It was originally a common opinion in Western societies that the West had less fear than it was during the Cold War 1.0. It was believed that reborn Putin’s Russia had nothing like the same resources as the former Soviet Union [...]
After the Cold War 1.0 (1949−1989) emerged many new problems in the international arena of global politics as the circumstances concerning international relations drastically have been changed. One of the many problematic issues that have been facing both the USA and Europe (in fact, NATO and the EU) after 1989 was to find a new way of their relations with a new post-communist Russia – a country in a historical political and economic transition. Russia after the Cold War 1.0 faced many stresses as it started to experiment with its position in the new world and new international relations which have been dictated by the American hyperpower position.
At that time, Europe was more divided than united over the fundamental constitutional provisions which would finally lead the EU toward a European super-state. Europe as well was facing several critical challenges of economic, political, and cultural nature. The leaders of Europe, but especially of the EU, not only have been confronted by older issues that they could not solve like Turkish membership of the EU, integration of European citizens of Islamic origin (some 13 million in 1991), or rising economic competition with both USA and especially China. The Europeans were aware of where they were coming from (of their historical roots), but on other hand, they did not have a clear vision of their way to the future, losing the plot of navigation. Only in 2003, the EU started to produce a more clear vision of its future through the adoption of the European Security Strategy which became at the same time the first serious effort in thinking about its international role under the new conditions of globalization and unipolar international relations.
In the 1990s, during an especially painful decade, Russia of Boris Yeltsin moved from being what it had once been after WWII under the cover of the USSR−a military superpower that could effectively challenge the US and its allies−to a declining power with diminishing both political and economic assets. As a direct result of its speedy adoption of Western-style (wild and brutal) privatization, Yeltsin’s Russia experienced consequences close to a 1930s-style Great Economic Depression. The focal negative outcomes have been the decline of industrial production, falling in living standards, and that whole regions previously devoted to military production during the Cold War now experienced an economic depression.
From the very global perspective, the foreign policy of Russia at the time of Boris Yeltsin was catastrophic as Russia lost even the position of great power in international relations. It was quite visible during the time of the destruction of the former Yugoslavia and especially during the Kosovo War in 1998−1999. Russian MFA did little to reassure many Russians who indeed understood Yeltsin’s decision to get close to Russia’s old historic Western enemies as he was selling out Russia to the West. However, outside Russia, the such policy made Yeltsin a hero−a “useful idiot” or “drunk clown”. Nevertheless, to the majority of Russians, he, like M. Gorbachev, was conceding everything but getting very little in return from the West. Two groups of Russian citizens were especially unsatisfied with Yeltsin’s administration and particularly with his foreign policy: nationalists and old communists, of whom there was still a significant number.
Many anti-Yeltsin Russians argued that he and his administration of Westernphile liberals, had not only given away Russia’s benefits at knock-down prices to a new class of oligarchs (tycoons), but he was as well turned Russia into a Western political, economic, and financial, and even ideological dependency. In one word, Yeltsin did not at all protect Russia’s national interest and even turned Russia into a Western colony.
However, when Yeltsin’s successor Vladimir Putin (a victor over Chechen separatists) took over the presidency, he had more or less a clear vision for Russia’s future. In order to realize his project of reviving Russia and making her independent from the Western hands, he started to stake out very different positions. Particularly, these included:
A greater level of Russian patriotism at home.
A clear recognition that the interests of Russia and the West would not going always smoothly.
A persistent drive to bring the Russian economy−and Russia’s immense natural resources, especially in Siberia−back under state control from the private tycoons.
In practice, it meant that Western governments could no longer consider Russia, as it was at the Yeltsin time, as a “strategic partner”, which meant the Western economic colony, indeed. In order words, the West understood that Putin’s Russia is going not to be in a state of irreversible decline as Yeltsin’s Russia, in fact, was. Further, with practically unlimited supplies of oil and natural gas in its possession, followed by the political leadership in Kremlin that determined to defend Russia’s national interests, Russia, actually, no longer was looked like the “sick man of Europe” (this term was originally applied by West Europe to the Ottoman Empire after 1699).
It was originally a common opinion in Western societies that the West had less fear than it was during the Cold War 1.0. It was believed that reborn Putin’s Russia had nothing like the same resources as the former Soviet Union. At least up to 2022 when Russia started the special anti-Nazi military operation in historical Russia Minor (today East Ukraine). The focal Western mistake with Putin’s Russia was that Western governments thought that regardless of economic reforms by Moscow, Russia still was dependent on the West. However, in reality, several Western countries, particularly Germany, have been and still are heavily dependent on energy from Russia.
The official ideology of Moscow, at least up to 2022, did not challenge Western institutions or values. Surely, the world had changed since 1990, and Russia for the first decade after the Cold War 1.0 as a power was not what it was during the USSR. On one hand, Moscow since 1990, in fact, did not want to prevent former Soviet republics to become independent, but on other hand was unable to prevent three Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) from both to sign up former (politically and ideologically) enemy institutions of the USSR and moving much more openly into the Western camp (the EU and NATO). Therefore, as the consequence, up to 2007, Russia became overwhelmingly encircled by the three Baltic republics to the north-west, an increasingly pro-Western and Russophobic Ukraine (since 2014 a Nazi Ukraine) to the south-west, and finally by Georgia in the Caucasus.
