Boris Nemțov…

Sa ne uitam bine la Rusia… Atat la Rusia lui Gorbaciov cat si la Rusia actuala, cea a lui Putin. Observam ca putem sa impartim perioada de timp scursa de la prabusirea comunismului in doua clase: Gorbaciov si Putin. Chestiunea este ca Rusia lui Putin nu mai e Rusia lui Gorbaciov, iar lucrul asta cred ca trebuie sa-l intelegem foarte bine cu totii: UE si NATO. Se pare ca Vestul, la ora actuala, incepe sa inteleaga totusi… Insa mai trebuie sa luam aminte la ceva: Rusia lui Putin  s-ar fi asemanat ca doua picaturi de apa cu Romania daca in 2004 nu ar fi castigat Traian Basescu alegerile si nu am fi avut un Daniel Morar!! Sistemul autoritarist si oligarhic al lui Putin si-ar fi avut tizul sau la Bucuresti, adica exact acel sistem care l-a ucis, cu putina vreme inainte, pe procurorul Panait, declarat nebun post-mortem. Regimul Putin a mimat o vreme libertatea. Acum Dl. Putin a ajuns suficient de puternic, suficient de oligarh pentru ca s-o sfideze.

Sigur, corect este sa asteptam rezultatele anchetei in privinta uciderii liderului Opozitiei, Dl. Nemtov. Sigur, toate banuielile duc spre Putin. Bineinteles, regretam ca s-a intamplat asa ceva si transmit condoleante pe aceasta cale familiei D-lui. Nemtov. Insa avem aici si o alta problema…

O problema chiar mai complicata decat invazia ruseasca in Ucraina. Daca invazia Rusiei asupra Ucrainei a aratat o atitudine neprietenoasa a Rusiei fata de Occident, uciderea D-lui. Nemtov pune in discutie problema prieteniei. Mai putem avea relatii de prietenie cu o tara in care se intampla astfel de lucruri batatoare la ochi, intr-o tara cu un sistem oligarhic, plin de bani bolnavi, cu o conducere care isi arata mereu agresivitatea fata de Lumea Libera si care considera „prabusirea comunismului drept cea mai mare catastrofa geopolitica a sec. XX”?

Nu degeaba am spus mai sus ca putem imparti perioada de timp scursa de la prabusirea comunismului in doua clase, deoarece, in continut, e vorba de valori. Altele erau valorile Rusiei sub Gorbaciov si altele sunt acum, sub Putin. Iar valorile de acum, pe care se fondeaza Statul Rus, sunt incompatibile cu valorile UE si NATO. In atari conditiuni se pune problema daca relatiile dintre UE si NATO mai pot fi ca pe vremea lui Gorbaciov. Bine, o potrivire perfecta nu poate exista vreodata. Dar diferentele intre Gorbaciov si Putin incep sa fie foarte mari. De aceea si atitudinea UE si a NATO trebuie sa se schimbe in consecinta. Cu alte cuvinte, nu mai putem vorbi de o prietenie cu Rusia, in asemenea conditiuni: Rusia are un regim profund corupt, statul de drept este calcat in picioare, sunt asasinati oameni publici importanti care critica regimul Putin, incercand sa se puna pumnul in gura oricarei forme de Opozitie. In atari conditiuni nu putem vorbi decat de un nou razboi rece.

Insa tot atat de grav este cum trateaza Administratia de la Casa Alba problema si va propun sa cititi aceste articole din Commentary:

What Will Nemtsov’s Assassination Mean for Hillary?

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„On February 27, Boris Nemtsov, a former Russian deputy prime minister and a liberal opponent of Russian President Vladimir Putin, was shot dead in the shadow of the Kremlin. It wasn’t the first time a Russian figure who ran afoul of Putin paid the ultimate price—think Sergei Magnitsky or Anna Politkovskaya—but it was among the most brazen attacks, or at least the most brazen attack that didn’t involve polonium. Unknown assailants killed Nemtsov, a critic of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just two days before a major opposition rally. Any doubt that Vladimir Putin is anything but a cold, calculating psychopath, an aggressive despot who seeks not Russian greatness, but rather his own unquestioned power, should now be put to rest.

