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In the 1990s, the country lost 60% of its GDP. Economically, Ukrainians were hit hard by a recession that was more severe than the post-Soviet economic decline in the other newly independent states of the former Soviet Union. With the consecutive elections of Leonid Kravchuk and Leonid Kuchma, two prominent communists of the Politburo and the Central Committee of the, by then defunct, Ukrainian Communist Party, respectively, the much-hailed transformation of the country remained a myth. Lack of robust institutions with legally guaranteed checks and balances prevented the emergence of rules-based democracy. Elections, tainted with fraud, intimidation and corruption, made a mockery of universal suffrage and the right of opposition. Politically, democracy did not become a functioning and effective reality. The aftermath of the Soviet Union’s sudden demise endowed Ukraine with the miracle of independence and the curse of political and economic catastrophe. His belief in his greatness and infallibility provides him with the confused notion that he can change even unassailable facts and reality by skillfully manipulating the patriotic feelings of every Russian inside, as well as outside, of his country. Absolute power puts him in a position in which he thinks and speaks and acts in total disrespect and defiance of facts and reality. The result is a tactician, and not a statesman, who is guided exclusively by his personal passions of hatred and revenge and not by the fundamental interests of his country. Therefore, any attempt by Putin to bring it back to life condemns him to lead a schizophrenic political existence: one for the outside world, before which he pretends to be a guarantor for world peace and a totally different one at home, where he presents himself as a ruthless autocrat, capable of the most monstrous atrocities. Yet, the Soviet Union is permanently dead both historically and politically. Thus, instead of his promise of “building a new Russia”, Putin is destroying the present and the future of his people, in order to resurrect the past.
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His foreign policy of rogue militarism only radicalizes Russia’s neighbors and invites resentment, and even hostility, from the rest of the world.
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His annual state of the nation address last December was a litany of domestic problems that cannot be solved by increasing repression and over-centralization. The symbol of hope and change of the late 1990s is a disappointment in his second presidential reincarnation. Now that the Ukrainian people put an end to Putin’s pyrrhic victory over the European Union, the anachronistic character of his attempts at the restoration of the bygone imperial glory of the Soviet Union is becoming all too apparent.įor present-day Russia is not the Soviet Union, and Putin is not Stalin, or even the latter’s successors. Although the immediate cause for the people’s uprising against Viktor Yanukovych’s reign was his rejection of a trade agreement with the European Union, the ultimate responsibility for the Ukrainian crisis lies with Vladimir Putin, the revanchist president of the Russian Federation.