Loading ...if he we’re a hipster…lol!
oh and by the way: Sergey Karaganov: Western delusions triggered this conflict and Russians will not yield<<<basically we’re going to kick your arses westy fools
The Soviet Union’s sunset years hardly felt like an innocent age to those who lived through them, but to recall the hopes and aspirations of that era is to rue the naiveties of those days. “A common European house” was how President Mikhail Gorbachev pictured the continent’s future; “a Europe whole and free”, in the words of George HW Bush, his American counterpart. But, as the tussle over Ukraine has shown, Russia and the west are rivals once again. The ceasefiresigned on September 5 gives both sides a chance to overcome their own illusions. They should take it, lest the conflict become a direct military confrontation.
Western leaders seem to believe their own propaganda. A failed Ukraine, they suggest, could be cradled into western Europe and become democratic and prosperous – and maybe it could, if they waited 20 years and could count on energetic support from Russia. But Moscow, they are convinced, is hell-bent on grabbing land, a hunger from which it can be distracted only through the infliction of pain. Hence the sanctions, the war of disinformation and the reinvigoration of Nato as a military force.
It is a strategy that rests on misunderstanding and miscalculation. The misunderstanding is that this is, at root, a stand-off over Ukraine. To Russians, it is something far more important: a struggle to stop others expanding their sphere of control into territories they believe are vital to Russia’s survival.
It is a miscalculation because Russia is far stronger, and the west far weaker, than many imagine. The west that Russia now faces is not the self-confident alliance that proclaimed itself victor of the cold war. It is a directionless gaggle, beset with economic insecurities and losing sight of its moral convictions. America and its allies once held the future in their hands, but at the beginning of this Asian century they have let it slip through their fingers. Their crowning accomplishment was globalisation – and they are destroying it, with economic sanctions they incoherently describe as instruments of self-defence. Read more at FT