Putin’s Thuggish Goals for Russia

Dr. Stephen Blank of the American Foreign Policy Council was a guest on Secure Freedom Radio with Frank Gaffney this week. Blank is an expert on Russia and Gaffney, citing Hillary Clinton’s famous Russian Reset, asked him to address the state of America’s relationship with Russia. Blank responded:

“Well, the reset ended actually four years ago when Vladimir Putin came back as president in 2012 and he buried it, not the Obama administration although I was never a big fan of it. So that policy is long gone and between 2012 and 2014 you had a number of incidents which contributed to the deterioration  of the relationship, the most prominent one in retrospect might be the Snowden affair when Mr. Snowden defected to Russia and released a whole series of intelligence information about our electronic intelligence. But even before the invasion of Ukraine in February 2014, the relationship was quite frozen and it’s just gotten worse.”

Blank went on to suggest that the United States and Russia have attempted to have an ongoing dialogue, particularly regarding Syria but says those efforts have been useless.

Gaffney noted that Putin has often lamented the fall of the Soviet Union and asked Blank if Putin is essentially trying to reassemble the fallen state. Blank replied:

“I think his goal is to reconstitute some form of the neo-imperial state. The Russian state, from its inception is an empire, there has never really been any other form of the Russian state, it’s always been autocratic and imperial and the two go together. Now this is not to say that they want to reclaim all the territory they lost in ’91, they know they can’t get that but what they do want is to have diminished sovereignty of all the states around it.”

Blank said Putin basically wants a privileged status which Russia can’t sustain and which is unwanted by all of its neighbors.

Frank Gaffney said Blank’s estimation sounded like Putin is trying to fracture the Western Alliance and Blank concurred:

“Well, that’s what he’s been trying to do. He is trying to create or exploit existing cracks within Europe in order to fracture the cohesion of Europe. Let me put it to you this way, the greatest threat that the Russians perceive is the geo-political integration of Europe under democracy which they see as an American alliance against Russia.”

The idea, according to Blank, is for Russia to keep its neighbor states diminished and fearful. He suggests this is a threat to the security of those countries and that this is entirely intentional.

Blank concluded by saying:

“They want the status that they held from ’45 to ’91.”