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GOP candidates slam Trump over Putin praise (Trump really scaring me-OK with killing journalists?)
Fox News ^
| Dec. 18, 2015
| Barnini Chakraborty
Posted on 12/18/2015 3:44:24 PM PST by mtrott
What started as a seemingly mild admiration between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin took an uncomfortable turn Friday when the GOP White House hopeful seemed to defend the Russian presidentâs strong-arm tactics â and dismiss his alleged killing of journalists and others who cross him.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
TOPICS: Foreign Affairs; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections; Russia
KEYWORDS: banmuslims; bombtheshitoutofthem; deportthemall; elections; greathonor; immigration; isis; moratorium; muslim; putinbuttkissers; putinsguy; taketheiroil; trump; trumpknowsnothing; trumpski; trumpwasright
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To: Calpublican; jwalsh07; mtrott; tsowellfan; All
Trump says many troubling things and also has repeatedly shown his is not Conservative. As tsowellfan said upthread: I think many Trump supporters HATE the Republican Establishment more than they LOVE Donald Trump and RIGHTFULLY so, and they LOVE what Donald Trump is doing to them (the GOPe) ... The It's an anti-establishment movement ...
And as such, is a losing strategy because it's taking a defensive approach. Stopping the GOPe, snubbing it and poking it in the eye, is the wrong goal. The RIGHT goal is advancing conservatism.
ONLY Ted Cruz fits that bill. Dump Trump. Choose Cruz.
221
posted on
12/19/2015 2:32:16 AM PST
by
Finny
(Voting "against" is a wish. Be ready to own what you vote for.)
To: mtrott
It would depend on which “journalists”/
222
posted on
12/19/2015 3:14:33 AM PST
by
Joe Boucher
(the only good mooselimb is a dead mooselimb)
To: Socon-Econ
As bad as Putin is, Obama and his supporters are a greater danger to freedom and Christian values â our soft-on-Islam President is spreading homosexuality, radical feminism, socialism, and environmental extremism all over the world.””
Before this war with Islam is over, there will be an alliance between the U.S., China, and Europe to kill this group of primitive mass murderers.
223
posted on
12/19/2015 4:15:55 AM PST
by
Neoliberalnot
(Marxism works well only with the uneducated and the unarmed.)
To: Abbeville Conservative
“Has Putin ever had a dead girl end up in his office?”
LOL!
224
posted on
12/19/2015 5:07:19 AM PST
by
McGruff
(The only poll I believe in in The North Pole)
To: tsowellfan
TOTALLY RIGHT. Most of us thought of Trump as a joke, initially. Then he took on The Establishment and the rest is history.
People that call it ‘hero worship’ are simply Establishment types that have run out of options for trying to pry us loose from Trump.
225
posted on
12/19/2015 7:17:51 AM PST
by
BobL
(Who cares? He's going to build a wall and stop this invasion.)
To: sport
exactly. The media and this administration changed their tune over Putin once Putin stood up to the homonazis.
Then the fairy boy in the white house threatened to not have the Olympic team go there, then all of a sudden there was pressure on FIFA to stop Russia having the world cup in soccer.
The media started with negative articles about Putin and in the end the whole relationship with Russia and Putin changed over not Crimea, not Syria, but started with the homosexuals and Putin not letting them get their way while keeping normal marriage, families, and education go forward.
226
posted on
12/19/2015 7:23:31 AM PST
by
manc
(Marriage =1 man + 1 woman,when they say marriage equality then they should support polygamy)
To: ETL
Putin is no fool and he’s completely focused on his goals. I have no doubt that he is ruthless and calculating.
227
posted on
12/19/2015 7:33:18 AM PST
by
trisham
(Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.)
To: Kickass Conservative
228
posted on
12/19/2015 7:38:10 AM PST
by
trisham
(Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis.)
To: Forward the Light Brigade
True, he needs super security.
To: ETL
I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace. That's almost exactly what we've been saying on FR for a long time.
Trump must an FR lurker.
In the USA they blamed every thing on W and in Russia they blame Putin. It's all alleged. The American way , not guilty until proven.
Anyway, it's better than being praised by the head chopping kings of Saudi Arabia.
230
posted on
12/19/2015 8:29:46 AM PST
by
duckln
Comment #231 Removed by Moderator
To: ruination
The mere thought of a nationalist and Christian Russia drives them insane.Good friggin grief. Why are there so many absolute morons like you on this site now?
Putin: Defender of Christian Faith and Morality?
