Word: sovietized
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...While many Western critics declared the Russian actions of the past week a reversion to Cold War tactics, Moscow sees NATO itself as a Cold War relic. The Russians complain that following the demise of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Treaty Organization, the U.S. reneged on promises to create a new global security order and instead moved to expand its own Cold War military alliance - NATO - into Moscow's own sphere of influence...
NATO's very purpose had been to contain the Soviet Union in the wake of World War II. The Red Army had just broken the back of Hitler's Wehrmacht and put Moscow in control of the Baltic states (annexed at the outset of the war), Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania. Having watched Central Europe transformed by Soviet military power into a patchwork of authoritarian vassal states, Western Europe was only too willing to join an all-for-one military alliance with the U.S. and Canada to even up the odds in the event of further Soviet...
...Sochi, next to the violated Georgia's frontier. There is a precedent for this. I was part of the Carter Administration when we brandished the Olympic torch as a symbolic weapon in 1980, pulling out of the Summer Games in Moscow after the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The Soviet Union had planned a propaganda show reminiscent of Hitler's 1936 Olympics in Berlin. America's boycott delivered a body blow to President Leonid Brezhnev and his communist system and prevented Moscow from enjoying a world-class triumph...
...test for Russia. If Putin sticks to his guns and subordinates Georgia and removes its freely elected President - something Putin's Foreign Minister has explicitly called for - it is only a question of time before Moscow turns up the heat on Ukraine and the other independent but vulnerable post-Soviet states. The West has to respond carefully but with a moral and strategic focus. Its objective has to be a democratic Russia that is a constructive participant in a global system based on respect for sovereignty, law and democracy. But that objective can be achieved only if the world makes...
...Russia's litany of indignities dates to the early 1990s when the Soviet empire collapsed. A bipolar universe gave way to a world in which the "sole superpower" boasted about how it had "won" the Cold War. Russia was forced to swallow the news that NATO would grant membership to former client states in Eastern Europe, along with former Soviet republics. Russia, the fallen empire, would have to content itself with membership in the largely symbolic Partnership for Peace...