Window on Eurasia: Putin’s New Pact with Russians Requires US be ‘Main Enemy,’ Belkovsky Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, October 28 – Moscow political commentator Stanislav Belkovsky says that Vladimir Putin has changed the nature of his “pact” with the majority of the Russian population and that unlike his old one, his new agreement requires that the United States be “the main enemy” just as it was in Soviet times.

 

            In a comment on Ekho Moskvy, Belkovsky says that “the old Putin pact between the Kremlin and the majority of the people” was one in which the population “gave up political freedoms in exchange” for everyday ones and “began to live as freely and as well as ever before” in Russian history (echo.msk.ru/programs/personalno/1425738-echo/).

 

            Now, the Moscow commentator says, Russia has entered “a state of war” and “the main raison d’etre of the Russian authorities is to oppose aggression by the United States which beyond doubt would divide and destroy the Russian Federation at the first opportunity and the only thing blocking that is Vladimir Putin personally.”

 

            “As long as he is alive, the Russian Federation will exist, and as soon as [he] isn’t, neither with the Russian Federation be with all of the pluses and minuses of this process” – that is the the new pact as was declared at “the recent so-called Valdai forum, although it took place not in Valdai but in Sochi,” yet another confirmation of the “surreal” quality of this new arrangement.