September 2014
(excerpt from a long, detailed article)
First and foremost, in any review of the basics regarding Putin, the most outstanding fact is that he is a creature of the Soviet KGB, a truly diabolical organization nonpareil, which stood for murder, terror, and grand deception.
It was the Soviet Communist Party's tool for the brutal suppression of religion, including the persecution of Christians: denying them jobs and education; spying on and entrapping them; arresting and imprisoning them; torturing them in unspeakable ways; desecrating and demolishing their church buildings; infiltrating their agents into churches to subvert them. The KGB destroyed thousands of Christian churches, monasteries, convents, and schools, and slaughtered millions of Christians.
But it did not destroy the churches utterly. There remained an underground church, whose members were always at risk of discovery, arrest, torture, and martyrdom. Above ground, the KGB took control of the Russian Orthodox Church, which became a very useful organ of the Soviet atheist state.
In January 2009, Vladimir Mikhailovich Gundyaev, better known as Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, was elected, from a short list of three candidates, to be the 16th Patriarch of Moscow and All Russia, the highest position of authority in the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). The election was called to fill the post that had been left vacant by the death of Patriarch Alexy II, who had headed the ROC since 1990.
Documents from the KGB archives have confirmed what sensible observers had long ago deduced from his actions: that Patriarch Alexy II (also spelled Alexi or Alexei) was a long-serving KGB agent (code-named Drozdov, "Blackbird"), in other words, a traitor to his Christian brethren and the God he claimed to serve. Putin's KGB/FSB was taking no chances with his replacement. All three candidates - Metropolitan Kliment of Kaluga and Borovsk (code-named Topaz), Metropolitan Filaret of Minsk and Slutsk (code-named Ostrovskii), and Metropolitan Kirill (code-named Mikhailov) - also have been reliably identified as agents of the KGB/FSB.
Russia expert David Satter, a former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times (of London) and the Wall Street Journal, wrote of the election in 2009 for Forbes:
According to material from the Soviet archives, Kirill was a KGB agent (as was Alexei). This means he was more than just an informer, of whom there were millions in the Soviet Union. He was an active officer of the organization. Neither Kirill nor Alexei ever acknowledged or apologized for their ties with the security agencies.
Because Patriarch Kirill is of central importance to the myth of Putin as the Saul-to-Paul, Christian persecutor-to-Christian champion, it behooves us to more closely examine the man. He has publicly presided over, and provided official benedictions and exhortations for, Putin's cynical and Stalinesque exploitation of Russian nationalism and Russian Orthodoxy. Josef Stalin, who had very nearly consummated the annihilation of the Russian Orthodox Church begun by Vladimir Lenin, reversed course in 1941. The reason? His erstwhile partner in crime, Adolf Hitler, had turned on him and had invaded Russia.
Stalin, needing all the help he could get, cut a deal with ROC Metropolitans Sergius, Nikolay, and Alexy. In exchange for their support in rallying the Russian people, he would cease (temporarily) the persecution and allow the reopening of churches and theological schools. In fact, Stalin's Soviet government paid for the rebuilding of many of the churches. The ROC was thus placed even more firmly under the control of the NKVD, which was later to be reorganized and renamed as the KGB. ..."
much more at link
http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/19162-putin-defender-of-christian-faith-and-morality
***********************************************************
"For 16 years Putin was an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991.
He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin's administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election, despite widespread accusations of vote-rigging,[3] and was reelected in 2004."
"On 25 July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its Secretary on 29 March 1999."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin
232
posted on
12/19/2015 8:48:50 AM PST
by
ETL
(Ted Cruz 2016!! -- For a better, safer America)
To: ruination
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
233
posted on
12/19/2015 8:49:19 AM PST
by
ETL
(Ted Cruz 2016!! -- For a better, safer America)
To: mkjessup
We didn't approve or condone of how Stalin abused and mistreated the Russian people during World War II, but we made him our ally because it just so happened that the Red Army was the only thing standing between stopping HitlerHow Stalin abused and mistreated the Russian people? He murdered 3 or 4 times as many people under his rule than did Hitler. About 6 million vs about 20 million.
234
posted on
12/19/2015 8:53:44 AM PST
by
ETL
(Ted Cruz 2016!! -- For a better, safer America)
To: mkjessup
Putin, once critical of Stalin, now embraces Soviet dictator's tactics
Carol J. Williams, reporting from Moscow
June 11, 2015
Only six years ago, President Vladimir Putin visited the Polish port of Gdansk, birthplace of the Solidarity movement that threw off Soviet domination, and reassured his Eastern European neighbors that Russia had only friendly intentions.
