Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Putin’s Apologists

  • Italians Turn Their Backs on Putin (And His Sympathizers)

    Mario Draghi
    Italian prime minister Mario Draghi answers questions from reporters in Brussels, October 22, 2021 (European Council)

    Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s far-right League, visited the Polish-Ukrainian border this month to “help refugees.” But he made headlines for a different reason. In a video that went viral, Salvini could be seen squirming away from a news conference when the mayor of Przemyśl, a Polish town across the border from Lviv, taunted him with a T-shirt emblazoned with a visage of Salvini’s “friend,” Vladimir Putin. Salvini wore a similar shirt when he visited Moscow in 2014.

    Salvini’s embarrassment is part of a broader blowback against Italy’s populist right over its cozy ties to Putin, one that could discredit the anti-American strain in Italian politics. (more…)

  • Vladimir Putin Is Not Your Conservative Hero

    Vladimir Putin
    Russian president Vladimir Putin looks out a window in Budapest, Hungary, February 17, 2015 (Facebook/Viktor Orbán)

    In an interview with the Financial Times, Vladimir Putin claims “the liberal idea” has “outlived its purpose” and puts himself at the head of a global reactionary movement against immigration, open borders and multiculturalism.

    The Financial Times knows that Putin’s evisceration of liberalism chimes with anti-establishment leaders like Donald Trump in America, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Matteo Salvini in Italy and even the Brexit insurgency in the UK.

    But true believes ought to take a closer look at the Russian leader. He may sound like an ally, but he’s not really interested in your cause. (more…)

  • Leaders Are Not Their Countries

    It’s a tried-and-tested strongman tactic: conflate yourself with the nation to silence your critics.

    Viktor Orbán used it this week, when he told critical members of the European parliament they were condemning not only him and his government but the entire nation of Hungary.

    Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s first vice president, had the right response when he called this the “coward’s way out” of a debate. (more…)

  • How Should Europe Deal with the Putin Apologist in the White House?

    Donald Trump Giuseppe Conte
    American president Donald Trump and Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte arrive to a NATO summit in Brussels, July 12 (NATO)

    I’m glad Donald Trump’s shameful behavior in Helsinki, coming on the heels of his ally-bashing in Brussels and the United Kingdom, is finally waking up even conservatives to the fact that we have a Putin apologist in the White House.

    When former intelligence chiefs start to call the president a traitor for accepting Vladimir Putin’s denials of waging information warfare on the United States, we should perhaps ask ourselves if Jonathan Chait didn’t have a point when he argued in New York magazine that the Trump-Russia scandal could be worse than we thought?

    For us in Europe, the why matters less than the what. Whatever Trump’s motives, we must deal with an American president who is determined to sabotage the Atlantic alliance and establish an accord with Putin.

    The question is, how? (more…)

  • Italian Parties Putin-Friendly, But Policy Shift Unlikely

    Italy’s election can’t keep Vladimir Putin up at night. No matter which party comes out on top, the Russian leader can expect a friendly government in Rome.

    • The center-left Democrats may be the least Russophile of the four major parties, but they still have a soft spot for Russia. Their leader, Matteo Renzi, threatened to block the renewal of EU sanctions in 2015. Federica Mogherini, the EU foreign-policy coordinator, has been criticized by Eastern Europeans and NGOs for not taking a hard enough line against Russia.
    • Silvio Berlusconi, the former prime minister and leader of Forza Italia, is on famously good terms with Putin.
    • His allies in the Northern League — who, in turn, ally with Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France — are openly sympathetic of Putin, whom they see as a defender of traditional, Christian values.
    • The populist Five Star Movement no longer wants to take Italy out of NATO but still calls for a reduced role in the alliance as well as an immediate end to sanctions. (more…)

  • This New Cold War Is Ideological Too

    Moscow Russia
    Moscow, Russia in the early morning (Unsplash/Jean Colet)

    Because Russia promotes an agenda that is native to Europe, few seem to realize this Second Cold War is just as ideological as the first.

    If anything, the fact that Vladimir Putin’s propaganda machine can tap into a homegrown Western reactionary movement that shares its beliefs makes the ideological challenge he poses more insidious. (more…)

  • Jean-Luc Mélenchon Is Not the French Bernie Sanders

    Jean-Luc Mélenchon
    Jean-Luc Mélenchon makes a speech in the European Parliament in Brussels, November 11, 2015 (European Parliament)

    Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s late surge in the French presidential election has invited comparison with the unexpected success of Bernie Sanders in last year’s Democratic primary in the United States.

    The comparison is not altogether off in the sense that Mélenchon’s rise is largely due to the unpopularity of technocratic socialism under the incumbent president, François Hollande. Sanders’ candidacy similarly reflected a disillusionment in the centrist incrementalism of Hillary Clinton.

