Putin: Great Visionary or Just Lost

[Magda Hassan]

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My thesis is that Putin hopes that the West will back off on this goal given his strategies of parlaying his gambits into Syria and the Donbass via diplomacy into the survival of Russian independence, while maintaining the economic and political status quo. He's trying to tip toe past a lot of graveyards populated with zombies.

The west is not going to back off. Insane to think otherwise.

Dimitri Orlov said some time ago that Putin's weakness is that he is a statist in his adoption of Western capitalist models. I think he sees Russia as being European and that he still wants to be seen as a peer with Angel Merkel.

Orlov's weakness is he a Libertarian and thinks all problems can be solved by abandoning nation states and by living on a big boat in international waters. However, he is correct here in that Putin is too wanting to be accepted by the west as an equal. He will never be accepted as long as the western Anglo American empire is dominant. At least Stalin, coming from Georgia, knew Russia was also an Asian country. And he didn't give a shit about western acceptance or not.



EDIT: Here is a another of Putin from Israel Shamir.

• As the Rouble drops, even the rather pro-Kremlin mass-circulation newspaper KP (full disclosure: I write an occasional column for the KP) published a call for the economy and finance ministers to resign or to be fired. There is a very little chance that Mr Putin will take this advice and clean his government stables.
  
• He could beef up his credit by dumping some (or all) of his ministers, but Putin is stubborn and unusually loyal to his colleagues. No accusation has ever convinced him to dismiss a man of his team. His former defence minister Mr Serdyukov has allegedly been involved in some shady dealing, while Serdyukov's paramour and assistant amassed millions by selling prime MOD assets to her cronies. Still, Putin did not dump him, and saved him from jail. (He had to resign to become a CEO, while she served a few weeks in prison, at most).
  
• Last week, the opposition leader Mr Navalny aired some heavy charges against Attorney General Chayka. For his defence, Chayka said that the man behind the campaign is the notorious Mr Browder. Browder is an American crook who managed to appropriate many high-quality Russian assets for pennies during Yeltsin's privatisation. Eventually he was forced to part with his loot and he has been sentenced to many years of jail in absentia. Browder is slime, no doubt, but it is a weak defence for Chayka. Still, Putin refused to drop Chayka or even to initiate an independent investigation of his alleged crimes.
  
• Putin stands by the most hated politician of Yeltsin's era, Mr Anatoly Chubays. TheFinancial Times called him Father to the Oligarchs. After leaving the government, Chubays has been appointed to lead the RUSNANO, a state-owned corporation notorious for its embezzlement and waste. Putin saved him many times over from prosecution.
  
• Putin went, hat in hand, to Yekaterinburg for the grand opening of Boris Yeltsin's Memorial Centre (price tag nine billion roubles) and referred kindly to the loathed late President who appointed him his successor. People were furious seeing their president enjoying himself among the carpetbaggers of Yeltsin's regime.
  
• Can you imagine Fox TV transmitting Russian propaganda? In Russia, a major chunk of Russian media, state-owned or subsidised by the taxpayer, transmits pro-Western and anti-Russian agenda, alleged the eminent film director Nikita Michalkov, a staunch supporter of Putin, in his video seen by over two million viewers in a few days. He called upon Putin to assert his line and banish the enemies within, but state TV refused to broadcast the video.
  
• Putin's recent press-conference provided a chance for more criticism. Beside the points mentioned above, the journalists asked why state enterprise CEOs are paid millions of dollars a year, while everybody else is called upon to tighten the belt. They asked why the Russian Central Bank keeps buying US bonds and supports the US Dollar at the expense of the Rouble. They asked why import substitution does not work etc.
  

These are protests from the pro-Putin crowd, from people who supported his takeover of Crimea and his entry into Syrian war. They could bear some deprivation, but they are upset by Putin's condoning thieves, by his apparent cronyism, by his oligarch friends. Until now, the critics avoided attacking Putin, but these are the early swallows. Dr Stepan Sulakshin, the head of a Moscow think tank, publicly accused Putin of knowingly leading Russia into further degradation.

All of this is problematic for Putin.