Putin spoke harshly that day of the notorious World War II-era pact that former Soviet leader Josef Stalin had signed with Adolf Hitler -- an agreement that cleared the way for the Nazi occupation of Poland and Soviet domination of the Baltics -- calling it a "collusion to solve one's problems at others' expense."
But Putin's view of history appears to have undergone a startling transformation. Last month, the Russian leader praised the 1939 nonaggression accord with Hitler as a clever maneuver that forestalled war with Germany. Stalin's 29-year reign, generally seen by Russians in recent years as a dark and bloody chapter in the nation's history, has lately been applauded by Putin and his supporters as the foundation on which the great Soviet superpower was built.
Across a resurgent Russia, Stalin lives again, at least in the minds and hearts of Russian nationalists who see Putin as heir to the former dictator's model of iron-fisted rule.
Recent tributes celebrate Stalin's military command acumen and geopolitical prowess. His ruthless repression of enemies, real and imagined, has been brushed aside by today's Kremlin leader as the cost to be paid for defeating the Nazis.
As Putin has sought to recover territory lost in the 1991 Soviet breakup, his Stalinesque claim to a right to a "sphere of influence" has allowed him to legitimize the seizure of Crimea from Ukraine and declare an obligation to defend Russians and Russian speakers beyond his nation's borders.
On May 9, the 70th anniversary of the Allied war victory was marked and Stalin's image was put on display with glorifying war films, T-shirts, billboards and posters. Framed portraits of the mustachioed generalissimo were carried by marchers in Red Square's Victory Day parade and in the million-strong civic procession that followed to honor all who fell in what Russians call the Great Patriotic War.
Putin's embrace of Stalin's power-play tactics is applauded by many Russians and other former Soviet citizens as the sort of decisive leadership they longed for while watching communism collapse around them. To the proponents of a reinvigorated Russia, reformist Mikhail Gorbachev and his successor, Boris Yeltsin, are seen as having submitted Russia to Western domination.
Over the last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has presented dictator Josef Stalin's bloody 29-year reign as the foundation on which the Soviet superpower was built.
Stalin lives again, at least in minds and hearts.
Stalin "kept us all together, there was a friendship of nations, and without him everything fell apart," said Suliko Megrelidze, a 79-year-old native of Stalin's Georgian birthplace who sells dried fruit and spices at a farmers market. "We need someone like him if we want peace and freedom from those fascists in Europe and America."
Such sentiments are no longer confined to those with actual memories of the Stalin era. A poll this spring by the independent Levada Center found 39% of respondents had a positive opinion of Stalin. As to the millions killed, 45% of those surveyed agreed that the deaths could be justified for the greater accomplishments of winning the war, building modern industries and growing to eventually give their U.S. nemesis a battle for supremacy in the arms race and conquering outer space.
The share of Russians who look back approvingly has been increasing steadily in recent years, and the segment of those who tell pollsters they have no opinion on his place in their history has shot up even more sharply, said Denis Volkov, a sociologist with the Levada Center.
He points to this year's massive Victory Day events as the Kremlin's message to ungrateful neighbors that they owe their peace and prosperity to the wartime deaths of more than 20 million Soviet citizens.
"The figure of Stalin is being justified through the war," Volkov said. "There is an attitude now that, yes, there were repressions and, yes, there were huge losses, but we won the war after all."
Victory exonerated Stalin's excesses, just as it does Putin's "strongman" posture toward neighbors and former Soviet subjects now outside the Russian Federation's borders, Volkov said.
Stalin's standing among his countrymen has waxed and waned with the political upheavals that have wracked the Soviet Union and Russia. He was so dominant a figure in Soviet citizens' lives by the time of his death on March 5, 1953, that hundreds of thousands poured into the streets of Moscow in a chaotic outbreak of mourning when word of his passing reached a public taught to believe that life was impossible without Stalin -- the Bolshevik nom de guerre he adopted, signifying "man of steel."
Nikita Khrushchev, who finally prevailed in attaining the leadership after five years of Kremlin infighting, began a campaign of de-Stalinization in 1961, moving Stalin's embalmed remains from public display next to Vladimir Lenin's to a less prominent grave near the Kremlin wall. Stalingrad, the hero city that symbolized the Soviets' watershed battle to turn back the Nazis, was renamed Volgograd, and statues and busts were removed, and streets, institutes and schools were renamed.
