Your long article on money laundering by Russia can serve as convincing arguments in favor of the adoption of appropriate measures, however, we must return to the roots of problems to understand how it all happened and not to repeat the same mistakes in the future.
The fact that the West cast Russia in a critical moment. Moreover, he encouraged her to open doors to the external maintenance of capitalism at a moment when Russia and other Soviet republics were not effective tools of control over the activity arriving financial capitalists, whose only goal was maximum profit. At that time, the young Russian government was not strong enough to stop an experienced private capitalists to seize and exploit the natural resources of the country. The problems we face today, dealing with Russian politics and economy are a direct result of the mistakes of the West. Interestingly, George Soros (George Soros) also expressed this idea.
We needed to support Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, including through the adoption of a kind of Marshall Plan to help the Russian economy and prevent the collapse of the ruble in 1998. If the US and the EU has taken steps in the period when Gorbachev was just beginning to remake the Soviet Union, its collapse might have happened more smoothly. Instead, a catastrophic decline in the economy undermined the position of Gorbachev among the electorate. For the presidential elections in 1996, which I attended as a senior observer for the Organization for security and cooperation in Europe, Gorbachev could only rely on derisory 0.5% of the vote.
At a diplomatic reception during those elections, one Russian oligarch asked me what role I play in all of this. When I explained to him, he laughed. “I don’t understand why you bother. We earn so much money that we just don’t let the country go bankrupt, regardless of the outcome of the election.” Faced with the cruel reality and the disrespect that the West is increasingly demonstrated against them, the Russians — and it should be no surprise — began to look for a strong leader. And they found Vladimir Putin. Since we have sown the wind, now we reap the whirlwind.
Michael Meadowcroft (Michael Meadowcroft), Leeds
Explanation of our participation in the NATO campaign to expand the territories of this organization to the East, to the Russian border, was that “the UK and Estonia have a long history of cooperation in the defence field: in November 1918, the squadron of the Royal Navy have been dispatched to the region to hold independence of the Baltic States”. But unless Britain did not send its troops to Murmansk at about the same time? Maybe later we needed to transfer its troops to protect Murmansk from Soviet/Russian aggression?
Robin Hudson (Robin Hudson), Southwell, Nottinghamshire
