It’s certainly possible. I wrote a college paper over the Ukrainian gas dispute, where I fingered Putin as a responsible party who privately owned a large share of the Russian gas industry, but I never put it up on the website. It’s a shame that I didn’t because now it would make for an excellent ‘I told you so’ moment. Perhaps Putin does deserve the Times title given this revelation; the man has certainly worked the system. His logic, as explained in the article, is tempting to say the least.
Belkovsky adds that the west has misunderstood Putin and has been distracted by his “neo-Soviet” image. Putin, Belkovsky claims, is ultimately a “classic” businessman who believes money can solve any problem, and whose psychology was shaped by his experiences working in the St Petersburg mayor’s office in Russia’s crime-ridden early 1990s.
“He is quite sure of this. A problem that can’t be resolved with $1bn can be resolved with $10bn, and if not with $10bn then $20bn, and so on,” Belkovsky said.
I wonder if the Kremlin is accepting job applications? I’d certainly consider tearing down my little Grinch for a piece of that pie.
In related news, I’m going to remove some of the papers/articles I’ve written from the website because I got to thinking about it and I’m not eager for some lazy college students to go stealing my poorly constructed arguments. I’m not interested in contributing to plagiarism or being plagiarized. Those papers and contentions may not be good, but I worked hard on them. If you’d like to get a hold of them for any other purpose, feel free to e-mail me.
It’s funny this would come up now. Before the liberation of Iraq, so many people had so many theories on why Russia–we knew why France–would so actively lobby against the liberation. Sure, there was the old Soviet/Stalin-Saddam thing, sure there was the sentimental side in seeing the U.S. not be able to push its weight around, but there was more.
Oil. Russian oil/gas reserves are HUGE. Putin and his team had estimated that in order to continue their rebuilding of Russia, and to rebuild the Russian military, oil would have to stay at a minimum of $28-29 per barrel. The theory was that once Saddam was out, and the West had access to the reserves in Iraq, production and therefore market share would have gone through the roof. Russia couldn’t allow this. They staked their entire 10-year budget on the premise of $28 per barrel oil income. As Putin kept finding ways to grab more and more of the Russian reserves, he knew he had to keep oil from Iraq at a trickle. He knew demand was going up daily, and the slightest scarcity was $ in his pocket. Heck, he even had his WMD advisors in Baghdad a few days before the invasion to make sure all the WMDs were moved out but more to ensure the oil infrastructure was crushed so the West couldn’t get it to market expeditiously.
As it turns out, good old fashioned supply and demand has Putin sitting fat and happy now. But he isn’t, and wasn’t, stupid. He wasn’t leaving anything to chance.
Putin is a slimy snake, who has been very clever in fooling the world about Russia’s ‘democracy’. When communism supposedly fell in the 90′s I met many Russians emigrating to Australia who said it had not. They also told me that Australia had more totalitarianism than Russia did. But the life seemed freer and therefore, was a more pleasant place to live. They said “we knew our enemy and despized them. But you do not see your enemy and embrace them”. This has proved so true in our every day life as people cry out more and more for the government to take over the control of more and more usually private or community/charity based organisations. I believe that this may be true in America as well.
Putin has also pulled off another stunt which will serve to be detrimental to the world at large. In May this year (after years of infiltration of Soviet sympathisers) the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad was served up as fodder for the still existant Soviet Department of Internal and Foreign Religious Affairs, in a so-called reunification of the two sections of the Russian Orthodox Church. The short version is that the Moscow Patriarchate was not recognised (until recently by the traitors) by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroard as a part of the Russian Orthodox Church. The story is too long for here, but suffice it to say that now all over the world the Soviet based Church of Moscow now has churches all over the world that they can use surruptiously to monitor activities within the countries they are located. The innocent people who have been duped and betrayed are not involved in this but the clergy have a lot to answer for.
Putin was very keen for this to happen, in fact he worked very hard to make sure it did come to fruition. There is talk that Metropolitan Laurus (who was the head of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia) was frighten of being murdered if he withdrew in the end. Putin is not a man to be trusted by anyone. May God help him and change his heart.