But the erasure of Stalin's name and likeness served also to stifle discussion of his vast crimes: Siberian exile or death sentences for political opponents, collectivization of agriculture during which millions starved, deportation of minorities and property seizures that impoverished generations. It wasn't until Gorbachev came to power in 1985 that a candid recounting of his era was attempted.
Even Putin, earlier in his presidency, fell in line with the collective spirit of criticism of Stalinâs errors. During the visit to Poland in 2009, a year after he had sent troops to seize territory in sovereign Georgia, Putin appeared to reassure Russia's nervous neighbors that the nonaggression pact that paved the way for war and division 70 years earlier was to be remembered as immoral.
The Aug. 23, 1939, Molotov-Ribbentrop pact's secret protocols doomed Poland to Nazi occupation a week later and gave the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania to the Soviet Union. Millions of citizens of those betrayed territories died at Stalin's hand, in political purges, summary executions and slave labor camps.
The scope of Stalin's brutality remains a topic of heated debate. Late Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn once claimed in an interview that as many as 110 million died from the dictator's vast array of repressions between 1921 and 1959, including prisoners who succumbed long after Stalin's reign. Historian Viktor Zemkov, at the other extreme, puts the number of deaths attributable to Stalin at 1.4 million.
"The estimates of 110 million to 1.4 million speak for themselves -- a hundredfold disagreement," said Dmitry Lyskov, a state television talk-show host who mounted a failed campaign four years ago to put Stalin's visage on city buses to commemorate Victory Day.
The Russian Military-Historical Society, established by Putin in 2012, announced this year that a new Stalin museum was to open in May in the village of Khoroshevo, 140 miles northeast of Moscow. Stalin spent the night of Aug. 4, 1943, in a small wooden home there, the closest he came to visiting frontline Soviet troops during the four-year fight to defeat Germany.
The sanitized exhibits recounting Stalin's contributions to the war effort and postwar recovery were ready by the planned May 9 holiday. But the opening was postponed amid local opposition led by the Tver regional leader of Memorial, a group dedicated to shedding light on Russia's totalitarian era.
Yan Rachinsky, a leader of Memorial's Moscow chapter, calls the museum "ridiculous," and Stalin's single night there irrelevant to the war victory two years later.
The stillborn museum was one of several official efforts to honor Stalin this year: A statue was erected in the southern city of Lipetsk, and splashed with red paint the night it was unveiled. A bronze likeness of the dictator was put up to mark the February anniversary of his 1945 meeting with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Yalta, a Black Sea resort now inaccessible to most of the world as only Russian aviation serves the contested Crimean peninsula.
Stalin has weathered more than six decades of historical revisions to maintain his standing as a rival to the West, "which is the context in which he interests Putin," said Nikolai Svanidze, a writer and historian whose grandfathers died in Stalinâs political purges.
"Just as Stalin defeated the West 70 years ago by capturing half of Europe," Svanidze said, "we are defeating the West again today. Crimea is our Berlin, our Reichstag, and there is no way it will be restored to Ukraine in the foreseeable future."
Svanidze also predicts there will be no more credible elections as long as Putin chooses to stay in power. That, he said, is another parallel with Stalin's lifetime sinecure as Soviet leader.
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-russia-stalin-model-20150611-story.html
235
posted on
12/19/2015 8:55:31 AM PST
by
ETL
(Ted Cruz 2016!! -- For a better, safer America)
"Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor"
http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131219/185734707/Putin-Says-Stalin-No-Worse-Than-Cunning-Oliver-Cromwell.html
______________________________________
"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.'..."
"The more I see and read about Mr. Putin, in power since 1999, and his 'managed democracy,' the more apprehensive I become about the future of Russia and the safety of its neighbors.
If Putin believes that the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 independent states represents the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,' then it follows that Putin might well believe he should do something to repair the loss..."
http://web.archive.org/web/20090415000000*/http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html
______________________________________
"The demise of the Soviet Union was the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century'," Putin said in 2005.
http://www.thetrumpet.com/article/11102.30640.0.0/asia/moscow-puts-the-soviet-squeeze-on-neighbor-nations
______________________________________
______________________________________
"'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://web.archive.org/web/20100711090651/http://article.nationalreview.com/365528/forgetting-the-evils-of-communism/jonah-goldberg
______________________________________
"The demise of the Soviet Union was the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century'," Putin said in 2005.
"Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor"
236
posted on
12/19/2015 8:56:02 AM PST
by
ETL
(Ted Cruz 2016!! -- For a better, safer America)
To: mtrott
Russia Boosts Arms, Training for Leftist Latin Militaries
Moscow defense minister inks deals with Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua for joint exercisesBY: Bill Gertz
February 20, 2015
Russia agreed to provide military training for three leftist regimes in Latin America and increase military visits and exercises following a visit last week to the region by Moscow's Defense Minister Sergei Shoygu, Pentagon officials said.
Shoygu met with defense and military leaders in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua and signed several agreements on warship visits and military training during the visit, which ran from Feb. 11 to 14. It is not clear whether any new arms deals were completed during the visit.
Defense officials said the Russian leader is seeking bases in the region for strategic bomber flights that Shoygu recently promised would include flights over the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean.
U.S. intelligence agencies closely monitored the visit but a Pentagon spokeswoman played down the Russian military encroachment.
"Just as we have bilateral and multilateral relationships around the world, so do other nations," Pentagon spokeswoman Eileen M. Lainez told the Washington Free Beacon. "All nations are free to choose their associations as they see fit."
The U.S. Southern Command, the command responsible for maintaining security in the region, also played down the visit.
"We respect the sovereign right of nations in the region to seek constructive relationships with the international community," said Col. Lisa Garcia, a command spokeswoman.
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), a member of the House Permanent Select Intelligence Committee, said "the Russian bear is out of hibernation from Damascus, to Donetsk, and from Pyongyang to Peru."
"Putin and his coterie of "former" communists smell weakness," Pompeo said. "Their window to expand Russian influence is now and they are acting with great vigor and with nearly zero resistance from America and the West. Russian military expansion into Latin America is simply one more manifestation of their resolve and American inaction."
Defense officials familiar with intelligence reports said Shoygu discussed future arms sales and signed military training and joint exercises accords during his four days of meetings.
All three Latin states are members of the 11-member Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, known as ALBA, a leftist alliance set up by Cuba and Venezuela in 2004 as an anti-U.S. grouping of states.
The Russian news site Pravda reported that the defense minister's visit appeared to set the stage for a future visit to the region by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The Russian leader is under growing isolation as the result of diplomatic and financial pressure from U.S. and European states that U.S. officials have said are beginning to cause serious economic problems for Russia.
The Shoygu visit also comes amid heightened tensions between Russia and the West over Moscow's military annexation of Ukraine's Crimea and continuing Russian military destabilization, despite a recent ceasefire accord, in eastern Ukraine.
The Obama administration has remained largely silent on Russian military encroachment in the western hemisphere. Russian Tu-95 Bear H bomber flights have increased sharply near U.S. coasts in recent months, with one recent air defense zone incursion simulating a practice nuclear cruise missile strike on the United States from northeastern Canada.
British jets on Thursday intercepted Russian bombers flying along the coast near Cornwall, in southwest England.
In Nicaragua, Shoygu signed an agreement aimed at simplifying procedures for Russian warships to make port calls. A second accord was reached that will increase military training in Russia for Nicaraguan military personnel.
Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista President Daniel Ortega announced last year that he plans to build up the armed forces with Moscow's assistance.
Russia also agreed previously to supply naval gunboats to Nicaragua beginning in 2016.
Venezuela also is a major recipient of Russian weapons, including an estimated $12 billion in arms, including Su-30 jets, Mi-17, Mi-26 and Mi-35 helicopters, T-72 tanks, Smerch multiple launch rocket launchers, S-300 anti-aircraft missiles, and artillery.
Venezuela also agreed during the Shoygu visit to increase visits by Russian warships, and Caracas will hold joint military exercises with the Russians. Joint Russian-Venezuelan air defense training also was discussed, and Russian warship visits will take place in the future.
"We will most certainly take part in your air defense and artillery drills," Shoygu was quoted by state-run Sputnik news agency as saying in Caracas.
Pravda reported Russian air force aircraft may make use of Venezuelan bases in the future.
In November, Shoygu announced that Russian strategic nuclear bombers would conduct long-range training flights over the Gulf of Mexico. "In the current situation we have to maintain military presence in the western Atlantic and eastern Pacific, as well as the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico."
Marine Corps. Lt. Gen. Vincent Stewart, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, confirmed the likelihood of future Russian bomber flights during testimony earlier this month before the House Armed Services Committee.
"Moscow has made significant progress in modernizing its nuclear and conventional forces, improving its training and joint operational proficiency, modernizing its military doctrine to integrate new methods of warfare and developing long range precision strike capabilities," Stewart said.
