Putin is a barbarous, corrupt and ruthless tyrant. So what does that tell us about his pal Conor McGregor?
SHORTLY after Vladimir Putin came to power in 1999, two apartment buildings in Moscow were bombed, and hundreds killed, in an attack that was blamed on Chechen separatists, but almost certainly orchestrated by Putin himself.
In the ensuing panic he seized the opportunity to reignite the Second Chechen War, reducing the capital Grozny to rubble and killing up to 25,000 citizens. This is the man Donald Trump and Conor McGregor embrace like a brother.
Their good buddy has funded, promoted and assisted pro-Russian terrorists in Eastern Ukraine, killing some 10,000 people to date. A Russian missile fired from Eastern Ukraine shot down a Malaysian passenger jet in July 2014, killing 283 people: a photograph of a tiny baby, lying dead in the middle of a ploughed field, should haunt the consciences of anyone who’s ever shaken Putin’s hand.
The Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad is another pal of Putin’s. Together these murdering dictators have gassed, bombed and slaughtered countless thousands of innocent Syrian citizens, prompting the former US ambassador to the UN, Dublinborn Samantha Power, to ask her Russian counterpart: ‘Is there no act of barbarism against civilians, no execution of a child, that gets under your skin?’
During Putin’s years in office, many journalists, opposition leaders and human rights campaigners have died ‘mysterious’ deaths – remember Alexander Litvinenko, poisoned with a teacup of polonium in Britain in 2006, and Anna Politkovskaya, shot dead in the elevator of her apartment block that same year?
Like Trump, Putin craves the deference and society of world leaders and celebrities, because it enhances his own status and bolsters his deranged ego. Perhaps world leaders believe they have no option but to deal with him, while holding their noses, but an Irish sportsman such as Conor McGregor has no such excuse. Vladimir Putin is a more dangerous and more ruthless war criminal than Slobodan Milosevic ever was, with the blood of tens of thousands on his hands.
There are those, of course, who will find a way to pretend that these things didn’t happen; that they don’t represent the real Putin. Take a look, then, at the footage of the presentation of the World Cup during a torrential downpour in Moscow. Putin stands front and centre, flanked by the FIFA president and the premiers of the competing countries. Croatia’s female president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic is wearing her team’s jersey, and France’s dapper president Emmanuel Macron is in a smart navy suit. They are both soaked to the skin. So too is FIFA chief Gianni Infantino, his black suit saturated and his shirt stuck to his chest.
But Putin, in the middle, is bone dry. He has a lackey holding an umbrella over his head, while everybody else gets drenched. If that show of ignorance, arrogance and calculated contempt for other human beings, let alone other world leaders, was all you knew about Putin, it should be enough to sound alarm bells.
What kind of a man invites dignitaries to his country, only to humiliate and discomfit them before an audience of billions? And if Putin cares so little for the welfare of VIP guests, can you even begin to imagine how little he cares for the wellbeing of his own people?
And this was only the second most nauseating picture of Putin this weekend. Worse still was that shot of McGregor, who claims to be a proud Dubliner and regularly wraps himself in our Tricolour, with his arms around a murdering, butchering war criminal. No Irish person could possibly look at that picture, however little you knew about Putin, without feeling shame and global disgrace. Is this really a representation of our best self? Is this what we’ve come to? Is this what passes for an Irish sporting ‘hero’ these days?
Loudmouth
Conor McGregor is an overpaid loudmouth, who long ago forfeited any entitlement to respect or admiration from his countrymen. Yes, he’s a self-made man, but what a cheap, flawed and shoddy specimen he has fashioned from such promising raw material. He could have been a role mode to the youngsters of his home place, a dedicated athlete from a hardscrabble background who made it to the top of his game. Instead, he is nobody you’d want your son to be; his racism and vulgarity, his thuggish antics, his dodgy pals, his flaunted and extravagant tastelessness, his swaggering contempt for an Irish court and his crawling cowardice before a US judge: Conor McGregor is nobody to celebrate, nobody that any country with a modicum of self-respect or integrity would claim with pride.
Still, even he should have drawn the line at hanging out with Putin. Even he should have known that a man gets judged by the company he keeps, and that nobody who cared for their reputation would keep company with such a man. And yet, in his defence, he can point to the fact the US president is another chum of the Russian tyrant’s, another swaggering jackanapes who can’t find a bad word to say about a man who has gassed babies in Syria, shot passenger jets out of the sky, had a critic killed in the most public (and agonising) way possible, and murdered hundreds of his own citizens.
McGregor can point to the fact that FIFA gave the 2018 World Cup to Putin’s Russia, not long before the entire top brass was purged for corruption – after which, by rights, every single decision they’d made should have been declared invalid. He can point to the fact that the West still buys Russian gas, and that Russia hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics despite undeniable proof that it routinely cheats in international competitions.
He can point to the presence of the French and Croatian presidents on the podium alongside Putin on Sunday. He can point to this country’s obsessive fixation with punishing Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians and the lack of any commensurate censure of Russian links and imports. We’d have sent a football team to Russia in a heartbeat, had we made it to the World Cup, without anything like the current agonising over sending a Eurovision entry to Jerusalem next year. Like most of the West, we’ve conspired in turning a blind eye to Putin’s savagery, because Russia is just too big and too powerful to enrage.
Just hours after McGregor posed for that stomach-churning selfie with a murdering tyrant, the US president was more than happy to do the same – which is further judgment on McGregor and the sort of company he keeps. Trump’s meeting came just as America charged 12 Russian spooks with hacking Democratic Party officials during the 2016 election that Trump somehow managed to win.
Trump began pandering to Putin before he’d even landed in Helsinki yesterday, tweeting that his own country was to blame for bad relations with Russia, that it was only the ‘stupidity’ of previous administrations that caused tensions between the world’s biggest powers.
Nothing, then, to do with the string of crimes Putin has overseen during his prolonged premiership and his tenure as a senior officer in the KGB, a sinister organisation with a long history of torturing and murdering Russian citizens. Nothing to do with his apparent interference in the democratic process in both the US and UK, resulting in an alarming destabilisation of the global order.
But then Donald and Vlad have much in common, not least their contempt for other countries’ leaders: watch footage of the orange buffoon marching ahead of the Queen during their meeting last week, or trashing Theresa May in interview comments he later tried to deny.
But as of today, Putin has the apparent support of the US president – and, as of last weekend, the imprint of Conor McGregor’s sweaty palm on those same bloodstained paws. For shame.