Skip to main content

What the F***?

After a phone call from the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, to the British Foreign minister, David Milliband, that was reportedly a tirade of foul mouthed abuse, it still seems that Russia is not getting the message. The tasteless and wholly inaccurate comment from Dimitri Medvedev that "Georgia was Russia's 9/11" combines the usual sense of Russian arrogance and paranoid victimhood in one simple phrase.

Meanwhile Russian schoolchildren are being tought that Stalin was "a tough minded leader who took decisions in his country's best interest".

Actually, Mr. Putin, Stalin was a psychopathic murderer with the blood of millions on his hands, who entered into an alliance with Hitler that destroyed European peace. Almost entirely evil, by the end of his life he was essentially criminally insane.

I am back in Tallinn and the impact of the Georgian war is clear- the fear that Russia intends to destabilise Estonia and the other Baltic countries by picking further disputes and stirring up the local Russian population. In fact although I think that much effort in that direction is being considered by the Kremlin, I am also sure that the local Russian population are generally quite happy living in a wealthy and democratic state, where their rights are respected.

Several Russian speakers have said to me that although the extremists amongst both Estonian and Russian speakers make a lot of noise, the vast majority are building their lives regardless. There is greater recognition by Estonian speakers that Russian speakers need to be brought further in to the Estonian state. There is a determination that no further social fracture should develop. That the Kremlin will create as much trouble as they can is taken as a given. However the overall feeling is that Russia has committed a strategic blunder, firstly by their massive over reaction in Georgia and even more so by their hostile and aggressive response to the storm of criticism.

The recovery of the Dollar and the fall in oil prices last week, underlined the vulnerability of Russia, despite its offensive posturing. The joint exercises that the Russian navy is undertaking with the Venezuelan armed forces do not pose a substantive security threat to the United States, but the cold rage that Washington now feels about the erratic blustering of the Silovik state grows more obvious by the day.

Close to home, several senior Estonians are now pointing out the growing likelihood of the collapse of the Russian electricity grid if there is a hard winter this year. Doubtless the crooks in the Kremlin will regard their own folly as some evidence of an American plot.

In the well chosen words of the Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation: why don't you f****** sort out your own issues, you lousy f*****.

Comments

Newmania said…
Is there not a teeny bit of you that rather delights in Millipede calling up to say the EU were going to wring hands and getting told to f--- off? Just me then

I rather like you Liberals roaming about solving the problems of the world.It suits you far better than the UK which is a bit complicated for a generalist.
Cicero said…
Yep- just you. Given the story was leaked in London, you might want to think how much more nasties we have to put up with from Russia.
Liberal Polemic said…
I'm not surprised that Lavrov was being so melodramatic.

It’s like the Labour councillor on my council that constantly swears and slanders the Tories (it is, apparently, possible :o) in the hope of getting thrown out of the chamber by the mayor, because it gets him good publicity.

Putin’s band of thugs are desperate to distract the Russians from their domestic misery by stirring up geo-political discord and then claiming to be defending Mother Russia.

If that was my mother, I’d run away from home.

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 ...

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 ...

One Year On

  Head vabariigi iseseisvuspäeva! Happy Estonian Independence Day! It is one year since I stood outside the Estonian Parliament for the traditional raising of the national flag from Tall Hermann tower. Looking at the young fraternities gathered with their flags, I was very sure that Estonia too would soon be facing the aggression of the criminal Russian regime. A tragic and dark day. 5 eyes intelligence had been clear: an all out invasion was going to happen, and Putin´s goals included- and still include- "restoration" of Russian imperial power across Europe, even to the Atlantic. Yet there was one Western intelligence failure: we all underestimated the guts of the Ukrainian armed forces, the ZSU, and its President and people. One year on, Estonia, and indeed all the front line states against Russia, knows that Ukraine saved us. Estonia used that time to prepare itself, should that "delayed" onslaught ever be unleashed, but equally the determination of Kaja Kallas, ...