defense in Czechoslovakia and Poland would go ahead according to schedule. Putin, for the most part remained politely silent. His objections were censored in the media. But less than 10 hours after the closing ceremonies of the G-8, Putin fired off the first salvo in what will certainly be remembered as "the war that brought down the Empire".
Putin addressed 200 corporate leaders at the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg and his comments left little doubt that he had already settled on a plan for countering Bush’s missile shield in the Czech Republic. Putin’s speech articulated his vision of a "Moscow-centered" new world order which would create a ``new balance of power''--less dependent on Washington. He said, ``The new architecture of economic relations requires a completely new approach. Russia intends to become an alternative global financial center and to make the ruble a reserve currency for central banks."
"The world is changing before our eyes.'' Countries that yesterday seemed hopelessly behind are today the fastest growing economies of the world. Institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the IMF are ``archaic, undemocratic and inflexible''. They don’t `` reflect the new balance of power.''
Putin's speech is defiant rejection of the present system. We can be sure that it has not passed unnoticed by anxious mandarins in the US political establishment. Russia is announcing the beginning of an asymmetrical war; designed to cripple the United States economically, weaken the institutions which have traditionally enhanced its wealth, and precipitate a shift of global power away from Washington. Putin’s challenge to the US dollar is particularly worrisome. He emphasizes the inherent unfairness of the current system, which relies almost entirely on the dollar and which has an extremely negative effect on many smaller countries’ economies and financial reserves. "There can be only one answer to this challenge," he said. "The creation of several world currencies and several financial centers."
Putin’s remarks are a direct attack on the dollar and its position as the de facto international currency. He imagines a world where goods and resources are traded in rubles or "baskets of currencies"--not just greenbacks. This would create greater parity between the countries and, hence, a more even distribution of power. Putin's vision is a clear threat to America’s ongoing economic dominance. Already, in the last few months, Norway, Iran, Syria, UAE, Kuwait, and Venezuela have announced that they are either cutting back on their USD reserves or converting from the greenback to the euro or a "basket of currencies". Dollar hegemony is at the very center of American power, and yet, the downturn is visible everywhere. If the dollar loses its place as the world’s "reserve currency"; the US will have to pay-down its monstrous current account deficit and live within its means. America will lose the ability to simply print fiat money and use it in exchange for valuable resources and manufactured goods. Putin is now openly challenging the monetary-system that provides the flow of oxygen to the American superpower.
Can he carry it off?
What kind of damage can Russia really inflict on the dollar or on the many lofty-sounding organizations (WTO, World Bank, IMF, NATO and Federal Reserve) which prop up the US Empire? Russia’s power is mushrooming. Its GDP is leaping ahead at 8% per annum and by 2020 Russia will be among the five biggest economies in the world. It now has the third largest Forex reserves in the world and it is gradually moving away from the anemic dollar to euros and rubles. Nearly 10% of its wealth is currently in gold. Russia has also overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading supplier of petroleum. It produces 13% of the world’s daily output and has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. In fact, Putin has worked energetically to create the world’s first Natural Gas cartel—an alliance between Russia, Qatar, Iran and Algeria. The group could potentially control 40% of the world’s remaining natural gas and set prices as it sees fit. Putin’s ambitions are not limited to the energy sector either---although he has strengthened the country by turning away foreign investment and "re-nationalization" vital resources. As Pavel Korduban says in his recent article "Putin Harvests Political Dividends from Russian Economic Dynamism"; Putin intends to expand beyond energy and focus on technological modernization:
"The shift in official discourse to "innovations" reflects an attempt to reorient economic policy from the goal of consolidating the status of "energy superpower" to the emphasis on industrial modernization and catching up with the technological revolution. The key role in formulating this new policy is given to Sergei Ivanov, who promised that by the year 2020 Russia would gain leadership (measured as 10% of the world market) in such high-technology sectors as nuclear energy, shipbuilding, aircraft, satellites and delivery systems, and computer software." Putin has also strengthened ties with his Central Asian neighbors and engaged in "cooperative" military maneuvers with China.
"Last month it signed deals with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to revive the Soviet-era united system of gas pipelines, which will help Russia strengthen its role of the monopoly supplier from the region". (Reuters) He has transformed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) into a formidable economic-military alliance capable of resisting foreign intervention in Central Asia by the United States and NATO. The CIS is bound to play a major role in regional issues as the real motives behind the "war on terror" are exposed and America's geopolitical objectives in Central Asia become clearer. So far, Washington has established its military bases and outposts throughout the region with impunity. But the mood is darkening in Moscow and Beijing and there may be changes in the future. We should also remember that Putin is surrounded by ex-KGB agents and Soviet-era hardliners. They’ve never trusted America's motives and now they can point to the new US bases, the "colored-coded" revolutions, the broken treaties and the projected missile defense system--to prove that Uncle Sam is "up to no good".
Putin sees himself as leading a global insurgency against the US Empire. He represents the emerging-market economies of China, India and Brazil. These 4 nations will progressively overtake the "old order". Last year 60% of the world's output was produced outside the G-7 countries. According to Goldman Sachs, by 2050 Brazil, Russia, India and China will be the world's leading economies. The transition from "superpower rule" is already underway. The centers of geopolitical power are shifting like giant tectonic plates. The trend is irreversible. The deployment of Bush’s missile defense system will only hasten the decline of the "unipolar-model" by triggering an asymmetrical war, where Forex reserves, vital resources and political maneuvering will be used as the weapons-of-choice. War with Russia is pointless and preventable. There are better choices than confrontation.
Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...xt=va&aid=6125
One might be tempted to regard Russian premier V. Putin's paper “A new integration project for Eurasia: The future in the making”, which saw the light of day in Izvestia on October 3, 2011, as the presidential front-runner's sketchily laid out program, but upon scrutiny that appears to be only one part of a wider picture. The opinion piece momentarily ignited wide-scale controversy in and outside of Russia and highlighted the ongoing clash of positions on global development…
Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27015
Putin’s War-Whoop: The Impending Clash With Russia
"What is a 'unipolar’ world?
It is world in which there is one master, one sovereign--- one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within. It has nothing in common with democracy, which is the power of the majority in respect to the interests and opinions of the minority. In Russia, we are constantly being lectured about democracy. But for some reason those who teach us do not want to learn themselves." Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address to the Munich Conference on Security Policy 2-10-07
The deployment of the US Missile Defense System in Eastern Europe is a de-facto declaration of war on the Russian Federation. As Russian President Putin said in a recent press conference, "If this missile system is put in place, it will work automatically with the entire nuclear capability of the United States. It will be an integral part of the US nuclear capability." This will disrupt the current configuration of international security and force Russia to begin work on a new regime of tactical nuclear weapons. This is a very serious development. Russia will now have to rethink its current policy vis a vis the United States and develop a long-range strategy for fending off further hostile encroachments into former-Soviet states by NATO.
Welcome to the new Cold War.