Hillary Clinton rose to prominence not on her own merits as an elected leader, but rather as a first lady. She might be smart and talented, but her path to power was not her own. Granted, she leveraged her prominence to run and win a Senate seat in New York, but she approached the office with extreme caution and simply bided her time; she certainly will not go down as a great legislator. After surprising no one and running for the presidency in 2008, she got her chance when President Barack Obama appointed her to be his secretary of state. It is chiefly the legacy of these four years in office that provide the only window into Clinton’s executive experience and policy judgment.

Hindsight is always 20/20, but few secretaries of state appear to have been so quickly proved wrong on the major initiatives they oversaw. Like it or not, Clinton’s foreign-policy legacy—the experience she needs to prove that she is worthy of answering the 3 a.m. phone call—rests upon her tenure at the State Department. And it is here that the Russian reality might come crashing down upon Clinton’s presidential ambitions.

President Obama took the Iran issue as his own—asking the Iranian leadership figuratively to unclench its fist—leaving Clinton in charge of Russia. Clinton shaped and oversaw the so-called “reset.” The conceit of the reset was the belief on Obama and Clinton’s part that their predecessors had mishandled the Russian relationship and allowed it to derail. George W. Bush was far from perfect on the issue—his claim to have looked into Putin’s eyes and seen his soul showed poor judgment and misplaced trust—but he quickly calibrated his policies to reality as the real Putin showed through. Clinton’s reset at best reflected a willingness to forgive and forget the Russian occupation of Georgia and, at worst, showed a complete ignorance of Putin and his ambitions.

Had Clinton learned from her mistakes, she might not be tied to Putin today. But, even against the backdrop of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Clinton insisted that her reset policy was a success, that it somehow benefited the United States’s security and position in the world. Alas, the opposite is demonstrably true. Russia is far more aggressive today than it has been in decades. Russian bombers not only probe NATO defenses in Europe, but also may soon patrol the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico.

Then, of course, there was the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). In order to win congressional approval for a deal riddled with holes, the State Department withheld information from Congress which detailed Russian cheating on previous agreements. Clinton’s point person on the new START was her undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, Ellen Tauscher. Tauscher subsequently left the State Department and joined the Atlantic Council, where she sought to further the reset with an initiative called “Mutually Assured Stability,” a silly name for an idea that treated Russian ambitions naively. There is no stability when the Kremlin sniffs weakness. What was incredible about Tauscher’s project was that she accepted Kremlin money to underwrite it. The Kremlin founded the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC) to act as its representative in the NGO world. Clinton had hundreds of staffers, and dozens claimed to be her close aides, so can she really be held accountable for what Tauscher did after leaving the State Department? Normally, the answer would be no. But Clinton has since brought Tauscher back as a key aide in one of the shadow groups organizing her campaign. That suggests Clinton is doubling down on her embrace of Russia even as Putin shows his true colors.

Few presidential elections revolve around foreign policy. Americans tend to vote with their wallets. But 2016 may be an exception: Obama’s diplomatic and national-security strategy had now been tried and found wanting. Obama did not cause the Arab Spring, but his belief in leading from behind allowed wildfires in Libya and Syria to spin out of control. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has reinforced a malaise not seen since the Carter years. Add into this mix that Clinton, if she runs, will have to run on her State Department tenure and it seems evident that foreign policy will matter in 2016. If Clinton cannot admit an error, that’s bad enough. If she truly believes her ideas and actions on Russia were to the benefit of international security, then that suggests a far greater question of judgment.

The more Putin embraces the paranoia and worldview of former Soviet Premier Josef Stalin—a comparison which will only be highlighted by Nemtsov’s murder—the more Clinton may find her State Department tenure not to be her greatest asset, but instead her Achilles’ heel.”

