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| Putins Military Expansion Only Beginning, Felshtinsky Says |
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Paul Goble
Staunton, April 17 Diplomats, commentators, and the public typically focus on a particular action rather than on the context within which it takes place or the extent to which it points to broader trends, either because this gives them confidence that they can address the particular or because all extrapolations from it are inevitably subject to dispute.
But that makes the arguments of those who suggest that any particular action is part of a broader trend all the more important because such arguments not only provide a test of the assumptions of others about the limited nature of this or that action but also call attention to what may happen in the future.
One writer who routinely seeks to go from the particular to the general in analyzing Vladimir Putins foreign policy actions is US-based Russian historian Yury Feltshtinsky, who argues in a new essay that Putins military expansion is only beginning (apostrophe.com.ua/article/politics/2016-04-17/yuriy-felshtinskiy-voennaya-ekspansiya-putina-tolko-nachinaetsya/4400).
Living exclusively on the extraction and sale of raw materials, he writes today on the Apostrophe portal, Russia is able to produce only two products arms and armed conflicts. The first is important as a source of income for the state, especially given declines in oil prices. The second is an instrument for expanding political influence.
At the present time, Feltshtinsky argues, Russia is searching for new places to exacerbate or create conflicts: Abkhazia and South Osetia for a new war with Georgia; Crimea and Eastern Ukraine for continuing the war with Ukraine; Transdniestria for the potential seizure of Moldova; Syria and Kurdistan for splitting NATO, destabilizing Turkey and unleashing a major war in the Middle East to increase oil prices; the Karabakh conflict for subordinating Armenia; military bases in Belarus as a place des armes for the annexation of Belarus; the Russian question in the Baltic states as an occasion for intervention in the Baltic countries and the reunification of ties between Kaliningrad and continental Russia; provocations towards Finland and Sweden which are not members of NATO for intervention in Finland under the pretext of not allowing it to become a member of NATO; the seizure of the Arctic in order to exacerbate conflicts with Canada; and finally, the demand for the return of Alaska to Russia which sold it 150 years ago as the beginning of an open geopolitical and military-political conflict with the US by means of the use of atomic blackmail against the entire world.
Given this list, the historian says, all signs show that the program of territorial seizures by Russia has only begun with the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of the eastern regions of Ukraine and that talk about demanding the return of Alaska should not be dismissed as an April Fools joke.
That is how many people reacted to an article published on that date in Moscows Gazeta with the title The Return of Alaska will be a Gift to Putin (gazeta.ru/politics/2016/03/30_a_8151107.shtml). But perhaps, Felshtinsky says, this may not prove to be funny at all.
After seizing Crimea, Putin did not say that this represented the completion of his territorial goals nor did he say that his intention was to restore the USSR, the Russian historian points out. Instead, he again talked about the end of the USSR as a personal and geopolitical tragedy and dismissed Ukraine as a non-existent state.
And taking their lead from Putins words, Russian singers talked about taking even more, up to and including the Turkish straits and Jerusalem because they are part of an imagined Russian world or because of Russias role as the third Rome, Feltshtinsky says.
From this perspective, of course, Poland, Finland and Alaska which once were part of the Russian Empire are nothing other than Russian lands from time immemorial. And it is thus not be any chance that from March 2014, Russian submarines regularly approach Finland, and Russian jets fly up to the air borders of the Baltic countries, Poland, Finland and Alaska.
A year before Putin made these remarks, Gazeta suggested that talk about getting Alaska back was either idiotism or a provocation. But now, the Moscow paper seriously discusses if it is possible for Russia to demand the return of Alaska, a reflection of the changes Putins policies have wrought in Russia.
Felshtinsky points to one detail of this years Gazeta article: it talks about the return of Alaska not as a gift to Russia as a state but to Putin personally. And it is understandable why: Russia and Russians dont need either Crimea or Eastern Ukraine or Alaska given the price they have paid and would have to pay for that to happen.
The only people who need this are Putin and his small junta of five to seven of the senior KGB/FSB officers who today run Russia. These people are very dangerous because they did not join the organs to become builders but rather to suppress, kill, control, provoke, split up, take away and recruit, all things they know how to do and do with enthusiasm.
In the propaganda film, World Order, Putin declared that he had learned as a child on the streets of Leningrad that if a fight is inevitable, one must strike out first. That is what he has done, even if many have been unwilling to recognize his moves as a reflection of this perception of the nature of the world.
