Vitaly Churkin, the Russian Federation’s ambassador to the United Nations, spoke Monday at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
He kicked off his remarks with a cursory whitewashed foreign policy history of the Russian state, benignly dubbing the bloody 1917 Communist revolution into a draconian dictatorship as its “socialist” revolution. Lenin and his commie cronies ruthlessly executed the royalty and millions of the Russian people who didn’t agree with their twisted Marxist philosophies.
Churkin also mentioned Russia’s (The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’s) significant role in World War II. While it’s true Russia paid more sacrifices than any nation in WWII — 27 million Russian dead attest to that — our charming diplomat failed to mention that Joseph Stalin rivaled even Nazi Germany’s Adolf Hitler in the scale and scope of his war crimes and human atrocities. Stalin, with his political and military purges in the 1930s and Russians troops-as-human cannon fodder style of waging war, had millions upon millions of his own people executed and murdered for the sake of his own political expediency.
And we call Hitler a monster?
Churkin applauded Russia’s role in nuclear arms reductions efforts by the world’s two super powers beginning in the 1970s (I’m cool with that) but went so far as to take credit for the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
When Russia launched a military invasion of the independent democratic state of Georgia, and its breakaway republic, South Ossetia, last August, Churkin coined the shameless geopolitical power grab something akin to a humanitarian aid effort.
Now I know Churkin is a diplomat and his chief duty is to be a spinmeister for Moscow, but come on. Really?
Listening to Churkin, one might foolishly believe that Russia has transformed itself (and its long history of aggressive, totalitarian ways) and become the most benevolent, democratic and free society on the planet. A giant Teddy bear, as it were, reaching out altruistically to embrace all nations of world with an olive branch, love and an impromptu rendition of “Kumbaya.”
He subtly bashed former President George W. Bush several times for acting unilaterally in American foreign policy despite the fact that Russia wrote the book over several centuries on taking advantage of and invading weaker countries (ask the former Soviet republics and Eastern Europe, stuck for forty years behind Stalin’s Iron Curtain), setting up puppet regimes in those countries, and silencing all democratic institutions and voices.
For years now, ex-KGB spy and Russian President Vladmir Putin has strangled democratic institutions and reforms born after the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. The Russian Legislature’s powers have been weakened, basic individual freedoms curtailed, free speech chilled, and central power consolidated under Prime Minister Putin and his new favorite Muppet, President Dmitry Medvedev.
With the Russia economy flourishing in recent years, Putin is rebuilding the Russian military and returning the country to a combative and aggressive stance more in line with the Soviet Union than a democratic republic committed to those ideals.
He’s called Mother Russia’s loss of her vast network of satellite states in 1991 a “tragedy.” Hmm, extending freedom and liberation to previously independent states from totalitarian authority is a tragedy — interesting.
Remember when Putin recently sent its submarines to the North Pole to post Russian flags claiming the real estate as Russian Federation territory and any valuable mineral or oil deposits that lay under its frigid waters? Call me crazy, but I don’t think that was just for an arctic photo op.
And you thought the oppressive USSR and icy days of the Cold War were gone forever — stupid Yankee peacenik.
With the election of President Barack Obama, with his “touchy, feely” approach to foreign relations, Moscow is licking its chops because it knows an American leader who doesn’t stick to his guns (read: values), will be easily intimidated and appeased to accept Russian realpolitik.
Churkin said the prospect of more Eastern European nations joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization makes Moscow “very uncomfortable,” and that a nation or nations cannot “strengthen their security at the expense of others”? Aww, let me extend America’s sincerest apologies.
What kind of ridiculous diplomatic double-speak is that? That’s the very definition of foreign security policy that all states engage in, working to notch up their security position vis-a-vis that of its neighbors and potential threats.
Besides, shouldn’t a decision to join NATO be up to Bulgaria, Ukraine, or whatever nation has been extended that invitation, and not Moscow?
Russia doesn’t even believe a country has the right to defend itself against a nuclear missile strike, as is obvious with its condemnation of U.S. plans to implement a future antiballistic missile shield network in Europe.
I’m neither a conspiracy theorist nor suggesting that Putin is sitting in his recliner in the Kremlin plotting a vast nuclear Armageddon with America, or rolling his tanks back into Berlin.
But I am saying Russia’s actions in recent years speak louder than its rhetoric.
Americans and Europeans and their leaders would be well advised to take notice of Putin’s neo-Sovietism.
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