In an interview with New Lines Magazine, Andrei Kozyrev says that NATO never went too far but, on the contrary, left things halfway.
Russian former Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev said in a new interview that Vladimir Putin the administrative and repressive machinery it builds is more reminiscent of totalitarianism than a “dictatorship like Latin America.”
Kozyrev told his views online magazine New Lines Magazine. Kozyrev was Boris Yeltsin the first foreign minister of the presidency, and served in the role from 1990 to 1996.
Kozyrev thinks it is wrong to talk about a new Cold War, because for the Moscow siloviks, the Cold War never ended.
“None of these guys, mostly from the KGB, accepted that the Soviet Union lost the Cold War to the Russian people along with the democratic world. They don’t swallow it. They want to stop it. And now they think this is their last, decisive battle. Kozyrev told the newspaper.
And contrary to what some American analysts in particular have said, Kozyrev said the Defense League never went too far in accepting new members, but the opposite: NATO left things halfway. According to Kozyrev, American critics of NATO enlargement are exactly what the Putin regime wanted them to be, stupid and helpful idiots.
NATO and the United States in particular, according to Kozyrev, failed to support Russia’s nascent and fragile democracy. It should have put all the bangs on it in the name of “strategic necessity,” Kozyrev told New Lines Magazine.
The United States should have given all possible support to those who advocated Russian democracy, “so that we would have won the Civil War against the revengeist, hard-line Russian nationalists,” Kozyrev said.
“We were prepared to keep the number of our nuclear weapons to a minimum and to put an end to the strategic doctrine that we were preparing for a confrontation with the West. The favorable moment existed until 1994.”
Kozyrev praises in an interview with a parent George Bushin an administration that understood the enormity of the problem. But Bush lost the election, and his successors Bill Clinton administration and foreign minister Warren Christopher no longer realized the problem in a similar way, Kozyrev told the newspaper.
“I didn’t need a career diplomat as my counterpart. I needed a revolutionary, like myself.”
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