The Murder of Yet Another Putin Critic

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„In 1934 Sergei Kirov, an old Bolshevik who had been head of the Party organization in Leningrad, was assassinated with a shot to the back. Most of his NKVD bodyguards had been mysteriously removed before the murder. Josef Stalin, the Soviet Union’s absolute dictator, expressed shock at the murder and promised to investigate personally. Within weeks a disgruntled former party functionary was arrested, convicted, and that very night executed. Stalin then used the assassination as an excuse to purge Trotskyites and others who he claimed were a threat to the regime, and whom he blamed for Kirov’s death. In reality, the bulk of the historical evidence suggests that Stalin himself arranged the assassination because he viewed Kirov, like other old Bolsheviks, as a potential threat to his rule.

Sound familiar? On Friday, Boris Nemtsov, a leading critic of the Putin regime, was gunned down with four shots to the back within yards of the Kremlin, the most heavily patrolled and secured area in the entire country. Vladimir Putin promised to personally take charge of the investigation while immediately branding it a “provocation,” presumably designed by his enemies to unfairly implicate him. Before long the Kremlin-controlled media were dropping dark hints that the CIA or the Russian opposition–or maybe the two in cahoots–were responsible for killing Nemtsov to blacken Putin’s good name. Or perhaps, they speculated, Nemtsov was killed because of his own moral turpitude; he was said to be involved in a back-alley abortion or some such.

Putin is no Stalin, but he has been rehabilitating Stalin’s image in Russia and he gives the clear impression that he has learned a few tricks from one of the most brutal dictators in history. Like how to get rid of your opponents.

There is, in fact, a disturbing and obvious pattern of what happens to those who challenge Putin’s authority. The “lucky” ones like Mikhail Khodorkovsky are merely sentenced to prison on trumped up charges–a decade in the gulag in Khodorkovsky’s case. Or their relatives are sentenced to prison–the brother of opposition leader Alexei Navalny was recently sentenced to three and a half years in prison on trumped up charges. The unlucky ones are simply eliminated from the face of the earth.

As the Washington Post notes, Nemtsov “was by no means the first Putin opponent to be murdered in brazen fashion. Similar hits by gunmen killed the dissident lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalist Anna Politkovskaya in Moscow and the human rights activist Natalia Estemirova in Chechnya. A former KGB agent who turned on Mr. Putin, Alexander Litvinenko, was assassinated in London by agents who poisoned him with radioactive polonium.”

Putin treats other countries pretty much the same way he treats his own people. He has eliminated resistance in Chechnya with scorched-earth tactics. He has invaded Georgia and carved out Russian protectorates in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. And now he has invaded Ukraine, annexing Crimea and turning eastern Ukraine over to Russian-backed rebels.

Why does he do it? Because he can. Because Putin is a deeply corrupt, deeply amoral man who is out to acquire as much wealth and power as possible. Not just for himself and his cronies, to be sure: He is also, in his fashion, a Russian patriot who views the breakup of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century,” and he is clearly bent on undoing it. He is determined, in other words, to resurrect if not exactly the Soviet Union (he is too much of a crony capitalist for that) then the Russian Empire with himself as its benevolent tsar.

No doubt Putin, like countless other despots throughout history, has convinced himself that his country will become “great” again only if he is its absolute leader. Just as Hitler reacted to the weakness of Wiemar Germany and Mao to the weakness of the warlord era in China, so Putin is reacting to the perceived weakness of the Yeltsin era in the 1990s. He no doubt sincerely believes that it is in the interest of all Russians to swallow weak neighboring states, and that anyone who stands in his way is a “traitor” and “Fifth Columnist”–the epithets used to brand the likes of Nemtsov and Navalny. Whether Nemtsov was killed on Kremlin orders or killed by some ultra-nationalist inspired by the Kremlin’s ultra-nationalist propaganda is immaterial: No matter how many layers of cut-outs Putin had between himself and the dark dead, he is still morally culpable.

