Window on Eurasia: Russian Regime ‘More Dangerous than the Soviet,' Eidman Says

Paul Goble

 

            Staunton, July 18 – Those guilty of shooting down the Malaysian airline include “not only the [pro-Russian] militants but above all those who sent them to kill, who armed them and who inspired them – Putin and his junta,” Moscow commentator Igor Eidman says, and that makes the current Russian regime “more dangerous” than the Soviet one was.

 

            Unlike the government in Ukraine which Russian propagandists regularly label a junta, that term “applies in an ideal fashion” to the Moscow regime which in essence is “a military (special services) – civilian authoritarian government headed by a caudillo who operates on the basis of force structures” (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=53C8E2F4C0721).

 

            Although many in the West are engaged in intellectual contortions so as not to have to hold Moscow accountable, “the guilty part of this tragedy is obvious,” the Moscow commentator says.  Pro-Moscow separatists in the area had already shot down other planes in recent days, and efforts to ignore that “are impossible to be taken seriously.”

 

            Moscow in general and Putin personally are directly culpable, he continues, because after the pro-Moscow separatists had fled from Slavyansk, the Russian authorities sent them new weaponry, including surface-to-air missiles and “anonymous Russian special service officers.”  This had a predictable and tragic result.

 

            “The bandits, having obtained control of contemporary weapons, began” to assume they could do anything they wanted. And that is something which “their Russian patrons and inspirers should have foreseen.”  Clearly, they didn’t – or at least didn’t take any steps to prevent the pro-Moscow forces in southeastern Ukraine from doing something this horrific.

 

            When the Soviet government shot down the Korean airliner, “the USSR finally became an international outcast.”  It will be “interesting” to see how the West will react to a crime that is in many ways analogous but in fact is even worse and more horrifying.

 

            The Malaysian airline was “shot down over the territory of a foreign state” by “terrorists in the service of the Russian government. The destruction of the Korean jet showed the inadequacy of the Soviet authorities who were not able to determine that what they were seeing was a civilian plane.”

           

            “The destruction of the Malaysian Boeing,” Eidman continues, was “the result of the aggression and adventurism of the Putin leadership which organized bands of terrorists headed by Russian citizens and agents to attack Ukraine.”

 

            If the first crime was in part one of omission, the latter is quite obviously one of commission, the Moscow commentator suggests, and that forces one to conclude that “now the Russian authorities are more dangerous than the Soviets were” and that “they represent a direct and real threat to the world.”