Mikhail Khodorkovsky:In Response to Putin's New Cold War the West Must Be Warm to the Russian People

[pampango]

The extent of the Kremlin regime's hopes is a return to the Helsinki Accords, only without the third package concerning human rights. This is an attempt to affect an overhaul of European history not from the moment of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but 15 years further back -- an attempt to make adjustments to the policy of "detente." The Kremlin wants to return to the policy of peaceful coexistence with total non-interference in its "internal affairs." It expects recognition of the Kremlin's right to do anything it wants in what it considers to be its "zone of influence."

Despite the obvious wrongfulness of the aggression perpetrated against Ukraine, Europe is going to have to look for a compromise in relations with the Kremlin regime because the alternative to compromise is global war. This is an objective reality that cannot simply be brushed aside. But, as a famous 20th century Russian political figure once said, there are compromises and then there are compromises. A policy of "appeasing the Kremlin" is a path that will lead to a big war far more quickly than it seems to many European politicians and businessmen who are disposed to conformism.

In the Kremlin and around the Kremlin today, there are more and more people who are candidly counting on a rapid "demise of Europe" in consequence of a full-scale political and economic crisis. They are seriously hoping that, for example, Great Britain's withdrawal from the E.U. or the default of one of the Schengen Treaty countries will lead to the collapse of the eurozone and to the appearance in Europe of acute contradictions along North/South and East/West fault lines. In this case, every effort will be made to make sure that the dividing line of the political watershed will pass not along the course of the Northern Donets, but once again along the Vistula and the Oder.

Strange as it may seem, inside-out Trotskyite ideas about permanent revolution are popular in Russia once again -- only now with an ultra-right, nationalistic tinge. They dream of creating a new international ultra-right, which would unite all the reactionary and anti-liberal forces of Europe.

My friends, who also oppose Putin's regime, convince me not to speak against sanctions because they believe that this is what restrains the aggressive behavior of the Kremlin today. I agree with this but I consider the application of sanctions against Russia as a country to be a big political mistake. The logic that -- "If life gets worse for the Russian people after sanctions, they will understand more quickly just what bad rulers they have" -- is absolutely senseless.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mikhail-khodorkovsky/putin-cold-war-warm-russian_b_6298440.html

Interesting that Khodorkovsky argues against sanctions, even though he considers the government to be a "neo-totalitarian regime" because the "Russian people must not be pushed away from Europe".

I haven't heard anyone mention the Helsinki Accords in many years.