Beyond being a moral monster, Putin is also a supreme opportunist. He advances when he senses weakness and retreats, at least temporarily, when he encounters staunch resistance. He hasn’t been encountering a lot of staunch resistance lately.

The Bush administration all but ignored his subjugation of Chechnya, which could be linked to the broader struggle against Islamist terrorism, and did almost nothing about his invasion of Georgia, which came when the administration was war-weary and on its way out. John McCain argued for a stiffer response and was laughed off the stage.

Predictably Barack Obama, who came into office promising a “reset” of relations with the man in the Kremlin, has been even more supine in the face of Putin’s blatant aggression in Ukraine. Obama refuses to supply Ukraine with the weapons needed to defend it from Putin’s aggression. He won’t even provide Ukraine with usable intelligence on where Russian troops and Russian rebels are located. Because he is afraid of “provoking” Putin.

Which is just what Putin is counting on. The murder of Nemtsov and the invasion of Ukraine are of a piece: they are barely disguised acts of aggression designed to show Putin’s adversaries, real or perceived, what happens if they oppose his corrupt, imperial designs. No question about it, he is a scary man. He is capable of anything–anything that he can get away with.

But he is not suicidal. Putin is not a member of ISIS who seeks death in opposing the West. He seeks a long, prosperous life for himself and his cronies. If he thought that his criminal actions would endanger the prospects of such a happy outcome, odds are he would pull back. But he has no reason to think that now.

Sure, the U.S. and the European Union have imposed some sanctions on Russia, but Putin is convinced that when oil prices return to $100 a barrel, Russia will be in good shape. The sanctions aren’t doing much to hurt Putin personally or his inner circle; they still control their ill-gotten billions not only in Russia but in places like the City of London, Switzerland, and Cyprus. It’s the little people who are getting crushed by the devaluation of the ruble, but, a la “1984,” they are being narcotized by the steady stream of Kremlin propaganda which is touting the aggression in Ukraine as the greatest thing that has ever happened to the long-suffering Russian people.

Only a few Russians such as Boris Nemtsov have been brave enough to expose Putin’s lies–to oppose the aggression in Ukraine and the corruption behind the Sochi Winter Olympics. But Nemtsov is now gone, and few will follow in his footsteps.”

Un lucru e cat se poate de clar: nu avem inca o pozitie publica ferma a SUA fata de ceea ce se intampla in Rusia. Si ar trebui sa avem o asemenea atitudine ferma! Pentru ca se vede ca Putin nu e deloc descurajat in actiunile sale ostile din ce in ce mai evident fata de UE si NATO. Pozitia Administratiei Obama e una moale, si are dreptate articolul care spune ca tocmai acest lucru l-a incurajat pe Putin sa devina un pericol. Trebuie inteles ca relatiile cu Rusia, din pacate, nu mai pot fi cele din vremea lui Mihail Gorbaciov. De aceea actiunile la adresa Rusiei trebuie sa fie si mai dure. Gazoductul Nabucco trebuie, in sfarsit, construit, pentru a scadea dependenta de gazul din Rusia. Pe de alta parte Opozitia din Rusia trebuie sa fie protejata de Occident si, mai ales, de catre SUA. Acest lucru ar trebui sa fie o conditie pentru continuarea unor relatii bune cu Rusia. Tinand cont de realitatile din Rusia, Opozitia la regimul Putin trebuie neaparat sa primeasca asistenta din partea Vestului. Romania este o poveste de succes si acelasi lucru trebuie si pentru Rusia. Daca spui ca Rusiei i-ar trebui doar un regim prietenos fata de Vest, trebuie dar nu e, totusi, de ajuns. Mai concret, ce ii trebuie Rusiei? Raspunsul e unul singur: un Traian Basescu si un Daniel Morar!! E clar ca lupta impotriva oligarhilor, impotriva coruptiei trebuie sa fie directia si in Rusia. Pentru intarirea statului de drept si democratiei. Altminteri toata Puterea se va concentra in mana lui Putin, seful oligarhilor Puterii. Este limpede ca Rusiei ii trebuie de urgenta un DNA! Altminteri vom mai vedea inca multi ziaristi ucisi, politicieni ucisi etc. Altminteri libertatea este in pericol in Rusia. Iar in felul asta Rusia se consitutie ca un pericol pentru intreaga Europa si pentru pacea mondiala!

