Putin the puppet
From Alexander Nekrassov
Sir: In his article ‘Why Putin sells missiles to Syria’ (26 February) Simon Heffer writes that President Putin’s hard-line foreign policy represents a danger to the EU. He argues that by siding with Syria and Iran and meddling in affairs of the Baltic states the Russian leader is trying to get back at the West for being ‘outmanoeuvred and impotent’.
Mr Heffer, along with many other commentators, is missing one important point: Putin was plucked from obscurity and installed in power by President Boris Yeltsin for one reason only — to preserve the existing status quo in Russia for as long as possible and with every means possible. The so-called strong man image that has been conjured up by his spin-doctors, most of whom had worked for Yeltsin, is a ploy to fool the Russian people and not the West. And all the supposedly hard-line decisions in foreign policy are part of the same game. If you look at the way Russia’s influence in the world is rapidly diminishing, you would realise that Putin is losing out on all fronts of his foreign policy. The West has nothing to fear from Putin, whose presence in the Kremlin was initiated to safeguard the interests of Yeltsin’s family and their cronies.
Guided by his new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, who knows Russia well, President George Bush is well aware of the situation. That was why he did not put any serious pressure on Putin publicly in Bratislava, knowing perfectly well that Russia does not pose any substantial threat to the West.
Alexander Nekrassov London NW5
Previous page
