3 October 2011
Former Guardian Moscow correspondent, Luke Harding, testified in an interview to ABC that the Russia's goal is invasion and reoccupation of all former countries of the Soviet Union. He said in particular:
What I hadn't really expected, when I first arrive in 2007, was that this sort of security state, which as you say has been kind of traditional, in Russia it's gone on for a very long time, but that it would be back, and actually in some ways kind of re-fighting the Cold War. This isn't really about ideology anymore, I mean no-one's interested in global communism, the Soviet Union's gone, but this mechanism, the KGB if you like, carries on.
And it took a bit of knock in the early '90s when the Soviet Union collapsed the KGB, but rather swiftly it reformed and it was rebranded the FSB, the Federal Security Service. And by 1999, who was its boss? Well Vladimir Putin.
Really what he's done, over the last decade, as he's kind of undone various reforms to the security services which Boris Yeltsin carried out in the '90s. And he's turned it into this formidable, prodigious, secret, and really quite terrifying, kind of organization that sees its goal as defending Russia from enemies. Both internal ones - opposition guys, human rights workers, those kind of people - and external ones - Western diplomats and people like me.
Well it's a kind of a KGB state now actually. The Russian government won't thank me for saying that. But if you look at the kind of people who are the top echelons of Russian power, a lot of them are Putin's friends, a lot of them are former KGB operatives from military intelligence, from foreign intelligence and so one. And obviously Putin feels comfortable with these kind of people.
And they share a similar kind of world view, which is essentially xenophobic, it's reflexively anti-Western, and the big project, I mean if Putin does have a big project, the project is to get back the sort of prestige and the international clout that the Soviet Union once enjoyed.
I mean what he really wants to be is to be taken seriously as a sort of, for Russia to be taken seriously as an international player and for people to be a little bit scared of Russia as well.
It's more of a, I mean the more important project of course is to get rich. I mean the ideology is definitely there but the primary goal, I think, for Putin and his team is to make money and to, essentially, to hang onto that money and to off-shore that money.
We're talking billions and billions of dollars. The problem is, as a reporter in Moscow, it's extremely hard to get to the bottom of this. I mean you would need a thousand years and an army of lawyers and you'd need people to leak. But I mean, there have been some leaks, and about three or four years ago one source I spoke to said, I think rather convincingly, that Putin was worth about $ 40 billion. So in other words, one of the richest people in the world.
I mean, bear in mind that this is an extremely corrupt state. It's the world's largest exporter of oil and gas, so there are enormous revenues. But, where do they go? (Laughs). I mean if you wander around any city outside, you know, if you wander around the Russian countryside it's clearly not going there, or look at the infrastructure. A fantastic amount is being stolen via intermediary companies, via off-shore schemes, via sophisticated financial mechanisms.
And the evidence of that you can see in the streets of London. I mean, just walk around West London or Chelsea or Belgravia, very many of these properties are Russian owned; or Biarritz or New York or Spain.
So there's this, some people under Putin have become extremely rich, I mean really wildly rich. Far richer than you possibly imagine really. And far richer than in Soviet times when, if you were at the top of the Kremlin, you could expect a big, swish Zil limousine and maybe a holiday in Bulgaria and a nice dacha or cottage somewhere.
I published this story with some trepidation about a year after I arrived in Moscow. I wasn't, I mean I was careful of the way I wrote the story, I wasn't saying definitely Putin is worth $ 40 billion. I was saying that there were leaks coming from the top of the Kremlin pointing to his secret assets abroad. And this was part of a wider power struggle between different Kremlin factions.
Now, what was interesting was that last year, before I got expelled from Russia, I spent a lot of time going through the WikiLeaks cables, these are secret US diplomatic communiqués that were never meant for public consumption. And what really quite kind of confirming in a way was the fact that the US diplomats, the US ambassador in Moscow, privately makes reference on many occasions to Putin's alleged assets abroad.
This isn't just about venality, I mean it's important to understand Russian politics because there's one, I think quite credible, school of thought which says that, actually, Putin is rather tired, he would like to retire, he would like to go and relax on Sochi on Russia's Black Sea coast, that he doesn't want to be Russia's leader anymore.
But the logic of his system, this corrupt system, is the only way he can guarantee that he and his friends hang on to all of their money, is by carrying on in power. Because the second he steps off the throne he faces the real prospect that there will be law enforcement prosecutions against him and that he could end up in goal.
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
Source: Kavkaz Center.
Link: http://www.kavkaz.org.uk/eng/content/2011/10/03/15208.shtml.