Stewart said Russian military forces, including Tu-95 bombers, conducted "record numbers" of out of area air and naval deployments.
"We expect this to continue this year to include greater activity in the Caribbean and Mediterranean Seas," he said.
In an article published Tuesday, Pravda quoted Putin as saying Russia would not permit the United States to achieve military superiority, and Moscow will continue to bolster its nuclear forces, space weapons, navy, and long-range aviation.
The newspaper also said Moscow lacks a system of bases to achieve its objectives.
In Cuba, Shoygu met Cuban dictator Raul Castro and noted that military relations continued to "develop constructively." The Russian leader also thanks the Cuban communist regime for hosting port visits by Russian naval vessels, including the intelligence-gathering ship Victor Leonov, which made a port call in Havana in January, coinciding with the Obama administration's diplomatic initiative to seek normalized relations with the regime.
Cuba also agreed to send military personnel to Russia for training.
U.S. defense officials said the Leonov was anchored some 25 miles off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida, last week, where it is suspected of conducting surveillance of U.S. nuclear missile submarines based at nearby Kings Bay, Georgia.
"This long-term strategy imposes obligations on Russia to supply its allies in Latin America with advanced weapons, including air defense systems, aircraft, and warships," Pravda stated.
Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton said the Russians appear to be filling a power vacuum in the region by the lack of focus from the Obama administration.
"Russia's perception of American weakness under Obama has fueled their new adventurism in this hemisphere," Bolton said. "Since I see no chance of Obama waking up to the potential threat, I am very worried about the situation a new president will face in January 2017."
Dan Goure, a Russia expert with the Lexington Institute, said Russia's current moves into Latin America "are like a page Xeroxed from the Soviet political-military playbook."
"Now, like then, the Kremlin is attempting to counter what it perceives as western encirclement by operating in America's backyard," Goure said.
"The U.S. deploys missile defenses in Eastern Europe and sends warships into the Black Sea so the Russian military is attempting a riposte by orchestrating naval visits to Venezuela and seeking to reopen its intelligence facility in Cuba."
Goure said Moscow is seeking to encourage anti-American sentiment in the region "much the same way as it perceives the U.S. has done to Russia in the so-called color revolutions."
http://freebeacon.com/national-security/russia-boosts-arms-training-for-leftist-latin-militaries/
*******************************************************************
How Russia arms America's southern neighbors
Ioan Grillo
May 9, 2014
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil -- Russia's push into Ukraine has put many on edge. But less known is that Russia is also strengthening its military links south of the Rio Grande and re-establishing itself as a power in the region.
Vladimir Putin has been strengthening military links here, and Russia is now the largest arms dealer to governments in Latin America, surpassing the United States.
Russia has even floated the possibility of building new military bases in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, and putting its warships permanently in the Caribbean.
In the midst of the Ukraine crisis, Russia's top diplomat Sergei Lavrov recently visited Cuba, Peru, Chile, and Nicaragua, where he announced that Russia would also pour money into the new Central American canal project. ..."
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/americas/140508/russian-arms-military-trade-latin-america
237
posted on
12/19/2015 8:57:17 AM PST
by
ETL
(Ted Cruz 2016!! -- For a better, safer America)
To: mtrott
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
_______________________________________________
Link to read "New Lies for Old" online:
https://archive.org/details/GolitsynAnatoleTheNewLiesForOldOnes
_______________________________________________
Link to read "The Perestroika Deception" online:
https://archive.org/details/pdfy-TVvzZzfXiMBkMdvD
238
posted on
12/19/2015 9:00:26 AM PST
by
ETL
(Ted Cruz 2016!! -- For a better, safer America)
To: ETL
How Stalin abused and mistreated the Russian people? He murdered 3 or 4 times as many people under his rule than did Hitler. About 6 million vs about 20 million.
So you think it would have been better to just let Hitler sweep his way unimpeded all the way to the Pacific?
239
posted on
12/19/2015 9:12:28 AM PST
by
mkjessup
(Islam is the ENEMY of all civilized people. Obama is a Muslim. What's that tell ya?!?)
To: ETL
Ya know the link would have been sufficient.
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-russia-stalin-model-20150611-story.html
When are you going to start collecting rent from Putin?
240
posted on
12/19/2015 9:14:48 AM PST
by
mkjessup
(Islam is the ENEMY of all civilized people. Obama is a Muslim. What's that tell ya?!?)
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