Putin Is Basking in an ‘Astonishing Leadership Vacuum’

Time Magazine ^ | Jan. 06, 2014 | Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg and Garry Kasparov

[Olog-hai]

Since Vladimir Putin’s official return to power in 2012, the Russian President seems to have set his mind on teaching the rest of the world a few simple lessons. First, that he shall not be underestimated on the international stage; second, that Moscow will keep reasserting control over what it considers to be its legitimate sphere of influence for Russia; and finally, that he shall do whatever he pleases at home. […]

When it comes to the honorable title of Bully of the Year, the Russian President surely triumphed in 2013. But all too often bullies fail with their homework. Russia’s economy is crumbling. Moscow revised downward its economic outlook in December, the fourth time it did so last year. Growth, investment and industrial output are all below previously set targets, while inflation has risen to above 6%. […] Crony capitalism and the heavy hand of the state has led to steady brain drain among the educated Russians needed for any real economy to thrive. …

[Cowboy Bob]

How is Putin any different than Obama?

[TigersEye]

He loves his country.

[Greetings_Puny_Humans]

No, he loves the power. If Putin loved his country, there wouldn’t be dead Russians draped all across his career.

[Cowboy Bob]

Dead Russians, dead SEALs. What difference does it make? (Hat tip to Hillary!)

[Republican1795.]

A lot of folks who gravitate to politics like power.

[ETL]

Symposium: To Kill a Russian Journalist
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 17, 2006

The murder of internationally renowned Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya in early October 2006 was yet another troubling sign of Russia’s retreat into its totalitarian past. Today Frontpage Symposium has gathered a distinguished panel of experts to discuss why Anna Politkovskaya was killed and what the tragic loss of her life symbolizes about the direction in which Vladimir Putin’s Russia is heading.

http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=1490
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'PUTIN'S RUSSIA' by Anna Politkovskaya:
http://www.amazon.com/PUTINS-RUSSIA-ANNA-POLITKOVSKAYA/dp/1843430509
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List of journalists killed in Russia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia#A_list_of_journalists_killed_in_Russia

[ETL]

Alexander Litvinenko, the former Russian security agent fighting for his life in a UK hospital after allegedly being poisoned, has been a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin since before he became president in 2000.

Mr Litvinenko is thought to have been close to journalist Anna Politkovskaya, another opponent of the Kremlin who was shot dead last month, and said recently he was investigating her murder. It was after being handed documents apparently relating to the case that he was taken ill more than two weeks ago.

But he is perhaps best known for a book in which he alleges that agents co-ordinated the 1999 apartment block bombings in Russia that killed more than 300 people. He now appears to have fallen victim to the kind of plots which he wrote about.

Arrest
Mr Litvinenko, 43, first became a security agent under the Soviet-era KGB, rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in its later incarnations.

He is reported to have fallen out with Vladimir Putin, then head of the security service, in the late 1990s, after failing in attempts to crack down on corruption within the organisation. In 1998, he first came to prominence by exposing an alleged plot to assassinate the then powerful tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who himself now lives in self-imposed exile in the UK. He was subsequently arrested on charges of abusing his office and spent nine months in a remand centre before being acquitted.

In 1999 he wrote Blowing up Russia: Terror from Within, in which he accused the current Russian security service, the FSB, of carrying out several apartment house bombings in 1999 that killed more than 300 people. The attacks, which Moscow blamed on Chechen rebels, helped swing public opinion behind Russia's second war in the breakaway republic.

Petrol bombs
Complaining of persecution, in 2000 Mr Litvinenko fled to the UK where he sought, and was granted, asylum. But after settling in an unnamed London suburb, the former spy continued to behave as if on the run, constantly changing his contact details. The Times newspaper reported that over the summer someone tried to push a pram loaded with petrol bombs at his front door. Appearing alongside high-profile opponents of President Putin, he has continued to make allegations about his former bosses. Perhaps most notably, he alleged that al-Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri was trained by the FSB in Dagestan in the years before 9/11.

http://www.russianlondon.ru/uknews/news/32117/
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Blowing up Russia: The Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror
by Alexander Litvinenko, Yuri Felshtinsky, Geoffrey Andrews and Co (Translator)

Synopsis: Blowing Up Russia contains the allegations of ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko against his former spymasters in Moscow which led to his being murdered in London in November 2006. In the book he and historian Yuri Felshtinsky detail how since 1999 the Russian secret service has been hatching a plot to return to the terror that was the hallmark of the KGB. Vividly written and based on Litvinenko's 20 years of insider knowledge of Russian spy campaigns, Blowing Up Russia describes how the successor of the KGB fabricated terrorist attacks and launched a war. Writing about Litvinenko, the surviving co-author recounts how the banning of the book in Russia led to three earlier deaths.

