Paul Goble
Staunton, Mar. 11 -- The Russian commentariat is currently spending more time discussing Donald Trump and the United States than it is talking about Vladimir Putin and the Russian Federation. Doing so is certainly safer and in many respects easier given the constant flow of statements from the American president.
Among this flow, two comments this week certainly are worthy of more attention than they have yet received because they likely reflect opinions among the upper reaches of hte Kremlin elite, given that they come from writers close to the Putin regime and thus are likely to inform what Vladimir Putin may do in the coming weeks and months.
The first comes from Valentin Katasonov, an economist who graduated from the foreign ministry's MGIMO and who now is a frequent commentator on foreign policy, most closely associated with the Russian nationalist Strategic Culture Foundation (business-gazeta.ru/article/665852).
In a lengthy comment for Kazan's Business-Gazeta portal about the current state of the world, he says bluntly that as far as US President Donald Trump is concerned, NATO is about business rather than security and that if one can give him what he thinks of as an economic advantage, he will ignore the security implications of what he does.
The second is from Dmitry Rodionov, a Russian naitonalist commentator whose articles defending Putin and attacking the West appear most frequently on the Svobodnaya Pressa portal. He says that with Trump in office, Russia need not pay any attention to NATO's Article Five which specifies than an attack on any alliance member is an attack on all (svpressa.ru/politic/article/455101/).
If in fact those in the Kremlin accept these arguments, that provides compelling evidence that Putin, however many problems he may face, is likely to become more rather than less aggressive than he has been and will seek to exploit the new American position to further undermine NATO and possibly even attack some of its members.
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