In 1999, when he was head of the KGB, he was involved in sending Russian troops to seize the Prishtina airport in Kosovo. Later that year, when he had become prime minister, he unleashed the second post-Soviet Chechen war. Then in 2008, the Kremlin leader invaded Georgia; and in March 2014, he sent his forces into Ukraine.
The main problem with Putin and Russia today, Felshtinsky says, is that Putin is not a dictator. He is in power as a representative of the KGB/FSB, and with the departure of Putin from the political arena, nothing of principle will change in Russia if the junta of former FSB officers remains.
Many have ignored that and have ignored the fact that not once over the last two years has the Kremlin declared that with the occupation of Crimea and the eastern regions of Ukraine is the program of Russias territorial seizures at an end. To the contrary, everything indicates that it is only beginning.
Evidence for this conclusion includes increased military spending, the bold testing of NATOs resolve in Europe, dispatching Russian forces to Syria, increased espionage activity, the aggressive rhetoric of the foreign ministry, and the activation of anti-Western rhetoric by the Russian media in Russia and abroad to levels unheard of even in Soviet times.
Putin is trying to force the world community to recognize a new world order as proclaimed and organized by the Kremlin, Felshtinsky says. At the basis of this new doctrine lies Putins demand to recognize Russias right to a free hand for the realization of the foreign political plans of the Kremlin to control or seize territories and spheres of influence.
According to the Russian historian, the tactical instrument for the realization of this strategic task is the exacerbation of conflicts in various parts of the world in order to demand Russias participation in their resolution as a fully equal partner of the US. And Putin is doing so because this is the only sphere in which Russia is competitive. |
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| US Air Force plane intercepted by Russian jet in ‘unsafe’ manner: Pentagon – Yahoo News |
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| ‘Erratic & aggressive’: Pentagon protests Russian interception of US spy plane – RT |
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| Israel, Turkey, Russia and Egypt – Gatestone Institute |
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Israel, Turkey, Russia and Egypt
Gatestone Institute
To restore full relations between Israel and Turkey would irritate Russia, with which Israel has good trade and political relations, and a respectful series of understandings regarding Syria. Israel’s relations with the Kurds are also at issue here …
and more » |
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| Russia jet ‘provokes’ US plane again – New York Post |
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| Заседание правительства Израиля впервые прошло на Голанских высотах – РИА Новости |
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| Hundreds Rally In Baghdad Demanding Reforms |
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Several hundred Shi’ite demonstrators have rallied in central Baghdad to call for reforms. |
| Israel Affirms Its Hold on Golan Ahead Talks with Putin on Syria |
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Sunday that Israel would never relinquish the Golan Heights, in a signal to Russia and the United States that the strategic plateau should be excluded from any deal on Syria’s future. “The Golan Heights will remain in Israel’s hands forever,” Netanyahu told his cabinet, which met for the first time on the Golan since the area was captured from Syria in a 1967 war and annexed in 1981, in a move that has not won international recognition. Netanyahu, who made a similar statement during an election campaign in 2009, said he had spoken by telephone with U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Saturday and told him that Israel’s security must not be compromised by any peace agreement to end Syria’s five-year-old civil war. That would mean, Netanyahu said, that “at the end of the day Iranian, Hezbollah and ISIS forces would be expelled from Syrian territory”. Iran, one of Israel’s main foes, as well as Tehran’s Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, have supported Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in the conflict against rebel forces and Islamic State militants. Echoing a previous call from the Jewish Home party, a key ultranationalist partner in his governing coalition, Netanyahu urged the international community “to recognize finally that the Golan will remain permanently under Israeli sovereignty.” Officially, the Golan was chosen as the venue for the cabinet session as a way to mark the anniversary of Netanyahu’s election victory a year ago. But the timing was seen by some political commentators as linked to talks Netanyahu is due to hold with Russian President Vladimir Putin on Syria, where Moscow’s military and diplomatic interventions are crucial. Though Russia is committed to keeping Syria intact under Assad, it has not publicly broached the future of the Golan. “Whatever happens beyond the border, the [Golan] line is not going to change,” Netanyahu said, in his remarks on his conversation with Kerry. Having sent in Russian forces last year to turn the tide against a rebellion raging since 2011, Putin, who meets Netanyahu in Moscow on Thursday, wants to preserve Assad’s central rule as part of national reconciliation efforts. Other powers want him gone. While formally neutral on the civil war next door, Israel has predicted Syria’s sectarian partition is inevitable. Past U.S.-backed Israeli-Syrian peace efforts were predicated on a return of the Golan, where some 23,000 Israelis now live alongside roughly the same number of Druse Arabs loyal to Damascus. |
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