orget china, forget the dollar, forget iraq. russia could well be more important to the rest of the world.
if so, will the usa get involved with the dems in 'power' ? i doubt it. will europe be blackmailed into paying exorbitant energy costs to russia ? could this be THE trigger to unbalancing the world economies ? just a thought. anway, a bit form the london ttelegraph below.
salud 40.
london telegraph
The West is losing patience with Putin Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 25/11/2006
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There is, as yet, no evidence linking the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko to the Kremlin. While many commentators believe that there is a connection – the former spy had been consorting with exiled opponents of the Putin regime – hearsay does not constitute proof.
We do not know for sure that Mr Litvinenko was murdered and, if he was, the deed may have been done by his ex-KGB colleagues acting without higher authority. It is important to make this qualification because, if Mr Litvinenko was indeed assassinated on the orders of the Russian state, the consequences will be huge.
We are talking, after all, about a man living under the Queen's peace. When one government deliberately uses lethal force in another's jurisdiction, it commits an act of terrorism – arguably of war. Libya and Sudan were bombed in retaliation for such ingressions, Afghanistan occupied.
advertisementVladimir Putin's regime is not, of course, in the same category as those of Gaddafi, Omar Bashir or the Taliban. But it is showing increasingly autocratic tendencies. Opposition figures are jailed on pretexts. Independent television stations have been virtually eliminated. Just weeks ago, a respected journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was gunned down in broad daylight after criticising the president.
Abroad, too, Mr Putin is throwing his weight about, meddling in Ukraine and in the dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan. He is conducting a bestial war against Chechen separatism, but is happy to sponsor South Ossetian separatism in Georgia.
Why this new-found swagger? Because Russia is suddenly, as Mr Putin likes to remind us, "an energy superpower". His defence minister is even more direct: "In the contemporary world, only power is respected." Perhaps. But, in any commercial transaction, power lies ultimately with the customer – in this case, Western Europe. Until now, the West has tended to overlook Mr Putin's authoritarianism, largely for the sake of a quiet life. But there must come a point when our patience runs out. It is one thing to tyrannise your people; quite another to presume to do so on British territory.