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Blowing-up-Russia/Alexander-Litvinenko/e/9781594032011

[ETL]

Yushchenko: Russia blocking poisoning probe
By Bonnie Malkin and agencies, September 12, 2007

Mr Yushchenko before and after the poisoning

"Mr [Viktor] Yushchenko, a pro-European politician who wanted to bring his country out of Russia's shadow, fell seriously ill on September 6, 2004 as he was competing in presidential elections against a pro-Moscow candidate, Viktor Yanukovich, now prime minister.

After months of tests in an Austrian clinic, it was determined that he had ingested a massive amount of the poison dioxin.

Although he survived, his face was left bloated and pockmarked, and he has had to undergo regular treatment to rid his body of the toxin.

In an interview with Le Figaro he said he believed the dioxin used to disfigure him was made in a Russian lab.

Mr Yushchenko did not directly accuse the Russian government of being behind his poisoning, but he did say he had 'practically put all the pieces together' and the attempt against him 'was not a private action'. ..."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1562838/Yushchenko-Russia-blocking-poisoning-probe.html
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"Viktor Andriyovych Yushchenko (born February 23, 1954) [was] the third and [former] President of Ukraine". He took office on January 23, 2005.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yushchenko
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(Ukraine) Hunt starts for Yushchenko's poisoner:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/1478922/Hunt-starts-for-Yushchenko%27s-poisoner.html
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pro-Moscow Viktor Yanukovich, new president of the Ukraine

[ETL]

From a 2007 article titled Putin's Russia...

"KGB influence 'soars under Putin,' " blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents."

In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin."

The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, expressed shock at her own findings. "I was very shocked when I looked at the boards of major companies and realized there were lots of people who had completely unknown names, people who were not public but who were definitely, obvious siloviki," she told Reuters.

Other supposed experts — in Russia and the West — have also expressed surprise and alarm at the apparent resurrection of the dreaded Soviet secret police. After all, for the past decade and a half these same experts have been pointing to the alleged demise of the KGB as the primary evidence supporting their claim that communism is dead.

From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian security apparatus Cheka (and its later permutations: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) had been the "sword and shield" of the communist world revolution.

"We stand for organized terror," declared Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka for Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, Dzerzhinsky launched the campaign of arrests and executions known as the Red Terror. Krasnaya Gazeta, the Bolshevik newspaper, expressed the Chekist credo when it reported approvingly in 1918 of the terror campaign: "We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood."

Unflinching cruelty and merciless, bloody terror have been the trademark of the communist secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB. Obviously, the demise of such an organization would be cause for much rejoicing. Hence, when the KGB was ordered dissolved and its chairman, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, was arrested in 1991 after attempting to overthrow "liberal reformer" Mikhail Gorbachev in the failed "August Coup," many people in the West were only too willing to pop the champagne corks and start celebrating our supposed victory over the Evil Empire.

But, as Mikhail Leontiyev, commentator for Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, recently noted, repeating a phrase popular among the siloviki: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over." And stumbling around in their post-inebriation haze, many of these Americans have only recently begun noticing that they had prematurely written the KGB's epitaph, even as it was arising vampire-like from the coffin.

However, there is really no excuse for Olga Kryshtanovskaya or any of her American counterparts to be stunned by the current siloviki dominance in Putin's Russia. For nearly a decade, even before he became Russia's "president," THE NEW AMERICAN has been reporting on Putin's KGB pedigree and his steady implementation of a long-range Soviet deception strategy, including the public rehabilitation and refortifying of the KGB-FSB. ..." (continues at link)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia

[JoeProBono]

[Greetings_Puny_Humans]

Excellent posts!

[ETL]

He may or may not love Russia, but he certainly hates the US and wants it out of his way. Russia, under KGB Putin, supports and supplies with arms, US enemies, Iran, Iraq (under Saddam Hussein), North Korea, the ChiComs, Venezuela (under Chavez and his current successor), other Latin American marxist/socialist dictatorships, Cuba, and Syria. Hardly a friend to the US, despite all the FR butt kissing that goes on on these threads.

[ETL]

KGB Putin thinks the "COLLAPSE" of the communist Soviet Union was the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th Century"! In other words, the mass murdering communist Soviet Union was just about the best thing that happened for the world in the 20th Century (according to him).

