Word: putin
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...these countries, which will create jobs in the arms industry, and also to collect old Soviet debts. But this is futile and stupid. Russia is not the superpower that the Soviet Union once was, and this policy can be counterproductive. We're not going to collect all the money Putin hopes to collect. Countries such as Iran and Iraq won't pay cash up front; they'll probably barter oil, which will ultimately enrich privately owned oil companies in Russia, but not the state. So we won't get much, but we shall lose our hard-won relations with...
President Putin is in Cuba supposedly to talk about trade. But given the symbolic place of the communist island in U.S.-Russian relations, surely there's got to be more than trade at stake...
...there's another reason: Putin is trying to build a new foreign policy. Once the Soviet Union collapsed, Boris Yeltsin's Russia tried to give up the old Soviet foreign policy and adopt positions more accommodating to the West, and more in line with the thinking of democratic countries. But there was a strong conservative backlash against that policy, particularly from within the security and intelligence establishment, which insisted that Russian national interests were being sold out. Eventually, Boris Yeltsin was forced to succumb to this pressure, and appoint Yevgeny Primakov as his foreign minister, straight from Primakov's position...
...Yeltsin remained more accommodating to the West than Putin has been...
...Russian foreign policy toward what we may call normal values. Still, there was a shift. In Yugoslavia, for example, Moscow supported Milosevic. Foreign policy began pursuing what these hard-liners call Russian national interests, but which may rather be called the interests of those conservative hard-line circles. Once Putin became president, the idea of a foreign policy change was more openly and publicly expressed. Putin has indicated that he's going to oppose the U.S. whenever possible. He's behaving like old the Soviet leaders by trying to drive a wedge in the Western alliance, seeking separate special relationships...