Putin cannot ignore the gravity of the proposed system or the threat it poses to Russia’s national security. Bush’s Missile Defense is not defensive at all, but offensive. It thrusts US military bases--with nuclear infrastructure and radar--up to Russia’s doorstep giving the US a clear advantage in "first-strike" capability. That means that Washington will be able to intimidate Russia on issues that are of critical international importance. Putin cannot allow this. He must force Bush to remove this dagger held to Moscow’s throat.
Bush’s Pyrrhic Victory at the G-8
The central issues on the docket at the G-8 meetings were downplayed in the media. The press primarily focused its attention on the "anticipated" conflict between Bush and Putin. But, the brouhaha never materialized; both were respectful and gracious. President Bush, however, was adamant that his plan for missile defense in Czechoslovakia and Poland would go ahead according to schedule. Putin, for the most part remained politely silent. His objections were censored in the media. But less than 10 hours after the closing ceremonies of the G-8, Putin fired off the first salvo in what will certainly be remembered as "the war that brought down the Empire".
Putin addressed 200 corporate leaders at the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg and his comments left little doubt that he had already settled on a plan for countering Bush’s missile shield in the Czech Republic. Putin’s speech articulated his vision of a "Moscow-centered" new world order which would create a ``new balance of power''--less dependent on Washington. He said, ``The new architecture of economic relations requires a completely new approach. Russia intends to become an alternative global financial center and to make the ruble a reserve currency for central banks."
"The world is changing before our eyes.'' Countries that yesterday seemed hopelessly behind are today the fastest growing economies of the world. Institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the IMF are ``archaic, undemocratic and inflexible''. They don’t `` reflect the new balance of power.''
Putin's speech is defiant rejection of the present system. We can be sure that it has not passed unnoticed by anxious mandarins in the US political establishment. Russia is announcing the beginning of an asymmetrical war; designed to cripple the United States economically, weaken the institutions which have traditionally enhanced its wealth, and precipitate a shift of global power away from Washington. Putin’s challenge to the US dollar is particularly worrisome. He emphasizes the inherent unfairness of the current system, which relies almost entirely on the dollar and which has an extremely negative effect on many smaller countries’ economies and financial reserves. "There can be only one answer to this challenge," he said. "The creation of several world currencies and several financial centers."
Putin’s remarks are a direct attack on the dollar and its position as the de facto international currency. He imagines a world where goods and resources are traded in rubles or "baskets of currencies"--not just greenbacks. This would create greater parity between the countries and, hence, a more even distribution of power. Putin's vision is a clear threat to America’s ongoing economic dominance. Already, in the last few months, Norway, Iran, Syria, UAE, Kuwait, and Venezuela have announced that they are either cutting back on their USD reserves or converting from the greenback to the euro or a "basket of currencies". Dollar hegemony is at the very center of American power, and yet, the downturn is visible everywhere. If the dollar loses its place as the world’s "reserve currency"; the US will have to pay-down its monstrous current account deficit and live within its means. America will lose the ability to simply print fiat money and use it in exchange for valuable resources and manufactured goods. Putin is now openly challenging the monetary-system that provides the flow of oxygen to the American superpower.
Can he carry it off?
What kind of damage can Russia really inflict on the dollar or on the many lofty-sounding organizations (WTO, World Bank, IMF, NATO and Federal Reserve) which prop up the US Empire? Russia’s power is mushrooming. Its GDP is leaping ahead at 8% per annum and by 2020 Russia will be among the five biggest economies in the world. It now has the third largest Forex reserves in the world and it is gradually moving away from the anemic dollar to euros and rubles. Nearly 10% of its wealth is currently in gold. Russia has also overtaken Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading supplier of petroleum. It produces 13% of the world’s daily output and has the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. In fact, Putin has worked energetically to create the world’s first Natural Gas cartel—an alliance between Russia, Qatar, Iran and Algeria. The group could potentially control 40% of the world’s remaining natural gas and set prices as it sees fit. Putin’s ambitions are not limited to the energy sector either---although he has strengthened the country by turning away foreign investment and "re-nationalization" vital resources. As Pavel Korduban says in his recent article "Putin Harvests Political Dividends from Russian Economic Dynamism"; Putin intends to expand beyond energy and focus on technological modernization:
"The shift in official discourse to "innovations" reflects an attempt to reorient economic policy from the goal of consolidating the status of "energy superpower" to the emphasis on industrial modernization and catching up with the technological revolution. The key role in formulating this new policy is given to Sergei Ivanov, who promised that by the year 2020 Russia would gain leadership (measured as 10% of the world market) in such high-technology sectors as nuclear energy, shipbuilding, aircraft, satellites and delivery systems, and computer software." Putin has also strengthened ties with his Central Asian neighbors and engaged in "cooperative" military maneuvers with China.
"Last month it signed deals with Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to revive the Soviet-era united system of gas pipelines, which will help Russia strengthen its role of the monopoly supplier from the region". (Reuters) He has transformed the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) into a formidable economic-military alliance capable of resisting foreign intervention in Central Asia by the United States and NATO. The CIS is bound to play a major role in regional issues as the real motives behind the "war on terror" are exposed and America's geopolitical objectives in Central Asia become clearer. So far, Washington has established its military bases and outposts throughout the region with impunity. But the mood is darkening in Moscow and Beijing and there may be changes in the future. We should also remember that Putin is surrounded by ex-KGB agents and Soviet-era hardliners. They’ve never trusted America's motives and now they can point to the new US bases, the "colored-coded" revolutions, the broken treaties and the projected missile defense system--to prove that Uncle Sam is "up to no good".
Putin sees himself as leading a global insurgency against the US Empire. He represents the emerging-market economies of China, India and Brazil. These 4 nations will progressively overtake the "old order". Last year 60% of the world's output was produced outside the G-7 countries. According to Goldman Sachs, by 2050 Brazil, Russia, India and China will be the world's leading economies. The transition from "superpower rule" is already underway. The centers of geopolitical power are shifting like giant tectonic plates. The trend is irreversible. The deployment of Bush’s missile defense system will only hasten the decline of the "unipolar-model" by triggering an asymmetrical war, where Forex reserves, vital resources and political maneuvering will be used as the weapons-of-choice. War with Russia is pointless and preventable. There are better choices than confrontation.
Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.p...xt=va&aid=6125
The Eurasian Project: A Threat to The New World Order
One might be tempted to regard Russian premier V. Putin's paper “A new integration project for Eurasia: The future in the making”, which saw the light of day in Izvestia on October 3, 2011, as the presidential front-runner's sketchily laid out program, but upon scrutiny that appears to be only one part of a wider picture. The opinion piece momentarily ignited wide-scale controversy in and outside of Russia and highlighted the ongoing clash of positions on global development…
Regardless of interpretation details, the reaction of the Western media to the integration project unveiled by the Russian premier was uniformly negative and reflected with utmost clarity an a priori hostility towards Russia and any initiatives it floats. Mao Zedong, though, used to say that facing pressure from your enemies is better than being in such a condition that they do not bother to keep you under pressure.
