Putinism a Greater Threat to Humanity than Anything the West has Faced Before, Yakovenko Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, December 10 – Speaking to the Forum of Free Russia in Vilnius, Igor Yakovenko says that “over its many thousand years of history, humanity has not once been faced with any challenge and mortal threat comparable to the Putin regime,” a regime that exploits the strengths of Western countries against themselves.

            The Putin regime, the Russian commentator says, is “a new threat” that is especially dangerous because few know how to describe or classify it, preferring instead like old generals to use terms from the past even though “not one of them” is appropriate for describing the state Putin has put in place (yakovenkoigor.blogspot.com/2018/12/blog-post_9.html).

            The Putin regime has no ideology. “We know the ideology of communism, Nazism, fascism and liberalism.” But try to imagine a book with the title “Putinism.”  “Inside it, you would find only blank pages.”  The Kremlin leader uses whatever seems to work for whatever aggression he is carrying out at the time, unconstrained by any ideological principles.

            Because that is so, Yakovenko continues, it is vitally important to convene an international tribunal to make clear what Putin and his regime are about, a tribunal that in the nature of things will combine both the arrangements of the Nuremburg trials of the Nazi leadership and the Russell-Sartre intellectual tribunal of Western crimes.

            On the one hand, the tribunal will include mostly non-governmental experts and activists, he says; but on the other, it will be able to define the nature of the Putin system and its crimes and thus involve governments to take actions against them in order to defend the values that inform Western countries.

            The tribunal should focus on three categories of crimes by Putin and his entourage: the usurpation of power, the war against Ukraine, the war in Syria, and crimes in the information sphere including but not limited to the subversion of the electoral process in Western countries, Yakovenko says.

            In each case, it will become obvious that Putinism does not fit into any of the categories Western analysts typically use for it.  Instead, “it speculates on the values of the civilization of the West and uses them in the ways a parasite does against a host. In this it resembles international terrorism.”

            Today, the commentator continues, the Putin regime is able to maintain itself because “world public opinion and in the heads of world leaders there exists a false picture of the world,” one which talks about the importance of Russia rather than the criminal nature of the Putin regime. A tribunal even with limited powers can help change that.

            “Our task,” Yakovenko says, “with the help of an open public process, is to show the entire world the falseness” of the picture people have of Russia and to “show that Putin’s gas and  oil are toxic and that with their help Putin corrupts Europe, America and the entire world and that to deal with Putin and his appointees is to bring the world closer to catastrophe.”