Speaking at the end of the meeting, Macron warned: “There is a change in Russia’s stance. It is striving to take on further territory and it has its eyes not just on Ukraine but on many other countries as well, so Russia is presenting a greater danger.”
Among those present at the meeting were the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, the UK foreign secretary, Lord Cameron, the Polish president, Andrzej Duda, and the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte.
How messed up is it that the conservatives who warned against Russia in the early 2000s turned out to be right?
How messed up is it that many of those same conservatives that warned against Russia 25 years ago are firmly under their thumb now?
In retrospective everything is more clear. I would argue that it was fair bet to try to establish a deep economical connection with Russia as means to try to integrate it more into Europe. And we don’t know what would have happened if the west pushed for harder balkanization of Russia after Sowjets broke apart.
Of course! Mutual interest and strong economic ties have a long and well-proven history of building peace.
We’re learning that certain regimes are too fundamentally poisonous. They will undermine their own peace and prosperity just to dominate their rivals. See also North Korea and Iran
I think the mistake was not to support democratic/liberal powers in Russia enough. Im my opinion the 1990th were a turning point in Russian history where it could have gone either ways. But also it would be really interesting to know how Putins strategy and vision for Russia developed over time, hope future historians can find it out.
I think we should not forget that the West, especially the USA, definitely played a role in the 1990s in keeping Boris Yeltsin (and with him many of today’s oligarchs) in power and thus helped establishing the autocratic system that Russia has today.
Not sure what you mean by helping Yeltsin stay in power? I can’t really remember Yeltsin power being in danger to beginn with. As far as I know, one of the bigger problems was the very president focus constitution, which made it really easy for Putin to consolidate Power and Oligarchs making a really bad judgement that they can control Putin.
In the 1996 election, the USA under Bill Clinton actively supported Boris Yeltsin. Unfortunately, I can’t find any in-depth sources in English at the moment, but this article gives a general overview.
Edit: Some more background info on the topic here.
Fair point, but his opponent was Gennady Zyuganov, so we were all incredible lucky - this is not the worst possible timeline we live in.
Yea, maybe. I’m just saying that the West has played a part in how the Russian system has developed into what it is today.
https://fair.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/TimeYanks.jpg
“the 1980s called, they want their foreign policy back”
Yes, Democrats continued to be wrong about Russia into the 2010s
The photo was just an illustration that this really did happen, and at the time was considered a total “zinger.” At the time I really considered Romney a complete tool but here we are a dozen years later and I’m the one with egg on my face.
I think it was about 2 years later that Putin started attacking and annexing parts of Ukraine.
Same boat here, if Romney wasn’t a corporate stooge he wouldn’t be so bad. I mean before Obamacare there was romneycare.
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How is it messed up? I mean, how likely is it that the opposing party is wrong about literally everything?