It helps to understand why, at the moment, Cold War-style headlines are constantly popping up in Western media and what perceived threat the West discerned in Putin's recent Eurasian integration. The obvious explanation is that, if implemented, the plan would come as a geopolitical challenge to the new world order, to the dominance of NATO, the IMF, the EU and other supranational bodies, and to the undisguised US primacy. Today's increasingly assertive Russia suggests and is ready to start building an inclusive alliance based on principles providing a viable alternative to Atlantism and neoliberalism. It is an open secret that these days the West is putting into practice an array of far-reaching geopolitical projects, reconfiguring Europe in the wake of the Balkan conflicts and against the backdrop of the crises provoked in Greece and Cyprus, assembling the Greater Middle East based on serial regime changes across the Arab world, and, as a relatively novel design, implementing the Asia project in which the recent disaster in Japan was an active phase.
In 2011, the intensity of geopolitical dynamics was unprecedented since the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, with all major countries and international bodies contributing. Moreover, the current impression is that military might somehow became a legitimate instrument in international politics. Just days ago, Moscow drew avalanche criticism after vetoing the UN Security Council resolution which could authorize a replay of the Libyan scenario in Syria. As a result, US permanent envoy to the UN S. Rice slammed Russia and China over the veto, while French foreign minister Alain Juppé declared that “it is a sad day for the Syrian people. It is a sad day for the Security Council”. During the heated UN security Council debates on September 5, Syrian representative lambasted Germany and France, and charged the US with perpetrating genocide in the Middle East. After that, S. Rice accused Russia and China of hoping to sell arms to the Syrian regime instead of standing by the Syrian people and stormed out of the meeting, and French envoy Gérard Araud opined that “No veto can clear of their responsibility these Syrian authorities that have lost any legitimacy by murdering its own people”, leaving an impression that murdering people, as in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, should be a NATO privilege.
Moscow's Western “partners” are outraged whenever Russia, in concert with China, puts obstacles in the way of the new world order. Syria, albeit a regionally important country, only fleetingly tops the agenda, but Putin's ambitious plan for the whole Eurasia - “reaching a higher level of integration – a Eurasian Union” - had to be expected to evoke deep and lasting concerns in the West. Moscow openly challenges the West's global dominance by “suggesting a model of a powerful supranational union that can become one of the poles of today's world while being an efficient connecting link between Europe and the dynamic Asia-Pacific Region”. No doubt, Putin's messages that “the combination of natural resources, capital, and strong human potential will make the Eurasian Union competitive in the industrial and technological race and the race for investor money, new jobs, and advanced production facilities” and that “along with other key players and regional institutions such as the EU, the USA, China, and APEC, it will ensure the sustainability of global development” sounded alarming to Western leaders.
Neither the collapse of the USSR and the bipolar world nor the subsequent proliferation of pro-Western “democracies” marked a final point in the struggle over global primacy. What followed was an era of military interventions and displacements of defiant regimes with the help of information warfare and the omnipresent Western soft power. In this game, Eurasia remains the main prize in line with John Mackinder's geopolitical imperative by which “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island; who rules the World-Island controls the world”.
In the late XX century the US became the first-ever non-Eurasian country to combine the roles of the world's top power and the final arbiter in Eurasian affairs. In the framework of the new world order doctrine, the US and the West as a whole see Eurasia as a zone of key importance to their economic development and growing political might. Global dominance is an openly stated and constantly pursued goal of the Euro-Atlantic community and its military and financial institutions – NATO, the IMF, and the World Bank - along with the Western media and countless NGOs. In the process, the Western establishment remains fully aware that, in Z. Brzeziński's words, „America's global primacy is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained”. Sustaining the “preponderance”, in turn, takes control over Europe, Russia, China, the Middle East, and Central Asia.
Untamed Western hegemony in Europe, Central Asia, and, to an extent, in the Middle East and even Russia used to count as an unquestionable outcome of the past couple of decades, but at the moment the situation appears fluid. Western, Chinese, and Russian watchers alike are predicting an imminent failure of the neoliberal globalization model embedded in the new world order, and the time is coming for the political class to adopt the view.
By opening up opportunities to shield original models of national development from Atlantist pressure and to maintain real international security, Putin's new integration project holds a major promise for Russia and its allies, and thereby presents Russia's foes with a serious problem. Neither Russia nor any other post-Soviet republic can survive in today's world single-handedly, and Russia as Eurasia's key geopolitical player with economic, political, and military potentials unparalleled across the post-Soviet space can and should stake a bid for an alternative global architecture.
The West's allergy to Putin's plan is therefore explainable, but, regardless of the opposition the project is bound to run into, of the weakness of some of its elements, and of the potential difficulty of putting it into practice, the Eurasian integration project grew out of the life of the post-Soviet geopolitical and cultural space and is consonant with current global trends. Surviving, preserving the economic and material foundations of national existence, keeping traditions alive, and building a secure future for the children are the objectives the Eurasian nations can accomplish only if they stay aligned with Russia. Otherwise, isolation, sanctions, and military interventions awaits them…
Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=27015
Good to see President Putin back. Except for the 45 or so useless idiots and Gary Weinstein-Kasparov types, the Russian people appear to wholeheartedly love this man. And most importantly to us, he has been very kind and capable to Armenia.
ReplyDeleteSo Armenia's elections:
I'm surprised that LTP's party even made it that far. Makes you wonder about the small percentage of people supporting him. Aside from being a traitor who leads pent up failures in Armenia to deadly clashes against the police, LTP has no actual plans and is surrounded by the same corrupt people that raped Armenia in the 1990s.
ARF - Apparently was once a relevant force in Armenia, now negotiating with LTP. All the AYFers here are analyzing why the "unthinking Hayastantsi" would be so stupid as to not vote for the ARF, it could only mean election fraud! The ARF behaved itself during the Kocharian era, now I see their rise to power as a major internal threat to Armenia given their total incompetence. They should stick to the education and diaspora ministries.
Orinants Yerkir - I laughed out loud when I read your post "whose leader got caught with his pants down a few years ago". Arthur Baghdasaryan really screwed up what looked like a promising career back then, first he gave a speech congratulating the foreign-funded "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine (Thank God that's over!), then he tried to put together a coup by selling his ass to the british ambassador, only to be recorded by Armenia's highly capable National Security Service. Idiot.
BTW british ambassadors are just evil. The previous bitch Thorhilda Mary Vivia Abbott-Watt pretty much openly insulted Armenia ever time she spoke, and the new husband and wife team of ambassadors they have in Armenia are a mockery of international diplomacy. Of course their ambassadors are the least evil thing about britian.
Heritage - You said that "he'd die in a car 'accident'" before the Russians would allow this foreign agent to assume any real power in Armenia. I respond with "Thank God for Russia, let's hope they don't wait until he assumes power to eliminate this danger from Armenia. If it wasn't so dangerous for Armenia, it would be amusing to watch Hovannisian and LTP bitch slap eachother for the title of Armenia's most eligible bitch for any foreigner with a few extra dollars, euros, new liras or manats.
Prosperous Armenia - Hard to call if they are playing games in cahoots with the authorities or making serious miscalculations when flirting with the LTP
Republican Party - They're getting the job done.