De aceea principalul lucru pe care Vestul trebuie sa-l faca este, dupa parerea mea, sa vada pe cine din FSB se poate baza, pentru a duce la indeplinire planul de mai sus.  Aici este nevoie de o miscare mult mai ampla, si de constientizare a maselor largi de cetateni asupra a ceea ce inseamna regimul Putin. Dar este nevoie de o forta politica care sa dezradacineze comunismul in Rusia. Definitiv. Or, lucrul asta se poate face printr-o reforma in Justitie si in serviciile secrete.

Altmiteri relatiile cu Rusia devin problematice, iar raspunsul Casei Albe ar trebui sa fie pe masura amenintarilor pe care le face o Rusie sub un regim ca cel al Dl. Putin. Nu stiu cat de constient este Dl. Obama de acest lucru, dar eu sper sa se trezeasca si domnia sa si partidul domniei sale. Putin e un troublemaker, care daca nu e descurajat nu se va opri, si cred ca nu se va opri nici macar de la crima.

Inclusiv relatiile Romaniei cu Rusia trebuie revizuite, mai ales ca avem aici firme din Rusia. Trebuie sa ne adaptam acestor vremuri noi, cu o Rusie al carei regim politic incepe sa derapeze destul de mult. Insa Romania poate fi o tara model pentru Rusia, pentru cum trebuie sa se desfasoare reformele in Justitia din Rusia, pentru cum trebuie sa castige Opozitia alegerile, tinand cont de alegerile castigate de Traian Basescu in 2004, in legatura cu lupta anticoruptie si cum trebuie aceasta sa se desfasoare. In felul asta, Romania ar putea juca un rol politic de prim rang in Estul Europei, mentinand relatii bune cu Rusia: ajutand-o sa scape de regimul oligarhic a lui Putin si ai acolitilor acestuia! De aceea este imperios necesar sa vedem pe cine ne putem baza din serviciile secrete rusesti, de exemplu din FSB. Cum putem ajuta in mod concret lupta Opozitiei din Rusia impotriva lui Putin. Cum trebuie procedat.

Atitudinea moale fata de Rusia, pe care au avut-o lideri precum D-na. Hillary Clinton sau D-na. Cancelar Merkel este una contraproductiva! Pentru ca o astfel de atitudine a indepartat Rusia de valorile noastre. Or, noi trebuie sa apropiem Rusia de valorile noastre, nu s-o tinem la distanta intr-un fel sau altul. Modernizarea Rusiei este un lucru foarte important pentru ca o Rusie nemodernizata, cu lideri de tip Putin, va fi un pericol la adresa Europei si a SUA, inclusiv la adresa Romaniei, chiar daca Putin nu e Stalin.

Opozitia la regimul Putin trece printr-un moment greu. Sa vedem cum putem ajuta. Si sa vedem cum putem constientiza oamenii obisnuiti de ceea ce inseamna regimul Putin si pericolul pe care il reprezinta pentru Rusia si pentru pacea mondiala. Ana Politkovskaia a incercat sa arate fata acestui regim si a reusit, caci de asta au omorat-o! Trebuie din nou incercat acelasi lucru, prin mijloace mult mai subtile, pentru ca oamenii sa inteleaga mai bine acest regim.

De asemenea regimul Putin trebuie descurajat si din punct de vedere militar. Este esential ca NATO sa inceapa sa finalizeze masurile necesare, ca inteleg ca in prezent se pregateste, pentru a fi capabil sa actioneze cu succes oricand ar fi nevoie.

Recomand citirea integrala si in original a tuturor articolelor.