After defending Crimea’s “reunification” referendum as adhering to “all international norms,” Russian President Vladimir Putin declared Tuesday, March 18, that Russia would henceforth strongly defend its national interests against the “cold war tactics” practiced by the United States and the West.
He complained Moscow had sought dialogue with the West, but was “cheated all the time.” When he accused America of practicing the “law of the strong,” he was cheered by the packed lower house of the Russian parliament.
This was the most acrimonious speech heard from any Russian leader since the end of WWII in 1945.
Putin started with a review of the profound historical, national and religious significance of Crimea as the cradle of Russian civilization and went on to declare, “Our relationship with our brothers in Ukraine will always be a key issue for Russia,”
But then, after voicing sympathy with the protesters of Maidan Square against a succession of corrupt Ukrainian governments, he said Moscow would have no truck with the people who took power in Kiev. They were “fascists, anti-Semites, nationalists and radicals who seized power in a coup d’etat backed by western patrons, and do not legitimately represent the people of Ukraine.”
He accused them of plots against the ethnic Russians of Ukraine, starting with Crimea, after which they planned to serve the West by bringing NATO right up to the historic borders of Russia and into Sevastopol.
The Russian president repeated that Russia will always defend the interests of ethnic Russians of Ukraine “diplomatically, through laws and other means.”
Putin asked why Kosovo’s legitimacy in breaking away from Serbia was recognized by the UN and US and Crimea’s referendum deemed illegal. This is a double standard, he said. In 1999 Western troops invaded Serbia to separate Kosovo and NATO fired rockets into Belgrade, whereas Crimea saw no military showdown and not a single person died, he boasted.
So why was Western military action in defense of Kosovo’s rights legitimate, while Russia was accused of aggression in support of Crimea?
The Russian leader then delivered an unprecedented diatribe against the United States, accusing Washington of flouting the UN and Security Council in pursuit of its own interests, breaking international laws by bombing Iraq and Afghanistan, and fostering an “Arab spring” which turned into an “Arab winter.”
The West calls Russia an aggressive power which must be contained, Putin noted and added: “We have to stop this cold war rhetoric and assert our interests and you have to respect us and our interests as an independent nation.”
He mocked the sanctions against Russian and Crimean officials that the US and European Union approved Monday, saying that Moscow was used to sanctions in the form of dictates to fall in with their policies.
Putin also joked that Russia was ready to take on NATO forces in Crimea and Ukraine at any time
The session ended with Putin and Crimean leaders signing the treaty for making Crimea part of Russia with a grand flourish.
@ honeybee:
I rarely say “never’ about anything, Honeybee. But as an guy who knows poker as well as chess, I know better than tryng to draw to an inside straight or to let an opponent with a one-pawn lead trade me down piece by piece.
In any case, real reform of American government in line with what Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Adams, Monroe had in mind — aside for winding up as downtown Chicago streets — come with real long odds.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
Never say never!!!
@ honeybee:
Honeybee, I’d say you know as well as I do that it’s been a long time since the People of America had control over the American Govt.
We’ve come a long way from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
NormanF Said:
Do not confuse the American Govt. with the People of America.
Given how America treats Israel, there is much substance to what President Putin said.
Russia is not taking lessons from the West in good behavior. Israel should do the same.
Being tough wins you the respect of your enemies. Being the world’s doormat, a role the Jewish State has become used to, allows other countries to walk all over it.
Putin is not so much bitter about America as about the fact his country isn’t receiving its due as a great power. And that is what he seeks to upend.
ArnoldHarris Said:
I getcha babe!!!!! Keep on, keeping on!
Most of what Putin says is entirely accurate.
@ ArnoldHarris:
Thank you for your comment.
I read your comments all along and find them very much akin to my way of thinking. Israel or better yet, a cadre that has installed itself into government for decades in one configuration or another is compromised and untrustworthy. They linked us to the US almost exclusively. Under normal circumstances one could do that under caution but never committing into total dependence. Yet the later fashion is what was done.
The Obama administration is conclusively one we should move away from. We can always return to better times after the US voters make their decision.
Russia’s leadership understood that and is acting accordingly.
I also believe that Israel must move on to better connections with Russia, China and India as well as Taiwan, Korea, etc.
Be well,
I agree heartily with Arnold Harris’s sentiments, but I think he misses more than a few important points.