    But there is no comparing the policies of the French candidate, who is backed by the Communist Party, to those of the senator from Vermont, whose views would be mainstream in France. (more…)

  • Farage Travels to California to Continue Putin’s Work

    After playing a key role in persuading Britons to vote to leave the European Union, Nigel Farage is moving to California to help Russia in another way: by breaking up America’s largest state.

    Farage recently raised $1 million in California for an effort to split the state in two together with Arron Banks, the businessman who funded both Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party and one of two anti-EU campaigns in last year’s Brexit referendum.

    Banks told reporters he and Farage wanted to show Californians “how to light a fire and win” a referendum:

    It would be portrayed as the Hollywood elites versus the people, breaking up the bad government.

    Leavers deployed a similar strategy in the British referendum, portraying the EU as an elite project detached from ordinary people. (more…)

  • Hamon, Macron Face Putin Apologists in French Debate

    François Fillon
    Former French prime minister François Fillon meets with other European conservative party leaders in Brussels, March 1, 2012 (EPP)

    Benoît Hamon and Emmanuel Macron don’t have a lot in common. The former wants to raise taxes in France in order to finance a universal basic income. The latter wants to cut taxes and reduce public spending.

    Yet the two presidential candidates made common cause on Monday, when they faced three Putin apologists in the first televised debate of the 2017 campaign. (more…)

  • It Seems Everybody Around Trump Was Talking to the Russians

    Was there anyone on Donald Trump’s campaign not talking to the Russians?

    The latest news is that Trump’s attorney general, Jeff Sessions, spoke with the Russian ambassador to the United States in September, when he was serving as foreign-policy advisor on the presidential campaign.

    We don’t know what the two discussed, but we do know that Sessions lied about the conversation taking place.

    During his confirmation hearings, he was explicitly asked by senators if he had been in contact with Russians — any Russians — during the campaign. Sessions said “no”. (more…)

  • Conspiracy Theorists and Putin Apologists: Trump’s National Security Team

    Donald Trump is filling his national-security team with people who share his most worrying dispositions: an apologetic attitude toward Vladimir Putin’s Russia, an alarmism about Islamic terrorism and a penchant for conspiracy theories.

    Perhaps we should never have expected Trump, who lacks any foreign-policy experience yet seems to believe he is always the smartest guy in the room, to surround himself with more level-headed Republicans.

    But the people he is choosing are the opposite of level-headed, which does not bode well for the next four years of American foreign policy. (more…)

  • Trump’s Credibility Problem on Russia

    I’ve been meaning to write about this since The Washington Post reported on Friday that the CIA is now confident Russia hacked the Democratic Party’s emails in July and November to help Donald Trump win the election — but NBC News sums it up perfectly today:

    It wasn’t just President-elect Donald Trump’s kind words about Vladimir Putin during the 2016 presidential campaign.

    Or his repeated denials that Russia was involved in the hacking of the [Hillary] Clinton campaign’s and DNC’s emails. (“They have no idea if it’s Russia or China or somebody,” Trump told Fox on Sunday. “It could be somebody sitting in a bed some place. I mean, they have no idea.”)

    Or the Trump team’s extraordinary statement on Friday blasting the CIA after The Washington Post first reported that the agency concluded that Russia intervened in the election to help Trump win. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again,’” Trump’s transition said Friday night.

    When you add up all of these stories, Trump has a credibility problem with it comes to Russia. (more…)

  • Russia Divides French Right’s Presidential Contenders

    Nicolas Sarkozy
    Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy meets with other European conservative leaders in Brussels, June 28 (EPP)

    A major foreign-policy issue that divides the top three contenders for the French right’s presidential nomination is Russia.

    BuzzFeed reports how Nicolas Sarkozy has transformed himself from a Vladimir Putin critic into a Vladimir Putin apologist since he lost the presidency in 2012.

    The former president has criticized President François Hollande’s handling of relations with Russia. He argues the EU should suspend sanctions against Russia. And most controversially, the former president has endorsed a referendum annexing Crimea to Russia, a view that puts him at odds with most UN states.

    François Fillon, Sarkozy’s former prime minister, has struck a conciliatory tone as well.

    He told the magazine Valeurs actuelles this week it was “fortunate” Russia had intervened in the Syrian conflict, otherwise the self-proclaimed Islamic State might have reached Damascus by now.

    In reality, Russia’s objective in Syria is to prop up the regime of Bashar al-Assad. It has not prioritized fighting the Islamic State, which mostly does battle with Western-backed forces in Iraq and Syria. (more…)

  • Trump Disparages Generals, Admires Putin

    It’s not that Donald Trump said anything new on Wednesday. His statements during NBC News’ “commander-in-chief” forum, which was broadcast from aboard the USS Intrepid in New York, only confirmed that the Republican hasn’t bothered to learn anything since he began his presidential candidacy fifteen months ago.

    But it’s still disconcerting to hear a major-party candidate for the most powerful elected office in the world speak in such simplistic terms about the complexities of international relations. (more…)