Skip to main content

Russia's active tense

The utter paranoia of the Russian regime ahead of the Samara summit is quite extraordinary.

It is not Russia that is the victim of politically inspired hygiene checks on its exports.

It is not Russia that has been the victim of a politically inspired shut down on its major oil route.

It is not Russia that has been threatened over the moving of a World War II monument and had riots fomented in its capital by a foreign embassy (although in recent years we may note that they have demolished several monuments and even desecrated graves in order to build new roads).

It is not Russia that is the victim of Cyber-attacks that have crashed many major corporate and government websites.

It is not Russia that has had its Ambassador harried at every turn by thugs.

Russia has prosecuted these activities and not been the victim.

The Germans have kept the Samara summit alive, but if the Russian strategy was to divide and rule in the EU, the sheer brutality of their methods has eliminated any goodwill. The summit will be bad tempered, and without some serious Russian back pedalling, the issue will not be greater Russian partnership with Europe- but what sanctions the bloc will impose.

Europe is very close indeed to deciding that Vladimir Putin is not a man that we can do business with at all.

PS: I was interviewed at the BBC about the Samara summit at the ungodly hour of 5.30 this morning- interesting to see the increasingly firm editorial tone across the UK newspapers, even the weaselly Guardian had the cyber attacks against Estonia on the front page.

Russian blundering is hardening opinion in every quarter.

Comments

urr said…
sometimes it seems that putin has totally lost his rational mind. especially strange was the trip of russian spying planes to scotland. until then they sent their planes only over the borders of baltic states...
crazy leader of ex-super power which is still equipped with so many atom bombs... not so happy future for all of us. i hope that western states do realize that he has to be stopped. the westerners didn't stopped hitler in right time. now they still have the chance with putin and his fellow criminals.

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...