What Mr. Putin and his supporters have done at home may be more important than his aggression against Ukraine, his support of the crumbling Bashar regime in Syria, his feints at the Baltic states. Later in the day he is expected to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
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Call them provocations, aggressions or mere maneuvers, but the actions by Russian Federation echo the bygone Cold War, ended a quarter century ago, analysts say.
In a gripping narrative of Putin’s rise to power as Russia’s president, Steven Lee Myers recounts Putin’s origins-from his childhood of abject poverty in Leningrad, to his ascension through the ranks of the KGB, and his eventual consolidation of rule.
“Indeed, as Russian Federation threatens anew a nuclear buildup and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation increases its forces in Eastern Europe, the situation seems to have regressed half a century”, Hryckowian wrote in an August op-ed for U.S. News & World Report. The framework was put in place for Russian Federation to provide arms to Syria via Iran and Iraq and for joint operations on the ground and in the air.
“We must merge the two coalitions into one”, Sarkozy said, referring to the rival US- and Russia-led military campaigns.
Thus, for example, Putin reportedly told Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in September 2014, “If I wanted, in two days I could have Russian troops not only in Kyiv, but also in Riga, Vilnius, Tallinn, Warsaw and Bucharest”.
“It’s incredible how the Russian people have taken Jones, he’s like a superstar…it takes the pressure off me because I’m seen as just an opponent for him, but I’m going to pull off a huge shock over here on December 12 and bring the world title back to Wales”. Indeed, this interplay between a current specific policy-issue and the fundamentals that the regime is built on, has been a trademark of Putin’s presidencies.
So, American politics tends to personalize bilateral relations to a ridiculous degree: It is a contest between a macho and ex-KGB Putin versus “who knows what kind of man Obama is”.
In a speech before students of the MGIMO, Moscow’s prestigious Institute of global Relations, Sarkozy called on the West to end Russia’s isolation and declared the country an “indispensable” partner in resolving the conflict in Syria. “This is a new reality for us strategically, and it looks like it’s here to stay”.
Perhaps the most interesting development, however, is with Saudi Arabia.
Russia’s leadership has already floated the idea of settlements for oil deals in roubles and currencies other than the dollar, such as China’s yuan, as part of efforts to trim reliance on Western financial institutions. But Mr. Putin has all but eliminated organized opposition to the work of his one-man coterie and the hangers-on, his old colleagues in the KGB, and profiteers of Russia’s new state capitalism.
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“On Komsomol’s birthday, Putin signed a decree on creating new Pioneers”, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily said in a headline on its website Thursday. This evolution, however, is not the product of a single linear strategy, but has been influenced and shaped by reactive responses to circumstances over the course of the last fifteen years.
