Beginning below is a look at Russian president Vladimir Putin’s public speeches since last December, which the essay’s author says suggest a forward-looking “new perspective” on Putin’s part and potentially on the part of other nations’ leaders. Consortium News published it today. — MCM
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The Strong, and the Merely Powerful
Vladimir Putin’s speech from the Kremlin last Friday, delivered to the nation and the world as four regions of Ukraine were reintegrated into Russia, was another stunner, in line with numerous others he’s made this year, demonstrating a fundamental turn in the Russian president’s thinking over the past eight months.
The implications of this new perspective warrant careful consideration. Putin has taken to looking forward and seeing something new, and in this he is hardly alone.
“The world has entered a period of a fundamental, revolutionary transformation,” Putin said while standing beside the leaders of the Luhansk and Donetsk republics and the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. Phrases such as this bear the weight of history. By way of magnitude, presidential speeches do not get any larger. Here is how the Russian leader expanded on the thought:
“New centers of power are emerging. They represent the majority — the majority! — of the international community. They are ready not only to declare their interests but also to protect them. They see in multipolarity an opportunity to strengthen their sovereignty, which means gaining genuine freedom, historical prospects, and the right to their own independent, creative, and distinctive forms of development, to a harmonious process.”
Putin has been speaking in this register since Feb. 4, 20 days before Russia launched its intervention in Ukraine and on the eve of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. In the Joint Declaration on International Relations Entering a New Era and Global Sustainable Development, issued with Xi Jinping, Putin and the Chinese president declared, “Today the world is going through momentous changes . . . and humanity is entering a new era of rapid development and profound transformation. There is increasing interrelation and interdependence between the States; a trend has emerged toward redistribution of power in the world.”
Putin’s rhetoric has grown markedly sharper from February to last Friday. He has attacked the European Union for its “selfishness” and cowardice, the U.S. for its hegemonic aggression, including the genocide of Native Americans, and the West altogether for the “neocolonial” character of its relations with the non–West. Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, used to refer to Western nations as “our partners.” As of last Friday, yesterday’s partners are Russia’s “enemies.”
All very grim. Putin has made this turn toward confrontation reluctantly and out of frustration with the West’s obstinate refusal to negotiate the new security order that Europe so obviously needs. He is angry at the spectacle of wasteful violence and prolonged disorder. This is my read. But there is a certain brightness to his outlook that we must not miss amid the bleak, evident animosity.
“Global politics and economy are about to undergo fundamental and irreversible changes,” Putin asserted again, this time at the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Council, held in Samarkand last month, “not based on some rules forced on [us] by external forces and which nobody has seen, but on universally recognized principles of the rule of international law and the U.N. Charter, namely, equal and indivisible security and respect for each other’s sovereignty, national values, and interests.”
In his Moscow address, he said: “They do not wish us freedom, but they want to see us as a colony. They want not equal cooperation, but robbery. They want to see us not as a free society, but as a crowd of soulless slaves.”
“Western countries have been repeating for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other peoples. Everything is exactly the opposite: instead of democracy – suppression and exploitation; instead of freedom – enslavement and violence. The entire unipolar world order is inherently anti-democratic and not free, it is deceitful and hypocritical through and through.
“Let me also remind you that the United States, together with the British, turned Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne and many other German cities into ruins without any military necessity during World War II. And this was done defiantly, without any, I repeat, military necessity. There was only one goal: just like in the case of the nuclear bombings in Japan, to intimidate both our country and the whole world. …
“The US dictate is based on brute force, on fist law. Sometimes beautifully wrapped, sometimes without any wrapper, but the essence is the same – fist law. The collapse of Western hegemony that has begun is irreversible. And I repeat again: it will not be the same as before.”
This kind of talk is daring. It is a million miles from anything . . . READ MORE . . .