It's a victory for the moral force of our values. This is a victory for democracy and freedom. Bush, declared the end of the Soviet era a triumph.Įastern Europe is free. continued as the next American president, George H.W. And I think that must have been a severe blow.Īs we celebrate Christmas, this day of peace and hope. The Communist Party obviously will lose its raison d’être. Your country disappears or is in the process of disappearing. You can only imagine what it must have been like as a young KGB officer. MARIE YOVANOVITCH, Political officer, U.S. Here the feeling is the end of the Cold War is at hand. Putin, the collapse of the Soviet Union, spurred on by an American president, was a defining moment. So he would have learned about the West in the frame of the adversary, the enemy, or at least certainly all of the reasons in which there would be to be suspicious about the West.įrom ABC, this is World News Tonight with Peter Jennings.įor Lt. He was, in fact, a professional agent for the KGB. We must take actions to assist the campaign for democracy.Īt the time, Vladimir Putin was a young KGB officer stationed in Germany, trained to fight the United States. There is such change taking place in the communist world. It began during the height of the Cold War. on a path that has brought Russia and the United States to the brink. It is a war that he has been waging for years, confronting five American presidents. It was a dramatic escalation: Putin leaving no doubt his war was against the United States and the West. I think it's a dangerous moment for Russia, because it's hard to see what the pathway forward is. are backed up by crude force, on the law of the fist. Vladimir Putin needs to somehow justify the horrific sacrifices that Russians are making on his orders by broadening the aperture, making this about something bigger-into some kind of conflict with United States, with the West, with NATO. Western countries have been saying for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other nations. Vladimir Putin would make it clear what his intentions were and who the enemy really was. calling his actions, quote, "detrimental to Russia’s and its citizens’ future." They knew the war in Ukraine was going badly. Russian losses are beginning to spark criticism of the Russian leaders. George Hall in the Kremlin, in the midst of a crisis. (As Peter Kafka noted when I joined his podcast, it would be like trying to determine the mood in America by surveying people in the West Village.-humiliating losses on the battlefields of Kharkiv-įrankly it’s a sign that they are struggling badly on the Russian side.Īt St. They are all unanimously and loudly against the war, but I am well aware that they are not a representative sample. I also wanted to understand what people outside my cohort-Russian journalists and creative types who fled en masse with the outbreak of the war-thought. Instead, they are told, it’s an easy, limited military operation to liberate the grateful Ukrainian people from Nazis, and with few casualties among the Russian military or the Ukrainian people. It is not the same war that we in the West are seeing. Moreover, as I’ve noted before-and as a group of independent Russian sociologists recently documented-the majority of Russians do support the war, but only as they experience it in an informational blackout. Of course, the job of the Russian pollster is that much harder now that Vladimir Putin has pushed the country into full totalitarian mode, shut down what was left of the independent media and criminalized any deviation from the official line on the war. How many Russians, after all, would give their true and unvarnished opinion to a stranger from an official-sounding organization, calling out of the blue? Even before the war, when Russia was an authoritarian country with a small, marginalized independent press, it was hard to separate what people actually believed from the sanctioned talking points they would parrot from state-owned television. Ever since the Russian army invaded Ukraine, I am constantly asked: what do the Russian people think about the war? Do they support it? This is a deceptively difficult question to answer.
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