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What few people in the West properly understood then, and still don't, to this day, is the extreme nervousness in the West Wing of the Biden White Ho… - John Sweeney
" "What few people in the West properly understood then, and still don't, to this day, is the extreme nervousness in the West Wing of the Biden White House that a Ukrainian victory in the war could lead to Russia becoming Iraq 2.0. Their number one neurosis is that a Ukrainian victory would lead to the fall of Putin and that, in turn, would end up with the breaking up of Russia liberating two dragons the Americans are very afraid of. The first dragon is an Islamist Chechnya getting hold of a nuke and holding the Western world to ransom while Donald Trump is on the stump. The second, more terrifying, dragon is of China seizing Siberia while Russia is in chaos. Overnight, China would become the biggest, most resource-rich country on earth. [...] The negative to promoting timidity as your number one strategy is that the other players in the game will notice and react aggressively, making the possibility of the things you fear the most coming true more likely than not. And there are three specific weaknesses: one, real Russian victory in Ukraine is a worst outcome than future possible Russian chaos; two, the break-up of the Russian Empire established by Peter the Great and Catherine is long overdue and trying to wallpaper over the Tsarist, Soviet and now Putinist cracks won't work; three, rewarding evil never ends well.
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About John Sweeney
John Sweeney (born 7 June 1958) is a British investigative journalist and author who has worked for The Observer newspaper and for the BBC's Panorama television series.
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Alternative Names:
John Paul Sweeney
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Additional quotes by John Sweeney
As American and British politicians slowly began to see Putin for who he really was, Corbyn decided to echo, albeit in a faltering and weak voice, some of the Kremlin's messaging. This was because he was navigating simply by holding himself in constant opposition to American power. By doing so, he made himself yet another of the Kremlin's useful idiots. George Osborne and Peter Mandelson cosied up to Kremlin proxies for their own self-interest; Corbyn lost his bearings because his political ideology was so strong it twisted reality.
The evidence at Nuremberg Two of Russian war crimes will be overwhelming. Satellite images, drone footage, eye-witness accounts, Bellingcat open-source material. A cyclist on a green bike in Bucha. His execution in early March by a Russian Army tank as he turns a corner, filmed by a drone. His body next to the wrecked bike filmed by reporters when the Ukrainian Army returned to the city. Once again: Kremlin inhumanity on repeat.
The fall of the Soviet Union delivered real change. The old nonesense of Communism did start to die, but far more slowly than appreciated back then. Ordinary Russians for the first time in their lives could read honest newspapers, watch good telly, go abroad, buy fancy foreign cars, own their own homes. The idea of a free market was embraced, but a system without the functioning machinery of the rule of law was bound to struggle. The rhetoric of a free market masked the reality of a bloody anarchy where the people who came out on top were the most cunning, the most pitiless and the greediest. Russia turned into an oligarchy, the country's resources carved up and seized by a few rich men, but an oligarchy with democratic lipstick. [...] The problem was that political power was in the wrong hands. As the nineties wore on, Boris Yeltsin morphed from being an inspirational and courageous leader, willing to stand up on a tank to defend Russia's infant democracy, into a senile alcoholic, guarded by some of his hopelessly corrupt family. The president of Russia needed to be fighting like a tiger to stand up for the rule of law, to defend democratic principles, to strengthen Russia's fragile open society. Instead, he took the pith.
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