So however the elections were conducted, we all know that the next day the opposition will cry out fraud, as is customary to any losing side in non-western elections. A small percentage of the disgruntled sheeple will protest, more because they are in a poor economic position than because they give a damn about politics (in this sense, Armenians are more pragmatic that for example Greeks, where insane ideologists like the anarchists take each election as an opportunity to carry out internal acts of terrorism for absolutely no reason). And the foreign-funded media will sound the alarm like the sky is falling. Of course when Georgia holds so-so elections, it is described as the glorious light of democracy and the spirit of George Washington himself bringing a new dawn to what centuries of evil Russian occupation had turned into a cesspool; when the azeris hold elections befitting an authoritarian sultanate, "ya its not perfect but they have oil and they promised us they are working on it, and aliyev is a good man working on keeping peace and investing his county's wealth wisely in Dubai and several westen bank accounts"; when Armenia holds what were most likely, and even unnecessarily, the most open elections in the former Soviet Union, let the mudslinging begin! In fact, since those damn Armenians won't learn, "suspend" the millennium challenge account funding to teach their corrupt authorities a lesson by punishing the villagers! God Bless Democracy!
ReplyDeleteThanks for pointing out Nanor Barsoumian for what she is, out of all the election coverage I skimmed through, her articles in the Armenian Weekly and Asbarez were the absolute most negative. An armchair warrior in Boston with no idea about the reality in Armenia working to destroy Armenia's good name and image in the minds of a huge percentage of the hapless Diasporans who get their news and biases from ARF media.
PS. Thank you for saying "Armenians like you give me hope", keep up the good work on the blog!
I'm glad that you are not one of our many democracy now zombies. You seem to have a very healthy grasp of international relations and realpolitik, something seriously missing amongst Armenians.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Nanore Barsoumian: Couple of months ago she released an article in which she was cleverly trying to cast a positive light on the Western/Turkish backed Islamic terrorists in Syria. The article even attracted two "Armenians" that were supporting the anti-Assad movement. One of them named "Hagop Alsoury" even had a website supporting the Syrian rebels.
Here is the link to Barsoumian's article: Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Armenians in Syria - http://www.armenianweekly.com/2012/02/16/17959/
And here is the Syrian-Armenian rebel activist's website: From a Syrian Armenian - http://aletterfromsyrianarmenian.blogspot.com/2012/02/from-syrian-armenian-letter-to-all_12.html
There is no doubt in my mind that Nanore Barsoumian is an active part of the NGO trained zombies that are tasked with disseminating Western propaganda throughout Armenian community; and she is working for the ARF. She and her friends are seeding Armenia for political unrest.
Regarding Levon Petrostein: He appeals to the 1990s era criminals and traitors and the country's self-destructive peasantry. Unfortunately, while not in the majority, traitors, criminals and peasant are somewhat common amongst Armenians these days.
Regarding Barkavaj Hayastan: Tsarukyan "Dodi Gago" is playing a clever game. He is courting Washington and Moscow at the same time. Back in 2007 he got a little out of hand and Moscow had to put him in his place. I think he now understands the stakes. Therefore, even with Vartan Oskanian in his political party, I really don't think he will try anything stupid with regards to Armenia's strategic relationship with Russia. Then there is always the theory that Tsarukyan and Sargsyan are closely cooperating behind closed doors. In other words, he may be the controlled opposition. Nevertheless, in my opinion Barkavaj Hayastan is the only viable opposition/alternative to the Hanrapetakans... unfortunately.
PS: Do you get emails from me or is this blog the only place you know me from?
Interesting idea about Tsarukyan. I always thought Serj Sarkisian and Robert Kocharian had an agreement where Kocharian would purposely drop hints that he is unhappy with Sarkisian in order to manipulate and fragment the opposition (maybe to unite behind Serj for fear of the Kocharian boogey-man returning). Seemed logical to me given that the two men have been a powerful duo in power for the last two decades plus. They and their families lead comfortable lives in positions of power, they both hail from the same region of Armenia (Artsakh) and they both know the disgruntled segments of the public sees the same foreign/traitor opposition politicians as the only alternative to them. Of course if this is true they do an amazing job hiding the evidence.
ReplyDeleteRegarding Nanor, her types make me sick. Unfortunate condescending agents like her poison relations between the large majority of politically uninvolved Diasporans and Natives of Armenia. The foreigners do a good job injecting filth into the Diasporan mainstream. This is slightly unrelated, but have you seen the IMMENSE number of Scientology, Mormon, Jehova's Witness and "Born-Again" cult materials translated into Armenian which are distributed to unsuspecting Diasporans? They are really working hard to screw up Armenian culture as bad as they have to western culture.
Regarding the Syrian-Armenian agent, in general the Armenians in hostile muslim countries are constantly in danger, mainly because western "Christians" bomb the muslims from their F-15s and F-16s for the sake of israel, and then leave the real, local Christians for the muslims to take their anger out on. Of course western-trained al-queda rampaging through Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt, ect makes things infinitely worse. Thus for this person to against the Syrian government in the name of Armenians is extremely dangerous. As far as I know, Assad has treated the Armenians with respect and he is an enemy of the turks, which makes him an excellent world leader as far as Armenia is concerned. As you said, Arabs are self-destructive (Phalange in Lebanon is a great example, but examples are many!), in general it is best to avoid their easily inflamed passions.
BTW in that Syrian-Armenians page I noticed the one line he had in Armenian, he using the Soviet orthography currently used in the Republic of Armenia for Eastern Armenian. Syrian Armenians speak HATE the Soviet orthography, a real Syrian Armenian would type in the traditional Mashdotsian Orthography. This reminds me of a few years back when turkey opened an Armenian-language radio or tv broadcast in istanbul, ostensibly as a goodwill sign towards the Armenians of istanbul. But again, the whole thing was immediately unraveled as a propaganda ploy when the broadcasts were done in Eastern Armenian, meaning the intended audience were citizens of the Republic of Armenia rather than the Western Armenian speaking istanbul natives.
ReplyDeleteIn my view, Armenian is Armenian, and differences in dialects are only cosmetic, but when something is out of place like this, it really makes you wonder who is pulling the strings and ghostwriting this Syrian-Armenians garbage.
For the next year or so closely monitor the work being done by the operatives I have singled out and the work of propaganda outlets such as ArmeniaNow, Hetq, Radio Liberty, Lragir, PFA, Armenian Weekly and Asbarez. And post comments!!! Even if they don't post your comments they at least know that they are being watched. They pay attention to reactions their articles get. That is how they assess their work as well as their next moves. Several cyberian colleagues and I, including Tigranakert, have been regulatory monitoring their work for the past several years. It has had an effect. ArmeniaNow has in particular been very careful in recent years. Their work used to be very inflammatory. Half the stuff I write does not get posted, but at least they recognize that Armenians are not all politically illiterate idiots.
ReplyDeletePS: Thanks for coming on board. I hope you will get active.
http://www.reporter.am/go/article/2012-05-09-song-and-dance-moves-to-armenia
ReplyDelete"The truth is that there is a lot of corruption in that country. The truth is that there is immense ineptitude."
I'm glad that this source of "news" has very, very few readers, none of who would actually ever even think about repatriation. It would have been tragic if they had managed to read any Diasporan Armenian seriously considering repatriating now or at some future point.
Even the first paragraph tries to draw artificial divisions about "returning to Western Armenia vs. moving to Eastern Armenia for the first time", a divide and conquer move usually reserved for the turks (between natives v. diasporans; Yerevantsis v. Artsakhtsis, ect.). The author would be better off contemplating similar issues regarding the israeli "law of return" than discouraging interested Armenians from a future in Armenia.
What are yout opinions regarding political analyst Armen Ayvazyan?
ReplyDeleteI know Armen and his work very well. He is a brilliant man. I agree with a lot of him political analysis and I truly commend his patriotism. But he is also his greatest enemy. His condescending attitude has turned-off many, including people in his circle. In my opinion, his stubbornness and arrogance limits his intellectual capacity and flexibility.
ReplyDeleteIn my opinion, his professional high point was his sobering/accurate assessment of Levon Petrostein's March 1 coup d'état. He then hit a low point when he tried to jump on the anti-protocol bandwagon by fearmongering and talking against the authorities. I have also see him on a couple of occasions make disparaging comments about Armenia's strategic relationship with Russia. He is one of those characters that are of the self-limiting opinion that by merely "uniting" Armenians can conquer the world, and that Russians will sell Armenia to the Turks when the time is right...
Again, as a typical Armenian, he is great when it comes to academic/intellectual matters, but mediocre when it comes to politics. Although he needs a good dose of humility, Armen is a brilliant scholar and some of his work is excellent. But politically, he has no depth and no foresight. And his biggest gripe is that the authorities have not taken him seriously.
http://asbarez.com/103025/of-hate-crimes-and-intolerance-lessons-must-be-learned/
ReplyDeletehttp://asbarez.com/103029/arf-shant-student-association-issues-statement-on-yerevan-hate-crime/
Now I know asbarez and armenian weekly editor Ara Khatchadoorian is gay, but this is too much. The ARF condemns the subversive western concept of "hate crimes" in Armenia, while at the same time negotiating with the Armenian National Congress! Their true agenda comes out. Let's just hope that the ARF is as "successful" pushing "hate-crime" legislation in Armenia as it has been in getting the US government to "recognize" the Armenian Genocide. The Satanists are hard at work on Armenia.
BTW arevordi, have you ever noticed that the URL to the English-language section of RFE/RL Azatutyun is http://www.azatutyun.am/section/english/666.html? I'm the sure 666 is just a coincidence.... (By default www.azatutyun.am loads their filth in the Armenian language, with a large link in the right corner captioned "in English" leading to the 666 URL above).
ReplyDeleteArevordi you said "Regarding Barkavaj Hayastan: Tsarukyan "Dodi Gago" is playing a clever game. He is courting Washington and Moscow at the same time. Back in 2007 he got a little out of hand and Moscow had to put him in his place. I think he now understands the stakes." Could you elaborate please, I don't recall Moscow calling out Tsarukyan. Thanks
ReplyDelete"Armenia will eventually need to expand north, north-east and/or northwest. In other words, Armenia needs to reach Russia and/or the Black Sea. Javakhq is only the first stop. "
ReplyDeleteIs the Iranian scenario necessary that an Armenian-Georgian takes place? I believe that if Sahakashvili goes too far, Arenia and Russia should raise the question of Javakhq, and if suddenly Georgia starts taking drastic mesures such as closing Armenia's border... we should invade... Geopolitically we would have made the turkish-azeri blockade much bigger, and why not cut it if we conquer Adjaria.
How realistic is the scenario that I depicted?
@Sarkis86
ReplyDeleteI knew Ara when he lived in New York about twenty years ago. He was just as flaming then as he is now. But this crap goes well beyond Ara and his sexual disorder. The ARF leadership could have stopped him but they chose not to. The ARF leadership here in the West is controlled by Western intelligence. Therefore, nothing good will come out of it. Nevertheless, this was a watershed moment for the ARF. A "nationalist" party has relegated itself to fighting for "gay-rights" in Armenia?!?! Very sad moment in Armenian history. To me the ARF is now dead.
Garegin and Dro must be turning in their graves.
As I have been saying, the political West will champion anything and everything in its effort to undermine a political system that is not enslaved by it. Championing gay-rights in former Soviet states has been one of their favorite weapons. It's the weaponization of social issues I keep referring to. I have nothing against homosexuals as long as they don't expect me to accept/commend their psycho-sexual disorder as something normal or healthy.
PS: The political West is indeed the Devil's manifestation on earth.
PS: I sent you an email about Barkavaj Hayastan and Russia.
@Anonymous
ReplyDeleteI don't think I fully understood your entire question. But I don't think Saakashvili is stupid enough to "go too far" again. He learned a very nasty lesson back in 2008. Even if he was stupid enough to pick another fight, his handlers in the West would not allow it. Therefore, don't expect Saakashvili to ever give Russians or Armenians a good excuse to invade Georgia. The most plausible scenario would be for Russia to move its military into Georgia and linkup with Armenia if the Western alliance attacks Iran...
"Nevertheless, this was a watershed moment for the ARF. A "nationalist" party has relegated itself to fighting for "gay-rights" in Armenia?!?! Very sad moment in Armenian history. To me the ARF is now dead.
ReplyDeleteGaregin and Dro must be turning in their graves."
Excellent statement of facts, you put my feelings into words.
So one of my friends is an AYF ANCA type. I told him the ARF is dead to me, his response was "fine go support LTP {unknown to this "activist" that negotiating with LTP is exactly what the ARF is doing as we speak}. You don’t know anything about modern nation building. We need tolerance for minorities, especially for gays." I go on Facebook, all the ayfer's statuses screaming Armenia Hate Crimes. I felt like I logged onto an azerbaijani blog! I understand now when you say most Armenian's are political illiterate peasants. Even Aram Suren Hamparian, who you singled out as someone who had avoided bashing Armenia in a recent post about a conference calling for upheaval and chaos in Armenia, put up a status along the lines of "gay or straight, we are all Armenian". These people are hopeless. The ARF's uselessness in Armenia has been apparent since LTP (wrongly) banned them in 1994, but it is mind-bogglingly depressing that up until this watershed the ARF in the Diaspora had been more or less useful in keeping some segments attached to Armenia. Up until they bailed the coalition in 2008, I don’t think they ever attacked Armenian society directly, save for when they used to bitch about LTP in the 1990s.
My view used to be that assimilation posed a huge threat to the Armenian nation. But now I'm convinced that a large part of the Diasporan youth are as far removed from Armenian culture as can be. These Americans of Armenian decent couldn't identify Armenia on a map, don't know Mashdots from say Gyumri mayor Vardan Ghukasyan (a non name brand politican) to the significance of the .am domain for websites to anything else. These Diasporans are raised on shows like Glee other subversive western garbage. Declining numbers on paper due to assimilation seems like a trivial danger now.
Thanks for the email you sent today, and thanks for giving me a place to get some ideas out on this forum. And you're right, as this blog shows flaming Armenians and doublecrossing dashnaks are only the symptoms, the virus lies behind the shadows.
Last question: I have been following Harut Sassounian's weekly commentaries in the California Courier via groong.com for about a decade. What are your thoughts about Harut? Is there anything subversive I need to be aware of?
Even though you didn't understand what I meant, you answered to my question... In that case, let's say that war with Iran didn't take place... should we wait, or should we plan on something?
ReplyDelete@Sarkis:
ReplyDeleteHarut Sassunian and Appo Jabarian of California remain untainted in my opinion. Although they are not very well versed in geopolitics and they do not truly comprehend the dangers posed by the political West and Globalism, these two men have nevertheless remained patriotic, objective and honest with regards to Armenian politics. I find myself in agreement with many of their political stances and I have not seen/felt anything about them that would suggest they are serving overlords.
@Anonymous:
No matter how one looks at it, the hard reality is that gaining a direct access to the Black Sea and/or establishing common borders with Russia is the ONLY way to cure Armenia's sociopolitical and socioeconomic ailments. I think we Armenians should begin seriously planning along these lines and we need to patiently wait for the right moment to break Armenia out of its mountainous prison. We as a people need to feel this "geostrategic" urge deep within our souls. So, let's talk about this amongst ourselves, with our friends and with our family members. Let's make this a real issue. Eventually it will take a life of its own. Always have your eyes on your prize and always be ready for the right moment when you can grab it...
Long Time Reader -
ReplyDeleteWhy exactly should the ARF or any other party not be fighting for gay rights? You say it like it shouldn't be done. This latest incident has really been disheartening to me, I truly didn't know there would be a single soul in Armenia that would defend violence towards gays/lesbians and thought that mentality died with the early 2000's.
"Gay rights" is not a political party fight, especially for a fledgling nation in the Caucasus, especially for a "nationalistic" political party like ARF...
ReplyDelete"Gay rights" in any given society is something that has to develop gradually and naturally...
"Gay rights" cannot be imposed on a conservative, underdeveloped society that is not yet ready to understand it or tolerate it...
"Gay rights" cannot be allowed to be used by Western NGOs as a weapon to undermine a targeted political system...
"Gay rights" is something that Armenia can do without for the foreseeable future...
Of all the psycho-sexual disorders and ailments in existence today I see homosexuality as the most harmless - as long as it's between two consenting adults. However, when outside political forces take the sexual disorder in question and impose it upon the general population as something "normal" or something that should be "respected", that's when I have a serious problem with it. The political West will use anything and everything under the sun to undermine a political system that it has not yet enslaved. Therefore, having failed in baiting the Armenian sheeple into rising against its state, the political West is now attempting to recruit "minorities" to do its dirty work in Armenia. It's the weaponization of various social ailments I keep warning Armenians about. Needless to say, these things are done to cast Armenia in a bad light, cause societal unrest and to place pressure on the state. Therefore, this matter goes well beyond "gay rights" per se. Nevertheless, had Yerevan been in bed with Washington, Armenian authorities could have decapitated homosexuals without Western officials even raising an eyebrow, as it happens in some Islamic countries that are allied with Washington.
Until Armenia NATURALLY catches up with modernity and western civilization (not to be confused with Western/Globalist culture), homosexuals in Armenia need to keep quiet and they need to stop acting like flaming fagots.
PS: Some homosexuals are born with hormonal problems that cause sexual disorders. Many homosexuals, however, are those that become homosexual at a very early age due to various traumatic factors such as sexual abuse...
PS: Thank you for being a long time reader.
I am only familiar with RT as an english-language Pro-Russian medium. Are there any others?
ReplyDeleteThere is no other Russian government sponsored English language news agency on television. For other forms of Russian news media, there is Voice of Russia on the radio and Ria Novosti on the web.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the answer. But What I meant was mainly about pro-Russian websites, not necessarily television or radio.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, there is something boggling my mind. Lately the BBC prepared a negative video about Azerbaijan, concerning mainly about Eurovision. How come western media actually critisizes Azerbaijan in such a powerful way? Aren't they supposed to be allies?
FOrgive me, because I'm still new to politics.
Very good question about the BBC video report and Azerbaijan. As a matter of fact, when I first saw the report I was thinking exactly what you were thinking - "aren't they allies"? Well, no, they are not allied; not in the official sense of the word. Azerbaijan may be actively cooperating with the West but they are not officially allied to or enslaved by the West. Thus, it could also very well be an internal matter between the two capitols that we are not aware of. A couple of years ago Baku signed a major deal with Moscow to sell it most of its natural gas. Recently, Baku has been kissing a lot of Russian ass. So, the BBC report could very well be some Western-style pressure to keep Baku more-or-less in-line. Such a thing may also have the secondary effect of making politically naive Armenians think that the West is a honest power-broker in the region. However you look at it, it's all politics.
ReplyDeletePS: The media links section of my blog lists several pro-Russian websites.
Thank you. It's always interesting to discuss such matters with you, Arevordi. I have also posted other questions on your previous posts. From now on, I will be posting as Svetia, so that you recognize me.
ReplyDeleteI am doing my best in trying to give them a different perspective about Armenia and (Geo)politics by discussing such topics with my Armenian friends in Armenia or elsewhere. Most of the time, though, most of them disagree with me and we end up getting angry at each other, but it is working.
I came to the realization of Russia's importance to us around 2008, after the March 1 events took place. Although I hate Serj with all my heart when it comes to domestic policy, I still see him the 'lesser' of the illiterate politicians. I strongly believe that for a country like ours, we need our own Vladimir Putin, or someone like the short-ruled dictator Aram Manougian in 1918.
Until next time.
Arevordi, what are your opinions on the various Armenian television channels available here in the US? I want to know your opinions on the channels based outside of Armenia.
ReplyDeleteI know there's the ARF's horizon, which despite its political slant and insistence of bashing Armenia, occasionally airs a good older documentary and sometimes patriotic speakers. Any thoughts on USArmenia, ARTN Shant, and I think others like Armenian Teletime if its still around. Thanks.
Thank you for joining us Svetia!
ReplyDeleteWithout Russia pulling the political strings in the Caucasus not even a million of our big talking nationalists would be able to stop the Caucasus from turning into a Turco-Islamic cesspool. No matter how one looks at it, Armenia exists because of Russia. There are legions of "patriotic" idiots today that would say I'm "anti-Armenian" or "self-hating" because I have pointed out this reality.
Armenians, even the genuinely patriotic amongst us, have a tendency to miss-judge and seriously miss-understand politics. Regardless of education, wealth or up-bringing, Armenians as a whole are politically illiterate and they severely lack objectivity and disciple. We as a nation have great potential due to our resourcefulness, creativity, ingenuity and natural talent in various disciplines. On the same token, due to our indiscipline inability to properly understand the political world we live in we Armenians are often Armenia's worst enemy.
If you closely analyze our history you will see such traits within our people going back hundreds of years. And the most worrying part is that major powers understand our national traits/characteristics better than us, and they treat us accordingly. It's all very disheartening and frustrating for me. I have reluctantly concluded that it is our genetic makeup that hinders us from reaching our potential in this world.
Armenia has suffered a thousand years of genetic and cultural damage. In the course of the last one thousand years we went from being a nation of warriors&priests to a nation of self-destructive peasants and petty merchants. We went from being a nation of lions to a nation of hyenas. Regardless of our education, wealth and up-bringing, we Armenians see the world today from the perspective of a peasant and/or a merchant. This serious damage will not be fixed quickly or easily, and it will definitely not be fixed if we continue considering all of our filth as compatriots and if we continue our foolish habit of patting ourselves on the shoulder and telling each other how great and wonderful we are...
Until Armenians free themselves of their Asiatic outlooks, merchants mentalities, overpowering emotions and massive egos, Armenia will continue suffering as a third world nation.
PS: It's the decades long Western psyops and mental conditioning that subconsciously compels you to "hate" President Serj Sargsyan without any real reasons. It may not be saying much but the reality is that President Sargsyan is Armenia's finest president yet. Remember that corruption and a tendency towards lawlessness in deeply imbedded in our national psyche. Armenia today is a nation awash in corruption not because of this or that president but because of the Armenian. Also remember that those waiting on the political sidelines in Armenia are in fact Armenia's worst enemies. Had it not been for President Sargsyan, the guy you hate so much, Armenia would have been enslaved by the Anglo-American-Zionist-Turkish-Islamic interests very long ago. Armenia has managed to establish a meaningful strategic alliance with Russia and become a major geopolitical player in the region because of a handful of individuals - Korcharyan, Sargsyan, Ohanyan... [interestingly all Artsakhtsis]
@Sarkis
ReplyDeleteForemost, I have to say that I do not watch much television. When I sometimes do, it's usually the weather channel. Everything else on tv brings pain to my brain.
Sometimes I watch Armenian tv. And when I do, I only watch H1. H1's programming has gotten very good n recent years.
USArmenia is a Globalist operation more-or-less run by Americans... Horizon is run by the ARF in America so you have to be selective in what you take from them... ARTN is a by-product of LA trash... I do not know much about Shant...
I'm not the best person to talk to about television.
Arevordi jan,
ReplyDeleteyou might be right if my hatred towards Serj is partly because of the psyop campaign. Of course he is much better than the previous ones, but it is always to criticize them, so that they fix themselves. All I am saying is that he could have done better regarding domestic problems. It's true that Armenia is going forward but it could have gone forward a little bit faster, if only there was the will, because the Armenian people at the same time do not work on themselves, they just sit and complain that the government should do everything for them and they should eat drink sleep and get their salary at the end of the month, just like in Soviet Times.
Regarding its foreign policy I agree 100% with that you said. After the protocols process was freezed, only then I realized that it was a game being played by Moscow/Yerevan over Ankara.
There are times where I wished I was born during the Artashesian dynasty, because at that time Armenians were different, they werea brave and proud people, as you said. I argue with my friends about Tigran Mec. Almost all of them criticize him for having expanded Armenia's borders, they say that "he should have just protected Armenia", what a bull**** mentality.
I agree with you 100%!
ReplyDeleteArmenian narrow mindedness (in all aspects of life) has been the main culprit in keeping Armenia from developing, expanding and becoming the great nation it once was. Again, this goes back to the genetic/cultural damage we have suffered as a nation for the past one thousand years. Blue blood amongst Armenians have been decimated. With very few exceptions, we are all today the off-springs of small shop owners and peasants of a Turkified Anatolia. Although we have great potential due to our natural abilities/talents, we no longer have noble blood flowing in our vains.
The mentality of your friends is typical of petty merchants or peasants.
Regarding domestic politics, we have to learn to be positive, constructive, patient, objective and proactive. Negativity and hate will further poison an already toxic Armenian atmosphere. And such an atmosphere will only play into the hands of Armenia's enemies. Let's also recognize that Serj Sargsyan is a by-product of the region Armenia finds itself in today. Thus, he is by nature limited in ability. Having said that, despite his many flaws, he is the best leader we have yet had. I hope to God that the next leader is someone like Yerevan's former mayor Karen Karapetyan.
I don't know if you had already read this but the following is a blog entry devoted to Serj Sargsyan - http://theriseofrussia.blogspot.com/2011/09/president-sargsyan-and-republic-of.html
Anyway, I'm glad to see there are Armenians like you.
Exactly, we have to learn to be positive, but sadly nowadays it's as if we seek negative news, and spread around as if it should a daily necessary routine.
ReplyDeleteYes, I've read that blog post, It is a well balanced approach.
Frankly, I am more than happy when I first stumbled upon this blogabout a year ago or so. I do have like-minded friends like us. We ared doing our best in conceiving our Armenian friends, but usually they attack us even personally, but we don't stop and not worry much about it. Keep up the good work.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSorry to butt in guys but I am really enjoying this conversation. All I have to say is aprek! I'm born in American but my family is from Armenia. I have been reading this blog for over year. You can consider me part of the silent majority of Armenians that can agree with the ideas expressed in this blog but cant properly expressed themselves. I wish I was also able to write comments.
ReplyDeleteSarkis86,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your comment.
It is going to take time in order to convince many Armenians about how we should perceive our homeland in a realistic approach.
Yes, unfortunately Tigran Medz hasn't been given much importance by us Armenians, while Europeans praised him. There are even a few classical songs written by composer Vivaldi about Tigran. Alas, it is not well known in Armenians.
It's not necessarily the number of the communities which is the problem of changing Armenians' mentality. It is going to take time, as Arevordi says, for a nation who has only seen pain during the past millenium. However, the problem with Armenian communities in the west, such as where you live, is that the propaganda and brainwashing is much more powerful and makes us harder to show our compatriots the reality. While here in Lebanon, many Armenians are pro-Russian subconciously. They don't realize that they are, because there are times where they criticize Russians as well. But when you talk with them, you'll find out their anger towards turkey, israel and their allies. Briefly said, most Armenians in Lebanon defend Russian-Armenian interests by criticizing the interests of Turkey and israel in the Middle East. The main Armenian newspaper, Aztag Daily, openly defends Russian interests in the Middle East. This is because of the ARF's political position in Lebanese politics. Still though, unfortunately many Armenians here from all political sides are politically illiterate.
Any ways, will keep in touch, parevner.
Thanks for the information, I never knew about Vivaldi's composition about Tigran the Great! That's amazing!
ReplyDeleteSorry I just realized I called you Svetlana when your username is Svetia. I wrote my last comment in a rush, that's why it's full of typos.
No problem Sako jan. I didn't even get the point when you said "Lost-Cause-Armenians Svetlana" ))
ReplyDeleteBy the way a question to Arevordi. I check the forum of hyeclub.com from time to time, were you(Arevordi) a member of that forum by the name of "Armenian"? I noticed some older posts reminding your way of writing and your ideas.
@Svetia
ReplyDeleteYes, "Armenian" is the username I went by in Hyeclub. For several years I posted a lot of good materials there. Check them out when you have time. Anyway, I stopped posting there couple of years ago after a series of problems I kept having with megalomaniac moderators, cyber-stalkers, teenagers with attitudes and weirdos with egos...
A lot of shootings has been going on on the Armenian-azeri border. Does this have any relation to clinton's visits, in order to create a diversion?
ReplyDeleteIt's a little difficult trying to figure out exactly what idiots in Baku are thinking but it looks like they are trying to put pressure on Yerevan and the West by raising the level of tension in the region. At the end of the day, Baku is doing what it is doing primarily for domestic reasons. After twenty years of anti-Armenian propaganda&hysteria they are now under pressure to finally resolve the matter. However, Azeri officials in Baku are in fear of starting major military operations against Artsakh because they realize that by doing so they may lose more lands to a Russia-backed Armenia. They also fear that if they don't return Artsakh to Baku their people will one day take-out their anger and frustration on Azeri officials. Aliyev is in a very difficult position.
ReplyDeleteHmmm, I once heard that the Russians and Armenians are arming the Artsakh forces in such a way that it alone should be able to confront the azeri army. Most of the heavy weapons are in Artsakh, and they are more in quantity. If, for example, Armenia has 100 tanks, Artsakh has 300. Also, in my opinion, the Armenian soldier's moral is much higher than the azeri's. The only thing discouraging young Armenians to join the army are the non-combat deaths, but the number of casualties are decreasing year by year; hopefully one day no more non-combat deaths occur.
ReplyDeleteI truly believe that in case of an azeri attack, Artsakh's army, as well as its natural fortress, will be able to hold the enemy back, and also liberate parts of Northern Artsakh. Artsakh and the Zangezur region are the only remaining obstacles for the turkish brotherhood to unite.
Sadly though, many Armenians both in Armenia and the diaspora are cowards, and are unable to see that we truly are stronger today than before. For them, it is as if we should always be weak, and only have so-called "moral victories"(Vardanandz).
Regarding azerbaijan, they are going to lose one way or another. Some day the people there could rise up against aliyev, which would only cause more political turmoil within the country.
It's possible though that if a new regime comes into power in baku, they would be less war-mongering and more willing to go to concessions, an azeri kind of Ter-Petrosyan
ReplyDeleteYou bring up a couple of good points.
ReplyDeleteDon't be too sure that Aliyev's departure will bring into Baku a pacifist. In my opinion, Aliyev is the best friend Armenia has had in Azerbaijan. The only thing Aliyev truly cares about is Aliyev. If Aliyev get's toppled, it will most probably be by a warmonger. Although I have no doubt that Artsakh will win any war against Azerbaijan, a war however will set the region back ten/twenty years. We don't need that.
Non-combat deaths are a fact of life and it happens in militaries all around the world. It's worst in the US military, it's worst in the Russian military, it's worst in the Chinese military, it's worst in the Iranian military, it's much-much worst in the Turkish military, it's much-much worst in the Azeri military... But it's only us Armenians that go hysterical over this topic.
Have you read this commentary? - http://theriseofrussia.blogspot.com/2012/01/sexual-assault-murder-severe-corruption.html
Yes, Artsakh is in fact an open-air arms depot for Armenia. I wouldn't be surprised if Artsakh has more armor and ammunition than Armenia. Artsakh is indeed a natural fortress. The only way Armenians there can be defeated is if they don't fight. Not fighting enemies and in-fighting amongst ourselves is essentially how we lost our kingdoms and principalities throughout our history. We have been our worst enemies.
Many Armenians in Armenia may be cowards but a majority of Armenians in the diaspora are in fact cowards. You are right, many Armenians today subconsciously expect Armenians to be weak and victimized. That is actually how they feel good about themselves. It's a sick form of sadomasochism that is the result of our decades long obsession over the genocide.
If you want to raise psychologically healthy/proud Armenians keep your children away from April 24 events. You can teach them the history but don't turn it into a form of religion.
You could be true about how post-aliyev baku would be. But I gave that idea because I have a friend who travels a lot to Georgia and Russia for works, he usually meets azeris on his way. There have been many azeris giving him the idea that most of the azeris don't care about Artsakh, they'd rather have peace with the Armenians than fighting for it. IF majority of azerbaijanis do think that way and if such minded people come to power, there is a possibility. However, I cannot say much because I a not familiar with azerbaijan's internal politics/problems. In any case, we should always be cautious of azeris.
ReplyDeleteYes, I have read that blog post. Very informative. I wasn't that aware about the US military.
Sadly, there is one major treasonous act in Armenian History which, if did not happen, things could have been different. The time when the Armenians handed the keys of Ani to Byzantium. And if the latter protected and helped Armenia confront the Central Asian invaders, perhaps we would have been in a more favorable geopolitical position today.
You're right about the majority of diasporans being cowards. It's as if the diaspora's only goal is to "make the world recognize the Armenian Genocide" by hiding behind other governments such as Lebanon, USA, France. True, raising awareness about our Genocide is important. And doing so was right until the collapse of the USSR. But now that thank God we have an independent, yet small Republic, we should concentrate our forces on strengthening. But instead, we just sit and complain: "As Hayasdantsinere Kogh en", "Hayasdan mi yertar, tramt gouden". Same thing goes to Hayastancis "es erkire erkir chi" "axr inch paterazm, handznenk prcnenk es harcic"...
However, I still do have hope for Armenia. Just yesterday I saw a news article which made me happy a lot. Due to the recent shootings on the border, nearly 4000 Armenians have called the Ministry of Defense, volunteering to join their comrades on the front. Such appearances in our country are great examples to show the remaining sheeple that this nation is still willing to live. Շուրջ 4000 զանգ ՊՆ-ում՝ կամավոր դառնալու: http://haynews.am/hy/1339090196
I'm not Russian, but watchmaking the documentary "The Unknown Putin" was still very enraging to watch! President Putin is incredible, no wonder the Russian people love him. His accomplishments dwarf Stalin's, and unlike the Georgian man of steel Putin did not build Russia into a superpower on mountains of Russian, German, Armenian and other Slavic corpses.
ReplyDeleteWell said! You don't have to be Russian to appreciate a great historic figure like Putin. He was, literally, God sent in my opinion. I also see him as I see Hitler - a warrior saint. Besides, by saving Russia Putin also saved Armenia. I have more respect for him than any of our politicians...
ReplyDeleteMy good friend you read my mind. He is the first light to shine on this world since the fall of Hitler plunged the entire world into a 60 year dark age where the current satan-anglo-zionist-turk alliance took hold. Putin is the only recent leader other than Hitler which I admire. And where Hitler tragically failed, Putin will dominate.
ReplyDeleteIronic that both leaders established power with near 100% support of their respective peoples by the same plan:
Step 1 - Eliminate the jewish oligarchy enslaving the gentiles and keeping them awash in cultural/idealogical filth and in dire poverty.
Step 2 - Put-in (no pun intended) hard work at the highest levels of government to educate and provide for the people, and enjoy the endless bounty of the Aryan Renaissance that immediately sweeps through Germany and Russia.
Ironic that even after decades of feverish jewish attempts at rotting the very soul of these great nations, the people recover entirely from the illness on average about seven years after a warrior poet leader takes firm power and ousts the jews.
There may yet be hope for the Armenians as well!