Free Republic

Moscow’s actions in the Crimea are comprehensible, former German chancellor, Helmut Schmidt said, criticizing the Western reaction to the peninsula’s reunification with Russia. President Vladimir Putin’s approach to the Crimean issue is “completely understandable,” Schmidt wrote in Die Zeit newspaper where he’s employed as an editor. While the sanctions, which target individual Russian politicians and businessmen, employed by the EU and the US against Russia are “a stupid idea,” he added. The current restrictive measures are of symbolic nature, but if more serious economic sanctions are introduced “they’ll hit the West as hard as Russia,” Schmidt warned. He also believes...

Out of office for more than three decades, Helmut Schmidt has strong views about the state of the European Union that he helped to forge out of the tough economic conditions of the late 1970s and early 1980s. "The state of Europe is problematic. European institutions are not really functioning any more. Why? Because of a lack of leadership." Schmidt says he is concerned about the "enormous, outlandish" debts of Greece, Spain, Portugal, Cyprus and Ireland and about the lack of jobs for the young. "We need a better coordination of fiscal policies. We need more solidarity in order to...

President Reagan used several deft tactical maneuvers to exploit cracks in the Soviet armor. As president of the United States, Ronald Reagan initiated a sweeping and unprecedented program of covert actions and economic-warfare initiatives that acted to greatly weaken the Soviet economy, its support for "wars of liberation," and its hold on its power in Eastern Europe, former top Reagan administration officials said. The elements of these programs were contained in top-secret national-security directives signed by Reagan in 1982 and 1983, these sources told United Press International. "Any kind of covert-action program had to be expressed in a presidential finding,"...