Monday 30 May 2022

From an FT interview with Andrei Kozyrev, Russian foreign minister 1990-96, published on March 18 2022

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Full interview here. It's ten weeks out of date and he is far away, in Miami, but interesting. He is quoted in The Times as saying failure in this war may lead to a Kremlin coup against Putin, which is obviously a possibility. But he does not expect nuclear war and thinks Putin's threats of one show Putin's weakness.

I ask if Russia’s invasion came as a shock to him. “Absolutely,” he says, even with all the US intelligence reports. “It was so brazen. So unthinkable . . . That’s why people think [Putin’s] crazy,” Kozyrev says. For his part, Kozyrev believes Putin still thinks he is acting rationally. Not reasonably, Kozyrev clarifies, but rationally. Authoritarian regimes “cannot be sustainable without these kinds of formal aggression. Because they are unstable inside,” Kozyrev argues. 

Moreover, he thinks Putin has come to believe that the Ukrainian people truly want to be liberated by Moscow. “He believes in all those lies which his propaganda feeds the Russian people.”  

Kozyrev is in awe of Volodymyr Zelensky — “He’s proven to be a real wartime president, more or less like Churchill” — but shares the Ukrainian president’s frustration with the EU, US and Nato, arguing that they are not doing enough to help Ukraine. 

 “They continue to treat him in a regular bureaucratic way,” he says, suggesting that the west had been too focused on Ukraine meeting a certain set of criteria, such as certain anti-corruption requirements, rather than recognising the extraordinary period of crisis that Kyiv was in.
“It was the same with us,” he says, referring to the US’s insistence in the early 1990s that Russia implement serious economic reforms at the same time as the oil price was cratering and ordinary Russians’ livelihoods were in freefall. “We needed money. We needed something like a Marshall Plan.” 
Kozyrev rejects the idea that Putin cannot reverse course in Ukraine. “I don’t buy all this talk that he cannot back down. For [Joe] Biden, [Boris] Johnson, the western politicians, backing down means you will lose public opinion.” Putin does not have this worry. 

9 comments:

  1. “Mr. Yes” once even declared that Russia had no national interests. As Primakov recalled, Kozyrev said this to former American President R. Nixon in 1992. The American asked what were the interests of the new Russia. “One of the problems of the Soviet Union was that we were too stuck on national interests,” Kozyrev replied. – And now we think more about universal human values. But if you have any ideas and you can tell us how to determine our national interests, then I will be very grateful to you.”

    Nixon was surprised by this response. Later, the head of the United States, in an interview with political scientist Dmitry Simes, quite logically called Kozyrev a "slug."

    Even Mikhail Gorbachev, who was much and rightly scolded for the collapse of the USSR and weak politics, was surprised at the baseness of Kozyrev. Under him, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs turned into a branch of the State Department, the former head of the Soviet state noted.

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    1. I had grave doubts about him since the Financial Times gives him a platform. I shouldn't have silenced my doubts.

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    2. https://en.topwar.ru/193041-kozyrev-u-rossii-net-nacionalnyh-interesov.html Good for him that he hated the USSR and liked sausages more.

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    3. He hates Russia: he did very well for himself in the old USSR. Don't know about his taste in sausages.

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  2. Well, for one thing, we appear to be in a close race between Klaus’s controlled demolition of the global economy and the US midterm elections this November, and perhaps the gang perceives that won’t go so well for them. Their key project in the 2022 offensive, the War in Ukraine, isn’t working out, either. The idea, it seems, was to bog down and humiliate the Russians so as to bring on the defenestration of Mr. Putin, who, believe it or not and despite the tsunamis of aspersion loosed on him by WEF-funded propagandists, is strangely and actually a defender of Western Civ. Yeah, I know, a stunner, right? (God works in mysterious ways — but the Davos Gangsters don’t believe in him / her / they.)

    In their cuckoo clock universe, they are too busy counting the teeth on the gears inside because they are the “experts” and that’s what they do. Which brings us to one of the central fallacies of the mechanistic world-view: that if you measure enough things, you will be able to control them. Their beloved data is failing them. They screwed-the-pooch on the Covid-19 caper and now the data is biting Klaus and Company on the ass. Especially Oberstleutnant Bill Gates’s ass, who was supposed to be in charge of the vaccine op and is jetting around the world now talking out of said cloacal aperture so recklessly that folks are looking to the lampposts of every country he lands in.

    Hence, the desperate attempts at censorship by WEF stooges-in-place all around the world. And see how well that has gone, especially in the USA under WEF-installed “Joe Biden,” the cigar-store-Indian in executive drag, who fronts for a US wrecking crew cabinet of oafs, losers, and reprobates. Has the world ever seen a more laughable official exercise as the botched appointment of one Nina Jankowicz, the Singing Censor, to the idiotically-conceived Disinformation Governance Board? They might as well have taken out a Jumbotron billboard ad in Times Square screaming We Suck in flashing psychedelic pixels.

    Careening Towards Grace
    By James Howard Kunstler
    https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/careening-towards-grace/

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    1. A very funny jumble of words.

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    2. ...to brighten a little bit the dim landscape of
      Moore, Lord Black and Tombs.

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