The Turkish friction caused by Erdogan's decision to shoot down the Russian bomber is another source of Putin's blues. He had spent a lot of effort nurturing relations with Turkey. All this effort went down the drain. There are multimillion projects, from a gas pipeline to tourism. All that was cut down at once. Putin's plans to deliver gas to Europe bypassing the hostile Ukraine collapsed. This is a huge setback for the Russian president.

Yes, huge set back. Should have worked with Serbia, Montenegro and Greece.

The rift between Turkey and Russia became a fact. Its main beneficiaries were the US and Israel. For the last five years, the relations between Israel and Turkey were hostile, since Israeli commandos massacred nine peace activists on board the Turkish vessel Navi Marmara. In face of the Russian threat, the Turks agreed to make peace with Israel.

Turkey totally capitulated to Israeli demands. Completely sold out their own murdered citizens. Not sure how well this will play out for Erdogan.

Israel has a good working relations with Daesh, too. I was told that Daesh troops entered the Palestinian camp al Yarmuk being equipped with long lists of Palestinian activists. They were assembled and publicly executed. The Palestinians think that Daesh received the names from Israeli secret service and acted upon their request. Moreover, Daesh never ever attacked a Zionist target.

Well, isn't that interesting....?

Even Pentagon generals complained about this matrix of his mind, says Seymour Hersh.

I am finding Hersh's comments very interesting. Shows there are faction in the military that are not supportive of their C in C nor are they of the Cheney brigade.

His ambition is more modest: he wants Russia to be independent, prosperous, great, and equal to other great nations like it was in 19th century...... There is a wind of nostalgia in Russia, and it is for Russia of Leo Tolstoy and Tchaikovsky. Putin has ordered that the remains of the White generals, philosophers, artists be brought back for burial on the Russian soil. Soviet and Communist memories are suppressed. Recently, Prime Minister Medvedev called for another bout of commemorations for Stalin's victims. I am not sure that this is a wise policy; perhaps it would be better to let past to take care of itself. But here we are: Putin and his crowd are old-style liberals, not social reformers. They do not want to raise the banner of revolt. They want to fit into the world as it is, but as equals.

Russia was then an irrelevant primitive provincial backwater. Russia is truly doomed then if this is the limit of his and others vision. They were never accepted as equals by Europe then and will not be now.

The problem is, there are people who are hell-bent on hegemony and full-spectrum dominance, and they are not likely to allow Russia to go its own way. They want to impose their rules, and set in place their docile rulers. That's why the very modest intentions of Putin meet so much resistance in NATO and the Pentagon, in the White House and in Westminster. What's worse, these people already control the mainstream politics of many countries, from the US to Japan, to France and Sweden. It does not matter which of the mainstream politicians win elections, the result is the same.

Putin's (and Russia's) hope lays in politicians outside the controlled mainstream. Donald Trump is a good example. Putin is not particularly interested in US internal politics and in Mr Trump's unusual proposals. This is an internal matter of the US, and Putin steers clear of it, like he wants the US to steer clear of Russia's internal matters. For him, what is important, is that Trump's America would not try to dominate the world and impose its agenda. The moral question whether Trump's ideas about Muslims or Latinos are lofty or base is a question for the American people to decide. Putin and many other foreign leaders want America's non-interference in their internal affairs.

The rude Mr. Trump seems to be the candidate least likely to push the button for nuclear suicide of mankind. Much less likely than nice Mrs Clinton who could nuke Russia because Russians do not celebrate gay marriages. Remember, her nice husband bombed Belgrade because the nasty Serbs did not allow for the secession of Croats (or was it Albanians?)

Trump or any straightforward decent politician who does not take orders from the Masters of Discourse would be able to play ball with Mr Putin, by classical rules of international law. Trump and Putin could return the concept of sovereignty to its privileged position. This would end many wars.

This is true. And I hate most of what Trump has said, horrified by some of what he has said, and he would make a terrible president for many reasons but on the foreign policy side he sounds far preferable to Hilary and the other Republicans. I don't find any thing nice about Hilary at all. Sanders will be best for everyone and I'm really holding out for Jeremy Corbyn in the UK to get some sanity in politics.