Western misunderstanding of Russia

On December 24, 2021 the Zimbabwe Independent published an anti-Russian article by Gwynne Dyer containing insinuations on my country’s reaction to attempts by North Atlantic Treaty Organisation to move further to the East. In order to provide readers with a clear view on the issue I attach hereto for publication excerpts from the annual news conference by the President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin on December 23, 2021. I avail myself of this opportunity to express an eagerness to cooperate with the Zimbabwe Independent. Nikolai V Krasilnikov

Diana Magnay, Sky News: What is it that you think that the West does not understand about Russia or about your intentions?

Vladimir Putin: Does the West understand or fail to understand something? You know, sometimes I get the feeling we live in different worlds. I just talked about things that are obvious. How can you not understand them? They told us: there will be no expansion, but they expanded. They promised us equal guarantees for all under several international treaties. But this equal security has failed to materialise.

Look, back in 1918, an aide to US President Woodrow Wilson said that it would be a relief for the entire world if instead of one huge Russia, that a separate state in Siberia and another four countries in the European part be created.

In 1991, we divided ourselves into 12, I believe, parts, and we did this ourselves. Still, it seems that this was not enough for our partners. They believe that Russia is too big as it is today. This is because the European countries themselves turned into small states. Instead of vast empires, they are now small states with 60 to 80 million people. However, even after the Soviet Union collapsed, and we were left with just 146 million, it is still too much for them. I believe that this is the only way to explain this unrelenting pressure.

Take the 1990s, for example. The Soviet Union did everything to build normal relations with the West and the United States. I have said this many times, and I will repeat it, so that your listeners and viewers understand. I do not recall what media outlet you represent, but this is not the point. We had representatives from American intelligence services at our nuclear, military facilities; monitoring Russia’s nuclear weapons sites was their job. They went there every day and even lived there. Many advisors, including CIA staffers, worked in the Russian government.

What else did you need? Why did they have to support terrorists in the North Caucasus and use organisations of a clearly terrorist nature in attempts to break the Russian Federation apart? But they did this, and as former Director of the Federal Security Service, I know this all too well. We worked with double agents, and they reported to us on the objectives set for them by Western intelligence services. But why? They should have treated Russia as a potential ally, and made it stronger, but it all went in the opposite direction; they wanted to break it down even further.

And then they started expanding Nato eastwards. Of course, we told them not to do this, arguing that they promised not to. But they asked us: “Do you have any paper record? No? If not, go away, we don’t care about your concerns.” This continued year after year, every time we showed our teeth and tried to prevent something and voice our concerns. But no: they did not want to hear anything, saying that they would do what they considered necessary.

There were one, two, three, four, five – five waves of expansion. What is it they don’t understand? I don’t know. You can say that this is all abundantly clear. I do believe that it is clear as daylight: we want to ensure our security.

Excerpts from Russia Today article NGO Memorial closed by Russian court over ‘foreign agent’ breaches dated December 29, 2021

A Moscow court has ruled that a prominent organisation campaigning on human rights issues should be dissolved after prosecutors insisted that it was breaching the country’s laws regulating ‘foreign agents.’

In a ruling on Wednesday, the Moscow City Court said that the Memorial Human Rights Centre would be dissolved. Handing down the verdict, judge Mikhail Kazakov said that he would “rule in favor of the claims of the prosecutor’s office to liquidate the inter-regional public organisation [Memorial] in full.” Officials allege that the civil society association repeatedly broke the terms of its ‘foreign agent’ status, imposed over links to overseas funding.

The day before, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered that the group’s sister organisation, which is dedicated to the memory of the victims of Communist-era repressions, be dissolved as well. Authorities filed applications to liquidate the two entities in November.

During the hearing on Tuesday, the Prosecutor General’s office argued that Memorial had been created in the late 1980s originally “as an organisation to perpetuate historical memory, but now it is almost completely focused on distorting historical memory, primarily about the Great Patriotic War,” as WWII is known in Russia.

According to officials, the group “creates a false image of the USSR as a terrorist state” and “attempts to whitewash and rehabilitate Nazi war criminals who have the blood of Soviet citizens on their hands… probably because someone is paying for this.”

Memorial documents the fates of people purged during Soviet leader Joseph Stalin’s ‘Great Terror’ and of those sent to the Gulag prison camps, while the Memorial Human Rights Center campaigns on what it describes as modern civil rights issues. Prosecutors allege that it was using funding from opaque sources and had encouraged unauthorised mass protests.

“Memorial carries out its financial activities in a non-transparent manner; the organisation’s reports do not contain complete information on income and expenses,” an official said during the hearing. https://www.rt.com/russia/544676

memorial-group-moscow-court