Nevertheless, first Russia’s success in opposing Western historical imperialism against its own state territory was in Chechnya in 1999 (the Second Chechen War) which certainly was enough to spoil West-Russia relations and compel many in the West to conclude that while Russia changed in many pro-Western ways it still remained a historical enemy which was fighting against Western imperialistic policy (ideologically wrapped into the protection of human rights and political democracy). The second Russian success in fighting Western imperialistic Russophobia was in 2008 during the short war against US client state Georgia followed by the Russian military intervention in Syria and in 2022 by the direct Russian preventive military intervention against NATO on the territory of historic Russia Minor. A coming future may have beckoned, but the heavy hand of the past (Russophobic Western imperialism) will continue to influence Russian relations with the West (the EU and NATO).
The key points of the article can be summarized into three facts:
The first President of Russia, a Westernphile B. Yeltsin, sought a new partnership with the West but under the conditions of not defending the Russian national interest.
His successor, Vladimir Putin, is pursuing much more patriotic policies at home and abroad and, at the same time, bringing Russia’s economic resources back under state control.
Regardless of the opinion that a new Cold War (2.0) was unable after 1990/1991 because of extremely important political, social, and economic changes that have happened in Russia since the dismantling of the Soviet Union, it gradually occurred after the 2014 state putsch in Kiev.
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
Ex-University Professor
Research Fellow at Centre for Geostrategic Studies
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/LegalStatement!
DonatetoSupportUs
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
Paul Craig Roberts’ address to the Conference on the European/Russian Crisis, Delphi, Greece, June 20-21, 2015 Paul Craig Roberts, formerly Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy, Associate Editor, Wall Street Journal, Senior Research Fellow, Stanford University, William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C.The United States has pursued empire since early in its history, but it was the Soviet collapse in 1991 that enabled Washington to see the entire world as its oysterThe collapse of the Soviet Union resulted in the rise of the neoconservatives to power and influence ...
Two months ago, hundreds of thousands of Chileans somberly marked the 40thanniversary of their nation’s September 11th terrorist event. It was on that date in 1973 that the Chilean military, armed with a generous supply of funds and weapons from the United States, and assisted by the CIA and other operatives, overthrew the democratically-elected government of the moderate socialist Salvador Allende. Sixteen years of repression, torture and death followed under the fascist Augusto Pinochet, while the flow of hefty profits to US multinationals – IT&T, Anaconda Copper and the like – resumed. Profits, along with concern that people in other ...
A map of historical spreading of the Ukrainian territorial imperialistic project. A nation which occupied and annexed parts of ethnohistorical lands of all its neighbors. A historical map of evidence:Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]A Crimea census of 1926 (done by anti-Russian USSR's authorities): ...
The United States approaches the November 2020 election with growing apprehension, even dread.Among the possibilities:Protracted uncertainty about the presidential contest. Think Florida 2000 but with several states’ results unresolved for weeks or even months (“Experts held ‘war games’ on the Trump vs. Biden election. Their finding? Brace for a mess”);A disputed outcome, perhaps with Donald Trump and Joe Biden both claiming victory, compounded by a “blue shift,” where states are claimed by Trump on election night but flip over to Biden as additional absentee and mail-in ballots conveniently turn up days or weeks later;Violent civil conflict, spurred on in the ...
Two Kosovo Albanian Muslim muhajedeens (with the passports of Republic of Kosovo) as members of ISIL in Syria in 2015 (Official ISIL’s video material)After the 9/11, a worldwide “War on terror” begun in order to disband and neutralize Islamic terrorist networks across the globe. The main focus of the largest anti-terrorist campaign in history is focused in the Middle East area, as well as in Afghanistan.The Balkan Peninsula is the European area where this campaign has also taken place, with numerous arrests and a continuous effort into riding the fundamentalist out of the area. The question arising though, is how ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]Save
The first aspect to consider, following the US attack on Syria, is what Putin, Xi, and Rohani, leaders of the Russian Federation, the People's Republic of China, and Iran respectively, thought while American Tomahawks were hitting the Syrian air base of Shayrat.The last three years of the Obama presidency highlighted two very different strategies being advanced simultaneously by the US and the nations opposing its imperialistic overreach, principally Russia, China and Iran. The latter have been seeking cooperation, while the US, with its big hammer, has characteristically been on the search for nails to hammer. Yet the management of international ...
The American taxpayers have been fleeced for almost seventy years by a so-called «intelligence» agency that has systematically violated the US Constitution, broken practically every federal law on the books, and penetrated virtually every facet of American life. The Central Intelligence Agency’s creation was bemoaned by its creator, President Harry S Truman, who, in a fit of personal angst following the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy, wrote in a newspaper column,“I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations… I, therefore, would like to see the ...
