Paul Goble
Staunton, Apr. 12 – If Putin remains continues his current policies, over the next 20 years, Vladimir Pastukhov says, “the result is easy to predict: Russia will turn into the Ottoman Empire of the 21st century, a technologically backward, arrogant pace, vulnerable both militarily and socio-politically,” the new “sick man” of Europe.
And at that time, less than the life of a single generation from now, the London-based Russian analyst and commentator continues, Russia and the world “will receive from history answers to all those questions about the future which seem insoluble today” (t.me/v_pastukhov/1058).
Pastukhov says that he “does not believe in the future of the Putin regime” because it is not securing the foundations required for the next stage of the scientific-technological revolution which is taking place online in the world surrounding Russia.” Instead, it continues to rely on what it inherited from Soviet times and has not gone beyond that.
“Fortunately” for Putin, it has turned out that “there was still something to squeeze out of that legacy,” enough to “wipe out Ukrainian cities from the face of the earth and threaten the rest of the world with nuclear suicide,” the commentator say, things that have “given rise to the illusion of power that so pleases the vanity of average people.”
But there is a problem: “while eating away at the Soviet legacy,” Pastukhov points out, Putin’s regime “does not create anything in return, literally a hopeless development. Indeed, “Putin’s technological renaissance is like the last sigh of relief of a seriously ill patient before death.”
In branch after branch, “under Putin, Russia has finally and apparently irrevocably lost the technological race, losing not only to the collective West but to the collective East as well.” And despite the Kremlin leader’s hype about his short-term victories, losses in these spheres will determine the future.
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