Most importantly, the world has changed dramatically for all of the parties described by Arnold, even in the last twenty years. We are seeing new realizations of democracy and democracy as a system of values is bound to vary from place to place where history differs and the experience of a people must shape democratic institutions and political culture.
And also the world, all this time, has been suffering at the hands of old evils that continue to hold sway in the world, Islam being the easiest example. Catholicism being the other, but far more elusive in its grasp and impact.
It is foolish to describe the United States as a fading empire. The United States has not now, nor will it ever be an empire. Like Russia now, it is a federation. There are those in the United States who have corrupted its political culture to make it function like an empire. But their days are numbered and their legacy is rot on our economy. political and society.
If Israel is to be a nation of Jews instead of a Jewish quarter, licensed by the UN and ghettoized by its neighbors, then it must cease to base its life on patronage. Instead it must vitalize its existence as a nation among nations by being a nation among nations.
@ SHmuel HaLevi 2:
Incrasingly, other commenters on Israpundit are taking words right out of my mouth. Nonetheless, I am pleased.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is precisely the kind of strong, tough, far-seeing and wise leader that the Jewish state and the Jewish nation so greatly need.
Surely, I respect the differences between the Russian Federation and the State of Israel.
Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation straddles some nine international time zones across eastern Europe and all of Asia and from the Arctic Ocean to the deserts of south central Asia, and has been a great power for many centuries, with a sturdy population of men and women who, when need arises, put their country’s national interests above all else, and whose grandfathers mobilized and equipped the vast and terrible armies that broke the back of Nazi Germany in a crescendo of violence that did not stop until they had cornered the rat Hitler in his underground bunker and had given him the choice of suicide or being chained and dragged into a war crimes tribunal, and being hanged like the rest of his Nazi criminal leaders. Many a Jew fought in the great Red Armies of that era, and I have met more than a few of them. To me, such men and women are holy, and I have treated them accordingly. Their great Russia is a country and a nation that allows nobody to shove them around, and that is a quality that I valuate above all the accumulated wealth of the world.
Binyamin Netanyahu’s Israel is a pint-size state comprising almost half the world’s Jews, which must quadruple its Jewish population before the end of the 21st century, and expand its borders both eastward across the Jordan River and westward across the Sinai peninsula, if Israel is in fact to be the permanent home of the Jewish nation. Israel has created one of the world’s best armed forces, which in a succession of wars have proved their abilities to destroy all the enemy air forces from the Nile to the Euphrates rivers in a single morning and to smash through and disintegrate armies of Arab peasants. But Israel, in the name of western liberal democracy, has allowed a now-fading western empire, the United States of America, to act as a sort of high commissioner for Jewish affairs, almost always against the interests of the Jewish state and the Jewish nation. There has not been a true and uncompromising Jewish nationalist leader in Israel since the retirement of Yitschak Shamir, a great son of the tough Jewry of eastern Europe. So minds of the personalities at the controls of the Jewish state dither, and Israel is shoved into one corner after another.
Israel — now, not later — requires a true Jewish nationalist government, a nationalism grounded in Jewish law and Jewish history. That government must set aside western liberal democracy, which, in any case, is contrary both to Jewish law and to the realities of Jewish national life in the middle of a mostly total Islamic imperium that stretches from the Atlantic Ocean to southeast Asia. In addition, Israel and the Jewish nation must break free of the controlling fingers of the American imperium, which proclaims its friendship to Jews but whose leadership cadres regard us as nothing more than a noisy voting bloc which, in any case, might be counter-weighed in the near future by a mass of Islamic voters in the USA whose numbers are now rapidly being augmented.
I have been questioned and sometimes openly attacked in this forum for wanting Israel to be more oriented toward Russia, China and India than toward the USA and western Europe. Perhaps that is so because this is in fact an English language forum, representing the national prejudices and ways of thinking of this once great but now fading western empire. But all of you should carefully think over what I say. I don’t even pretend to be likeable. But I do think I am right.
And lest anybody thinks otherwise, President Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation and their Eurasian Customs Union will win out of President Barack Hussein Obama’s United States of America and their NATO and Germany’s European Union.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Lets see if the process followed by Mr. Putin serves as guide to our infirm trash passing as leaders. I doubt that specimens such as Peres or Livni Or Netanyahu are fit to truly lead forward. They only lead down.
It is not a matter of right or wrong. Personally I believe that historically Mr. Putin is correct. But his stern leadership is what I point at.
If the US has been driven to the shoals by internal enemies, so we have been as well.
The unJews must be set aside, now.