Putin delivers major speech under fire from rights groups, insurgents

[Derek V]

Source: Aljazeera

December 4, 2014 9:30AM ET

President Vladimir Putin on Thursday accused Russia's enemies of seeking to carve the country up and destroy its economy to punish it for growing strong, in an annual state of the union speech that seemed to outdo even Putin’s own recent strident nationalism.

Speaking in an ornate hall packed with dignitaries, Putin trumpeted Russia’s annexation earlier this year of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula in a speech that showed no sign of turning back from policies that have brought his country to a level of intense confrontation with the West unseen since the Cold War.

The same day he spoke, however, a damning indictment of Putin’s human rights record and a deadly attack on police threatened to steal the spotlight.

Making his first visit to Russia in nearly a decade, Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth accused Putin of leading the country toward a “slide into autocracy.”


Read more: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/12/4/putin-speech-rights.html

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Too bad the title isn't literally true.

[hrmjustin]

1. I see he has no interest in taking blame for his actions.

[RufusTFirefly]

2. "Too bad the title isn't literally true."??

Gee. How nice.


Have you considered a career in U.S. foreign policy?
You'd be perfect.

[jakeXT]

3. It is

MOSCOW — A fierce gun battle between Islamist militants and government security forces paralyzed the center of the Chechen capital, Grozny, overnight Thursday, leaving some 19 people dead and embarrassing President Vladimir V. Putin just hours before he delivered his state-of-the-nation speech in Moscow.

Residents of Grozny reached by telephone said there seemed to be a wide list of targets and significant violence downtown. As dawn broke, smoke was rising from several locations, they said. Kheda Saratova, a human-rights activist, said in a telephone interview that gunfire broke out around 1 a.m. and continued through the morning.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11337453

[MBS]

4. he's playing on people's fears

. . and blaming foreigners for Russia's problems. Sound familiar? No wonder so many right-wingers like him. .
Here's a big story from the NYT, with photos and video. .
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/05/world/europe/putin-russia-state-of-nation-speech.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region

Video (see link above: in Russian, with subtitles) is especially evocative in terms of body language (though the text of the excerpt in question is one of the less combative parts of the speech) . Think Cheney/Rumsfeld/W, but with zero sense of humor.

The defining event of Vladimir V. Putin’s initial rise to power was the crushing of an Islamist insurgency in Chechnya, at the cost of human rights abuses and years of dictatorial rule there. The defining event since his return to the presidency two years ago was his hard-line response to the Ukraine uprising in February, with the invasion and annexation of Crimea and the incursion into southeastern Ukraine — while sneering at critics in the West.On Thursday, Mr. Putin was forced to contend with trouble on both fronts, as insurgents mounted a deadly attack in the Chechen capital of Grozny, and he was compelled in his yearly address to reassure Russians that his assertive foreign policy would not bring economic ruin.

Mr. Putin sought to portray himself as a leader with Russia’s glorious destiny firmly in hand, a viewpoint echoed by his supporters. His critics, however, called the speech way off the mark, if not delusional, with Mr. Putin acknowledging neither the scope of the problems nor his role in creating them. In the first part of the 70-minute speech, Mr. Putin adopted the angry, aggrieved tone toward the West that he has used since Russia annexed Crimea in March, blaming the United States for starting the trouble by fomenting a coup in Ukraine. He used a more professorial tone in the second, economic part of the speech, but it proved to be a laundry list of small adjustments, many of them recycled.In one striking passage, Mr. Putin compared Crimea to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, saying the peninsula held sacred importance for Russians because the Russian Orthodox Church was born there. Grand Prince Vladimir, considered the ruler who converted the tribes to Christianity, was said to have been baptized near today’s modern city of Sevastopol.

. . .

Mr. Putin also stressed that Russia did not want to restore the Iron Curtain, that the country was open to the world and that it would never “pursue paranoia, suspicion and looking for enemies.”That avowal will come as a surprise to some, especially government critics, employees of nongovernmental organizations and others who have been labeled “foreign agents” over the past year by the state-controlled media.

. . .
The problems have set off an extended fight in the Kremlin, which was already divided over Ukraine. “One school says that Putin will keep the mobilization among the people, the society and the elite despite the economic crisis,” Mr. Ryzhkov said. “If he prolongs the policy of greatness, of expansion, of confrontation with the West, he will be popular and supported by the people despite any economic crisis.”