On Friday, October 5th, the U.S. Secretary of State – John Kerry calls for war crimes investigation of Russia’s and Assad governments for the destruction of the Syrian city of Aleppo. The western corporate mass media was a very quick, like, for instance, The New York Times, immediately and clearly to accuse the Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of alleged war crimes in Syria – the same cliché used by the same propaganda machinery against the Serbs (Srebrenica case from 1995 or Kosovo War from 1999) during the bloody destruction of ex-Yugoslavia (by the U.S. ...
Ema Miljkovic-Bojanic, M. A.Institute of History ofSerbian Academy of Sciences and ArtsBelgrade, 2000Malcolm’s Apology of the “Pax Ottomana” (Ab)using of historiography and historical facts for political ends is not a novelty introduced towards the end of the twentieth century. Its instances have been known throughout history, so that “practically there is not a single epoch of human history that was not controlled – by the Church, state, nation, party, leadership…” But precisely at a time when historiography seemed to be getting rid, at least partly, of the grip of “supervision” and when a critical approach was getting the upper hand, the ...
The Kosovo Question recently once again became an important issue of global politics and international relations for two reasons: 1) The Albanian “government” of the “Republic of Kosovo” announced to officially proclaim the existence of the Kosovo Army (that is a violation of the 1244 UN Resolution in 1999), and 2) The “president” of the “Republic of Kosovo”, a war criminal Hashim Tachi, participated on November 11th (2018) in Paris to the world leaders’ celebration of a centenary anniversary of the end of the WWI (the signed armistice with Germany) as the official representative of an “independent” Kosovo. He was ...
A woman working at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand has been arrested for allegedly selling a 14-day-old baby.Two other women employees from the centre have been detained and are being questioned about other possible cases.Police took action after the state’s Child Welfare Committee (CWC) registered a complaint.The charity has not responded to BBC requests for comment.“We have found out that some other babies have also been illegally sold from the centre,” a police official told BBC Hindi’s Niraj Sinha. “We have obtained the names of the mothers of these babies and are further ...
While the numbers are not as high as Auschwitz or Treblinka, Jasenovac was notorious for its cruelty and the high number of young children who were victims.April 22 is a date that binds two groups of people who shared the same tragic fate. It is the date that commemorates the revolt of the prisoners of Jasenovac, the death camp that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Jews, Serbs and Roma.While the numbers are not as high as Auschwitz or Treblinka, Jasenovac was notorious for its cruelty and the high number of young children who were victims. The saddest ...
On November 21st, 2015 it was the 20th anniversary of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accord – a treaty signed by four Presidents (the USA, Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) that led to an end of the civil war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. As a result of the Dayton Peace Accord a new “independent and internationally recognized state” emerged: Bosnia-Herzegovina as a confederation of two political entities (the Republic of Srpska and the Muslim-Croat Federation) but ethnically strictly divided into three segments composed by the Serb, Croat and Muslim (today Boshnjak) controlled territories. In contrast to the Republic of Srpska (49% of the territory ...
The day commemorates lost lives of US servicemen and women sent to war for the wrong reasons – from the 18th century to today, notably America’s so-called War of Independence, its Civil War, WW I and II and all subsequent wars of choice.America’s only enemies in the past 70 years and throughout at least most of its history were and remain ones it invents.It could have been a model peaceful nation had it chosen a different path. Instead, its history reflects unbridled militarism, endless wars of choice, related violence and chaos, contempt for rule of law principles, along with unparalleled ...
Author’s note: a draft version of the article was originally written at the end of December 2015 and published in March 2016. This is the extended article’s version.On April 24th, 2016 Serbia faced three-level elections: for the national parliament, local municipalities and Vojvodina’s autonomous provincial administration. The elections did not cover Kosovo province as current Serbia’s pro-NATO/EU’s government already two years ago de facto recognized in its negotiations with the EU and Pristina’s government that this province is not any more an integral part of the legal and administrative system of the Republic of Serbia. Nevertheless, these elections were in ...
The title page of Rūta Vanagaitė’s best-known book contains two pictures of young men. “This one is a Jew,” she said, pointing at the picture on the left. “He was a bicycle-racing champion. Good enough to represent Lithuania in international competitions, but not good enough to live.” He was executed during the Holocaust. The man in the picture on the right was a Lithuanian executioner. “They are both us,” Vanagaitė explained. “But Lithuanians don’t like to think of them as ‘us,’ because one is a Jew and the other is a killer.” Her book is called “Us.” (The title has ...
According to a report issued on June 6th in German Economic News (Deutsche Wirtschafts Nachrichten, or DWN), the German government is preparing to go to war against Russia, and has in draft-form a Bundeswehr report declaring Russia to be an enemy nation. DWN says: “The Russian secret services have apparently thoroughly studied the paper. In advance of the paper’s publication, a harsh note of protest has been sent to Berlin: The head of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Russian State Duma, Alexei Puschkow, has posted the Twitter message: ‘The decision of the German government declaring Russia to be an ...
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.[wpedon id="4696" align="left"]SaveSaveSave
“Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Keep in mind that, much sooner than later, the great avenues will again be opened through which will pass free men to construct a better society. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!” President Salvador Allende’s farewell speech, 11 September 1973.“It’s hard to find someone with the fighting spirit, courage and the story of Allende. He was a man who actually had the branded name in history: democratically the left came ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic
