Many Suffer from ‘Delusion’ that after Putin, ‘Everything will Return to Normal and Be Just Fine,’ Sulandziga Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Dec. 18 – Many people “expect and hope that the Putin regime will fall – and then that everything will return to normal and be just fine,” Pavel Sulyandziga, head of the Batani International Indigenous Fund for Development and Solidarity and former vice president of RAIPON who has been forced into emigration.
    To think that way, he argues, is to suffer from “a profound delusion. Things won’t be the same as they used to be before! And the sooner the Artic community … realizes this, the sooner it will be possible to begin building a new system of relations with Russia and have effective interactions in the future” (batani.org/archives/2846).
    Before 2010, most members of the Arctic community outside of Russia regarded that country as “friendly,” albeit “with some oddities and peculiarities.” But “we have all witnessed what that illusion led to” in the form of Putin’s expanded invasion of Ukraine and his breaking off of relations between Artic peoples.
    What the Western community, including governments, activists and scholars, must grasp is that “there is a dangerous enemy on the other side and that its oddities and peculiarities are not just whims of the regime but sources of its power and a threat to the outside world. Any policy toward or relations with Russia must be based on an acknowledgement of that fact.”