VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
London; Washington; and Hanover, N.H - When war erupted in August between Russia and Georgia, it was the European Union (EU) president who achieved a cease-fire agreement. Was this just a lucky break for the EU, or a sign of Europe's strength?
Dmitry Medvedev, Russia's president, broke a taboo on constitutional change yesterday when he asked parliament to extend the presidential term from four to six years - a move that could pave the way for Vladimir Putin to return as head of state for a further 12 years.
Barack Obama's election victory prompted an impressive outpouring of goodwill from around the world yesterday -- but also the first hints of the testing that his running mate, Joseph R. Biden Jr., predicted. Kenya declared a national holiday, Britain's largest-circulation newspaper called Mr. Obama's victory "one giant leap for mankind" and even Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez proposed "new relations between our countries." Then came a Bronx cheer from Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, who delivered a speech harshly attacking the United States and reiterating threats to deploy new missile systems within range of U.S. NATO allies. It would be up to Mr. Obama, Mr. Medvedev suggested with a typical absence of subtlety, to "make a choice in favor of full-fledged relations with Russia."
An article in the pro-Kremlin Izvestia newspaper last week pointed smugly at Americans' purported latent racism, noting the 70th anniversary of Orson Welles' reading of War of the Worlds on the radio. "If on November 4 a black man gets into the White House, it will be no less a miracle than an alien landing on earth."
Two months ago, the United States. and Europe were jolted by a revived Russia. Flush with energy money, Moscow announced that it was back as a world power. Georgia was defeated, Ukraine was fearful, the Eastern Europeans were nervous, and the United States and Western Europeans argued over what to do. Was a new cold war imminent? They needn't have worried.
Russia's president Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday became the first world leader to throw down a gauntlet to US president-elect Barack Obama, declaring that the Kremlin would station missiles in the tiny Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, which borders Poland, in response to US plans for an anti-missile system in Eastern Europe.
The friend giving me a ride swapped just a couple of grim words with his wife on his cell phone, then turned to me. "They fired her," he said sadly. "There go our plans." The wife, who had enjoyed a cushy bank job, then joined the tens of thousands of Russia's new middle class who have found themselves newly unemployed.
Despite Russia's plunging stock markets, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, like other authoritarian capitalists in China and Venezuela, has at least been comforted by the thought that the financial crisis is a repudiation of the West's brand of free-market capitalism, and a golden opportunity for his country to shine. "Faith in the United States as the leader of the free world and the market economy and trust in Wall Street has been undermined forever," gloated Putin recently. Now, he predicted, Russia, China and India would be the "locomotives of world economic growth."
After the west heaped blame on Russia for the conflict, it ignores new evidence of Georgia's crimes of aggression. So now they tell us. Two months after the brief but bloody war in the Caucasus which was overwhelmingly blamed on Russia by western politicians and media at the time, a serious investigation by the BBC has uncovered a very different story.
From the vantage of a Moscow living room this week, it was easy to believe that the world had been magically beamed back to the worst days of 1962. On Monday, the state-controlled TV stations eagerly showed us a military delegation visiting Cuba in a mission, the first of its kind since Soviet times, to "exchange experience in organizing tactical air defence and in training officers," as the Kremlin put it.