"the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...
"World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'
http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html
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"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism’s crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=ZmY0MjI1MDgyYjg1M2UwNDMzMTk2Mjk5YTk0ZTdlMWE=
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"Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor as much as the late British lord protector, a 'cunning fellow' who "played a very ambiguous role in Britain’s history."

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131219/185734707/Putin-Says-Stalin-No-Worse-Than-Cunning-Oliver-Cromwell.html

[ETL]

Putin praises Cold War moles for stealing U.S. nuclear secrets
Reuters ^ | Wed Feb 22, 2012 5:04pm EST | Steve Gutterman

Vladimir Putin praised Cold War-era scientists on Thursday for stealing U.S. nuclear secrets so that United States would not be the world's sole atomic power, in comments reflecting his vision of Russia as a counterweight to U.S. power.

Spies with suitcases full of data helped the Soviet Union build its atomic bomb, he told military commanders.

"You know, when the States already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels," Putin said, according to state-run Itar-Tass.

"The were carrying the information away not on microfilm but literally in suitcases. Suitcases!"

Putin's remarks referred to the dawn of the Cold War more than half a century ago, but they echoed a message he has made loud and clear more recently: that the United States needs to be restrained, and Russia is the country to do it. …

(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...

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Obama To Betray Missile Defense Secrets To Moscow
Investor's Business Daily ^ | January 9, 2012 | IBD staff

Appeasement: From ObamaCare to recess appointments, honoring the Constitution has not been an administration hallmark. But when it comes to betraying secrets to mollify the Russians, it becomes a document the president hides behind.

It was bad enough that the 2012 defense authorization bill signed by President Obama set America on a downward spiral of military mediocrity.

He also issued a signing statement, something he once opposed, saying that language in the bill aimed at protecting top-secret technical data on the U.S. Standard Missile-3 — linchpin of our missile defense — might impinge on his constitutional foreign-policy authority.

Section 1227 of the defense law prohibits spending any funds that would be used to give Russian officials access to sensitive missile-defense technology as part of a cooperation agreement without first sending Congress a report identifying the specific secrets, how they'd be used and steps to protect the data from compromise.

The president is required to certify that any technology shared will not be passed on to third parties such as China, North Korea or Iran, that the Russians will not use transferred secrets to develop countermeasures and that the Russians are reciprocating in sharing missile-defense technology.

(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...

[Conspiracy Guy]

Well he is a man rather than a pansy.

[KJC1]

Those photos are haunting. I’ve been poisoned before, but by the grace of God, it never took that toll.

[ETL]

Well, here comes that “he’s a MAN” sheeet again. I knew it would be coming.

In other words, all you’re mainly concerned about is whether or not a leader is a tough guy. With that line of thinking one can say they admire any number of ruthless dictators and thugs throughout history, street gang leaders, mafia figures, etc, etc. Obviously, Obama is a little wussy, but Putin is no person to admire in any way. Respect as a formidable and cunning enemy, yes. He’s clearly winning people’s hearts and minds here. You folks need to understand that the Russians are masters at the art of deception. They’ve been using naive people around the world to help with their global agenda for decades. In fact, they even had a name for these people. They referred to them as their “useful idiots” in America.

[ETL]

Something at least to consider...

I don't know if all the links are still working.

Did Communism Fake Its Own Death in 1991?
American Thinker ^ | January 16, 2010 | Jason McNew

In a [] 1984 book [New Lies for Old], ex-KGB Major Anatoliy Golitsyn predicted the liberalization of the Soviet Bloc and claimed that it would be a strategic deception. ..."

"Golitsyn's argument was that beginning in about 1960, the Soviet Union embarked on a strategy of massive long-range strategic deception which would span several decades and result in the destruction of Western capitalism and the erection of a communist world government."

"Golitsyn published his second book, The Perestroika Deception, after the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. This book contained further analysis of the liberalization, in addition to previously classified memoranda submitted by Golitsyn to the CIA. The two books must be read together to get a complete picture of Golitsyn's thesis."

http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/did_communism_fake_its_own_dea.html
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FReeper khelus provided the following links for reading/downloading both books in their entirety (free):

New Lies for Old:
http://archive.org/details/GolitsynAnatoleTheNewLiesForOldOnes

The Perestroika Deception:
http://curezone.com/upload/Members/ChazTheMeatHe/Books/Golitsyn_The_Perestroika_Deception_The_World_s_Slide_Towards_the_Secon.pdf

[ETL]

Wow, I’d bet you have one hell of a story to tell. But don’t do it here if you don’t want. At least you’ve seemed to have recovered well.