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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
The Insouciant Russians
The Insouciant Russians
Paul Craig Roberts
Armenia, despite being a member of Russia’s Collective Security Treaty Organization, began last Monday joint military exercises with the United States that will conclude September 20.
This would appear to be Armenia’s finger in Russia’s eye. Clearly, Big Bucks Washington bribed someone in Armenia. The Russians are yet to learn that Putin’s idealism exists nowhere else and that they must out-bribe the Americans.
About a year ago Washington organized “Regional Cooperation 2022,” an exercise of the US armed forces with the former Soviet Central Asian Republics of Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kryrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan.
As Washington’s cover for stirring up new troubles for Russia, Washington’s ambassador to Tajikistan, John Pommersheim, explained Washington’s presence in Central Asia as working on peaceful responses to global challenges.
Just as Putin, the Kremlin, the Russian media sat sitting on their butts for 8 years while Washington built and equipped an Ukrainian Army poised to destroy the Russian peoples in the Donbas breakaway republics, the Kremlin, and the Russians media sit on their butts doing nothing while Washington, motivated by Putin’s failure to bring the Ukrainian war to an end, prepares to present the butt-sitter with another Ukraine in Central Asia.
It seems Russians, too, can be insouciant. I sometimes wonder if they realize that they are at war. Russian tourists flock to Europe to have their cars and personal possessions stollen as sanctioned goods.
And instead of warning the weak, essentially militarily irrelevant EU countries, the Kremlin warns its own citizens.
The persona of irresoluteness, indecision, inability to act that the Kremlin broadcasts to the world encourages Washington to ever more provocations that will eventually go too far.