Russian President Lashes Out at West

Source: Associated Press

President Vladimir Putin likened his critics to "jackals" fed by foreign funding, and he accused the West of meddling in Russian politics, telling a campaign rally Wednesday that foes at home and abroad want to weaken the country.

--
Addressing thousands of backers in an event that mixed the flavors of a U.S. political convention and a Soviet-era Communist Party congress, Putin painted a grim picture of the turmoil in the 1990s in Russia and suggested that his Western-backed political foes were bent on turning the clock back.

"Those who confront us need a weak and ill state. They want to have a divided society, in order to do their deeds behind its back," he said.

A strong United Russia majority in parliament was needed to preserve his course, he said.

"Regrettably, there are those inside the country who feed off foreign embassies like jackals and count on support of foreign funds and governments, and not their own people," Putin said.



Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=3896997

it just seems some countries are destined to repeat the same errors again again and again. First Tsars...then Soviet chairmans...now autocrats disguised as democrats...and the Russian people continue to support it.

The U.S. government is funding Russian oppostion groups leading up to the elections.

The Orange Revolution (which has since collapsed) in the Ukraine was funded by U.S. sources.

So was the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan.

and their response will be to return to Soviet style life.

I blame the U.S. for intervening in their affairs, and I blame national autocrats taking advantage of the insecurity provoked by the U.S. Both are assholes.

Spying on its citizens, holding them indefinitely without charge, profiling citizens, tracking where they live and everything else done in the last 7 years all justified as "security measures".

but as bad as the U.S. is getting, I'm sure the Russians are well-trained on it already. The Russian state, during and after the Soviet Union, has been much more autocratic than ours. It's the nature of russian society itself...their culture lends itself to it. They've been like that for centuries.

The US has no monopoly on this sort of thing, assuming what Putin says is even remotely true.

But it's not like the State Dept. hired all those that went to the Maidan and protested, or even paid for the tents and loudspeakers. Nor was the Maidan website populated by State Dept. folk, or the ballot-box monitors hired by the US. For that, there was a European organization, one that's fairly independent.

It pays to remember that people that aren't Americans actually have brains and opinions of their own, and can actually form independent judgments concerning political events in their own countries.

Now, when you can find a nice parallel to Nashi ...

But the Bush administration has pretty much pissed away all semblance of American credibility by this point. There are surely quite a number of people in Russia who don't like the Putin regime, and who arrived at their conclusion all by themselves. But they all get tarred with the same brush when the Bush administration meddles in internal Russian politics.

The ham-fisted diplomacy of the Bush years will hamstring our country for years after the Decider has shambled off to his ranch, whether it's in Texas or Paraguay.

Hmmm....

over 5000 American-funded NGOs made sure the vote went for USchenko. Since the win wasn't certain, they had to paint the other guy "pro-russian" and the epitome of evil. Looking back 3 years this looks like a winning strategy for about a year or so.
After the aborigeens got sober and found out they are being steered into some totally anti-russian and anti-semitic direction by that Uschenko guy who recently made the SS officer Shukhevich a national hero of Ukraine.
There were a lot of raised eyebrows over in Israel.

Western NGO's including Human Rights Watch and to a certain extent, the US governmemt funded the process for new elections after Yanukovych blatantly tried to steal them and even attempted to assassinate Yuschenko. Yanukovych was essentially a puppet of Putin and the heir apparent to the post-soviet kleptocracy of Kuchma. The legacy of Kuchma is the lost decade of the 90's. Yuschenko may be one of the oligarchs but Kuchma and Yankovych were much worse. I am not sure why there is so much animosity towards Yuschenko who represents the ethnic Ukrainians that have been tyrannized for so long by the Russians (although Brezhnev and Gorbachev were Ukrainians). And besides, the Orange Revolution is not dead. There was a lot of blood loss, but it has stopped and the coalition won the last election.

1. Both sides tried to steal the elections (not just Yanukovich). Western Ukraine had 96-97% going for Yuschenko, is that possible in democratic elections?

2. Nobody poisoned Yushenko - 3 years later the guy himself couldn't figure out what happened to him (possible plastic surgery gone wrong coupled with abuse of alcohol) - but the PR campaign to paint Russia and Yanukovich evil was a great success, whoever was responsible. Kudos to that!


3. Yahukovich is not a puppet of Putin - he is a self-made-man oligarch who doesn't want to share the spoils with anybody. Why would he need Putin to rule over him?


4.Kuchma's legacy is not a "lost decade" as some US think tanks are pointing out - Ukraine was doing 12% growth of GDP per year in 2003-2004. Not bad after a total collapse of the economy, huh.


5.There is so much animosity towards Yushenko, because nationalistic and antisemitic arseholes come in different shapes and forms. He is one of them. No wonder his wife is leading the nationalistic ukrainian movement in the States. Europe got rid of nationalistic politicians a long time ago. The guy is a dinosaur and should be put into the history books.


6. Gorbachev is not ukrainian - he is from Russian Kuban region. Khrushev is.

7. The orange revolution is truly dead, because those who got to power are just as corrupt as the previous guys, multiplied by their nationalistic fervor and revisionism towards SS formations and nazi followers. I guess this is Kathy Chumachenko's old contacts at work now.

And I don't blame the Ukrainians for being a bit nationalistic after being under the Russian boot for several centuries.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

:eyes:

Which is exactly what the Yushchenko "Organge" alliance is full of. Read up on the fascist "Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists".

Yushchenko is still president, and Tymoshenko looks most likely to be the new PM:

The IMF-imposed program of privatization was absolutely corrupt. When state-run firms were put up for auction for private shareholders, firms worth tens of billions often sold for mere hundreds of millions in rigged auctions. Several individuals became billionaires by the time they were 30 simply by turning around and reselling the firm, at market price. Others cannibalized their firms and laid off the workers, and still others used their spoils like their own personal piggy-bank.

Hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars worth of Russian wealth were siphoned out of the country.

in places like Russia and China. As I recall, this administration sent a lot of people over early in its reign. And, people like Abramoff were lobbying for Russian interests. Poppy bush went to China and talked bidness. It seems to me the very idea of democracy is sinking under the new world order of piratized governance.

MOSCOW (Reuters) - An opposition politician running in Russian parliamentary elections was shot and seriously wounded on Wednesday as he entered his house in the southern Russian region of Dagestan, Russian media reported.

Farid Babayev, who will lead the regional list for the liberal anti-Kremlin Yabloko party was in a serious condition in hospital, RIA novosti news agency reported after an unidentified gunman fired on him in the regional capital Makhachkala.


SNIP
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL2147085720071121?feedType=RSS&feedName=topNews&rpc=22&sp=true

thats democracy freedom on the march in Russia