Paul Goble
Staunton,
November 20 – The decision of the Singapore prime minister to cancel his
meeting with Vladimir Putin when the Kremlin leader showed up an hour late
calls attention to the fact that Putin has a long history of keeping others
waiting, whether they are world leaders or people at home in Russia, Yekaterina
Vostretsova says.
If
Putin’s late arrival in Singapore had been the first such “delay” by the
Russian “’monarch,’” she writes on the Forum-MSK.ru portal, “the international
community might have shown understanding.” But since it is the latest in a long
line of such behavior by Putin, it didn’t (forum-msk.org/material/news/15187782.html).
Instead,
commentators in many countries pointed out the many occasions in the past when
Putin turned up late, including most recently at the session in Paris on the centenary
of the end of World War I, the Helsinki summit, and the record he set in making
Chancellor Merkel of Germany wait four hours and 15 minutes.
Vostretsova says that she calculates
that Putin on average makes foreign leaders wait 78 minutes after the time
scheduled for their sessions with him.
The reasons this graduate of the Leningrad yards ignores “the elementary
rules of politeness and international etiquette” are obvious, she continues.
Being late is designed to “show the counterpart
who is dictating the conditions of the talks, a purely ‘Chekist’ tactic of
manipulating the latter even before the start of the talks,” to make the interlocutor
nervous and put him off his game, and to disrupt any plans the latter had had
for the talks.
Finally, in the person of the
Singapore prime minister, someone has responded correctly to Putin’s
boorishness. Who will be next?
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