Last night (Sunday) I accidentally turned on Sky News. And briefly stepped into a dirty piece of propaganda calculated to persuade its viewers that President Putin was a deluded clown obsessed with personal power.
A few days ago I watched a video of the Russian addressing an international security conference in Munich 15 years ago in March 2007. He seemed rational then and his concerns seemed valid. Those concerns were not addressed by his audience, who in the succeeding 15 years added to them.
According to (an American?) publication “The National Interest” Putin took direct aim at the notion, so popular in the United States during the1990s and 2000s that the international system was unipolar and that Washington’s power was unchallengeable. Implicitly referring to US-led military action in the Balkans and Iraq Putin stated-
“Today we are witnessing an almost uncontained hyper use of military force in international relations, force that is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflict. This is extremely serious. It seems that no one feels safe. Nato has put its frontline forces on our borders.- as yet we do not react to those actions at all.
Nato expansion represents a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust. We (Russians) have the right to ask: against whom this action is intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?”
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