IN A major article on foreign policy in the week before the presidential election, Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin has strongly criticised the United States, described any military acton against Iran as “disastrous”, and warned that no one should be allowed to apply a Libyan solution to Syria.
He accused the US and its allies of having “an itch for military intervention” and said the reaction to the veto by Russia and China of a UN security resolution on Syria had been extremely negative and “almost hysterical”.
He warned the West against a tactic by which it would, on the one hand, accept UN Security Council approval of action, but on the other hand would go ahead with action even if the Security Council failed to approve it.
Mr Putin’s electoral style, in sharp contrast to the soundbites used by western politicians, has included a series of long policy documents published in the Russian press.
Yesterday’s foreign policy article in Moscow News ran to more than 7,500 words and repeated his increasingly frequent attacks on the US and its policies. For domestic consumption, he has also accused the US of trying to use its influence directly in Russia’s internal politics by subsidising opposition demonstrators and local electoral observation groups.
The US, he wrote, had become obsessed with the idea of becoming absolutely invulnerable. This, he claimed, was a utopian concept that could not be brought to fruition either geopolitically or technologically.
“By definition, absolute invulnerability for one country would in theory require absolute vulnerability for all others,” Mr Putin wrote, adding that this could not be accepted.
On Syria, Mr Putin’s view was that the international community should work to achieve reconciliation between the two sides in the conflict in that country “without preconditions or foreign interference and with due respect for sovereignty”.
He pointed out that Russian companies were losing their “decades-long positions in local markets” in the Arab Spring countries and were being replaced by companies from countries that had played a part in removing the previous ruling regimes.
Russia was worried, he wrote, about the consequences of any military action against Iran. Russia’s view was that there should be international recognition of Iran’s right to develop a civil nuclear programme, including uranium enrichment, but this must be done in line with strict safeguards from the International Atomic Energy Agency.
On Europe, Mr Putin wrote that co-operation between Russia and the EU was not consistent with meeting global challenges, and he proposed a community of economies “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” that would develop into a free trade area.
