John Winterson Richards on 15th June - I agree with him

Putin sees himself as "a leader in the tradition of Peter the Great" - I said ...in a post here back in March. It has taken the BBC this long to catch up, and even then they needed a heavy hint from Putin himself! [Political Refugee from the Global Village: I did too!]

This rather confirms what I wrote in the same post: "The Western media and political class simply do not understand the Russian mentality." Sorry to be quoting myself, which is usually a bad sign of egotism. In my case it is a sign of frustration, that the people being paid to know these things are so ignorant.  

 The people making all the decisions in the West today prefer to think of themselves as cosmopolitan - literally "citizens of the world" - but lack the faintest idea of how most of the world thinks.  

Most of the world, including the people making all the decisions in Russia, China, India, Brazil, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, etc, care absolutely nothing for the New World Order with all globalist bureaucracies and sanctimonious declarations.  

They seek only to increase the power of their own tribes, be those tribes national, religious, or political, or some combination. In doing so they remember what Western leaders try to ignore, that power ultimately comes down to force and, possibly more important, the will to use it.  

 The most stupid of many stupid things being said by so called "experts" influencing Britain and America's increasingly stupid foreign policy is that "Russia is too poor to win a long war.

It is a common error, and getting more common, to attempt to quantify military capacity in purely economic terms.  

Tell it to the Mongols. Among the poorest people of their times, they conquered two of the most prosperous Empires of those times.  

They are just the most obvious example among many throughout history: the Medes and Persians who took Babylon; the Spartans who defeated the wealthy Athenians in the Peloponnesian War; the Huns and Germanic tribes who overran the Roman Empire; the Arabs who came out of the desert to take the rich cities of the East, only to grow rich in turn and become vassals of the Turks; the most powerful Empire of our own time being humiliated by a bunch of poorly armed peasants in Vietnam ...and again in Afghanistan last year.  

Victory does not go to the richest but to those who want it most. Indeed, history shows that the rich are usually the most reluctant to die. The poor have less to lose. The West is now in the same position as a number of wealthy and complacent civilisations that forgot this truth.