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Quote by Anthony T. Hincks

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Anthony T. Hincks

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“If, as Ilyin maintained, voting was just an opening to foreign influence, then Putin's job was to make up a story about foreign influence and use it to alter domestic politics. The point was to choose the enemy that best suited a leader's needs, not one that actually threatened the country. Indeed, it was best not to speak of actual threats, since discussing actual enemies would reveal actual weaknesses and suggest the fallibility of aspiring dictators. When Ilyin wrote that the art of politics was “identifying and neutralizing the enemy,” he did not mean that statesmen should ascertain which foreign power actually posed a threat. He meant that politics began with a leader's decision about which foreign enmity will consolidate a dictatorship. Russia's real geopolitical problem was China. But precisely because Chinese power was real and proximate, considering Russia's actual geopolitics might lead to depressing conclusions. The West was chosen as an enemy precisely because it represented no threat to Russia. Unlike China, the EU had no army and no long border with Russia.”

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Author:Timothy Snyder (author)
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“It should by now be clear to Americans that any Power, whether Napoleonic France or Hitlerian Germany or some other madly ambitious power of the future, which goes on the warpath in Europe and attempts to dominate that Continent, automatically endangers the peace and security of the rest of the world and is sure, sooner or later, to involve the United States in a horribly costly overseas conflict.”

RussiaPutinUkraineWorld War 2HitlerUkraine WarPutinismRussian AggressionPutin War Crimes
Book:Wartime Mission In Spain 1942-1945
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“Neither Yeltsin nor the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus were to blame for its collapse. The Soviet Union was destroyed by the Communist Party and the KGB. The former, through the lies, hypocrisy, and incompetent management of its senile leaders, reduced the country to a state of economic crisis. The latter, in the person of its chairman, Vladimir Kryuchkov, attempted a coup that was bungled as badly as everything else they had done in earlier years. Most researchers of the August putsch believe Chairman Kryuchkov was the main actor among the conspirators. At that time, Lieutenant Colonel Vladimir Putin, working in the Leningrad department of the KGB, was by no means making a fuss about geopolitical disasters but, in pursuit of money and new opportunities, cheerfully leaving the ranks of his organization in order to throw in his lot with the mayor of Leningrad, Anatoly Sobchak, one of Yeltsin's main supporters. In other words, Putin was unquestionably one of those with a direct interest in the collapse of the U.S.S.R., helping it along and extracting maximum benefit from it. I don't want to exaggerate Putin's personal role or assert that he particularly betrayed his organization. He simply acted in his own interests. One day he was out catching dissidents on the streets of Leningrad who would be sent to prison for "anti-Soviet propaganda," and the next he was the bag carrier of one of the new regime's most radical supporters.”

PutinCollapse Of Soviet Union
Book:Patriot: A Memoir
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“I finish writing the emails and send them. I check that Yulia has access to the banking apps-a fairly pointless exercise because all my accounts have been frozen for months by lawsuits filed by "Putin's chef," Yevgeny Prigozhin, a man who, in the days of the U.S.S.R., was convicted of aggravated robbery but has now become, thanks to his friendship with Putin, "a successful entrepreneur" with a monopoly on the food supply to the day cares and schools of Moscow. We are running out of time. One more meeting is scheduled. I call Leonid Volkov, our chief of staff, Maria, and Kira. Yulia joins us. We briefly discuss the plan of action for each possible scenario: we get home without hindrance; I am arrested at the airport and jailed; I am detained, then released, and the Kremlin waits for the indignation to subside and then has me arrested; nothing happens, but I am arrested in a couple of weeks on a different charge, and so on. These scenarios are approaches the Kremlin has already used on us. In the twenty-first century you are confronted not just by the machinery of a repressive state but by the PR machinery of that state. Public opinion is what matters to all the players. The same action performed in subtly different ways can either leave people unmoved or enrage them and bring them out onto the streets to demonstrate. Everything has to be taken into account, including what day of the week it is and the weather.”

CorruptionRussiaPublic OpinionPutinPublic Relations
Book:Patriot: A Memoir
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