Former Guardian Moscow correspondent, Luke Harding, testified in an interview to ABC that the Russia's goal is invasion and reoccupation of all former countries of the Soviet Union. He said in particular:
What I hadn't really expected, when I first arrive in 2007, was that this sort of security state, which as you say has been kind of traditional, in Russia it's gone on for a very long time, but that it would be back, and actually in some ways kind of re-fighting the Cold War. This isn't really about ideology anymore, I mean no-one's interested in global communism, the Soviet Union's gone, but this mechanism, the KGB if you like, carries on.
And it took a bit of knock in the early '90s when the Soviet Union collapsed the KGB, but rather swiftly it reformed and it was rebranded the FSB, the Federal Security Service. And by 1999, who was its boss? Well Vladimir Putin.
Really what he's done, over the last decade, as he's kind of undone various reforms to the security services which Boris Yeltsin carried out in the '90s. And he's turned it into this formidable, prodigious, secret, and really quite terrifying, kind of organization that sees its goal as defending Russia from enemies. Both internal ones - opposition guys, human rights workers, those kind of people - and external ones - Western diplomats and people like me.
Well it's a kind of a KGB state now actually. The Russian government won't thank me for saying that. But if you look at the kind of people who are the top echelons of Russian power, a lot of them are Putin's friends, a lot of them are former KGB operatives from military intelligence, from foreign intelligence and so one. And obviously Putin feels comfortable with these kind of people.
And they share a similar kind of world view, which is essentially xenophobic, it's reflexively anti-Western, and the big project, I mean if Putin does have a big project, the project is to get back the sort of prestige and the international clout that the Soviet Union once enjoyed.
I mean what he really wants to be is to be taken seriously as a sort of, for Russia to be taken seriously as an international player and for people to be a little bit scared of Russia as well.
It's more of a, I mean the more important project of course is to get rich. I mean the ideology is definitely there but the primary goal, I think, for Putin and his team is to make money and to, essentially, to hang onto that money and to off-shore that money.
We're talking billions and billions of dollars. The problem is, as a reporter in Moscow, it's extremely hard to get to the bottom of this. I mean you would need a thousand years and an army of lawyers and you'd need people to leak. But I mean, there have been some leaks, and about three or four years ago one source I spoke to said, I think rather convincingly, that Putin was worth about $ 40 billion. So in other words, one of the richest people in the world.
I mean, bear in mind that this is an extremely corrupt state. It's the world's largest exporter of oil and gas, so there are enormous revenues. But, where do they go? (Laughs). I mean if you wander around any city outside, you know, if you wander around the Russian countryside it's clearly not going there, or look at the infrastructure. A fantastic amount is being stolen via intermediary companies, via off-shore schemes, via sophisticated financial mechanisms.
And the evidence of that you can see in the streets of London. I mean, just walk around West London or Chelsea or Belgravia, very many of these properties are Russian owned; or Biarritz or New York or Spain.
So there's this, some people under Putin have become extremely rich, I mean really wildly rich. Far richer than you possibly imagine really. And far richer than in Soviet times when, if you were at the top of the Kremlin, you could expect a big, swish Zil limousine and maybe a holiday in Bulgaria and a nice dacha or cottage somewhere.
I published this story with some trepidation about a year after I arrived in Moscow. I wasn't, I mean I was careful of the way I wrote the story, I wasn't saying definitely Putin is worth $ 40 billion. I was saying that there were leaks coming from the top of the Kremlin pointing to his secret assets abroad. And this was part of a wider power struggle between different Kremlin factions.
Now, what was interesting was that last year, before I got expelled from Russia, I spent a lot of time going through the WikiLeaks cables, these are secret US diplomatic communiqués that were never meant for public consumption. And what really quite kind of confirming in a way was the fact that the US diplomats, the US ambassador in Moscow, privately makes reference on many occasions to Putin's alleged assets abroad.
This isn't just about venality, I mean it's important to understand Russian politics because there's one, I think quite credible, school of thought which says that, actually, Putin is rather tired, he would like to retire, he would like to go and relax on Sochi on Russia's Black Sea coast, that he doesn't want to be Russia's leader anymore.
But the logic of his system, this corrupt system, is the only way he can guarantee that he and his friends hang on to all of their money, is by carrying on in power. Because the second he steps off the throne he faces the real prospect that there will be law enforcement prosecutions against him and that he could end up in goal.
Department of Monitoring
Kavkaz Center
Source: Kavkaz Center.
Link: http://www.kavkaz.org.uk/eng/content/2011/10/03/15208.shtml.
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