WASHINGTON, D.C. Mar. 6 (DPI) – In an insightful take on the crisis in the Ukraine, Washington Post columnist and Russia expert Anne Applebaum reports that Western financial institutions have long abetted Vladimir Putin’s political-industrial oligarchy. She says the West – more accurately, its capital markets based in London and New York — has bolstered the Russian leader’s power as he seeks to annex the Crimean peninsula.
The London-based Applebaum wrote:
Illegally acquired Russian assets can receive the imprimatur of the international financial establishment, as long as they are sufficiently valuable. This general principle has since been applied to many Russian assets in the United States and Europe, especially Britain. U.S. readers might not realize the extent to which millionaires and billionaires from the former Soviet Union dominate the London art and property markets. Some of that money represents oil profits. But some of it comes from theft.
She goes on to say that opposition groups have pretty much written off the West as a supporter of democracy in Russia:
Western politicians who speak grandly about democracy while ignoring violations of their own anti-corruption laws back home are thus perceived in Russia as hypocrites. They also contribute to the Russian elite’s feeling of impunity: Putin and his colleagues can do what they want, whether in Ukraine, Georgia or Britain, because everyone knows that, whatever the Westerners say, they are all for sale in the end. This doublespeak also grates with the beleaguered Russian opposition, which no longer sees the West as particularly friendly or even appealing: No one wants to hear about human rights from someone whose business leaders are funding an oppressive state.
See the entire column here: