Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

The ‘blame the Russians’ mantra running through British foreign policy, which feeds into hate stories in the media and inflames public opinion, has the power to damage Britain in the long term much more than it does Russia. Russia is perhaps the most resilient of all nations. It coped with Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler and the collapse of the Soviet Union and remains one of the world’s three greatest powers. It is potentially self sufficient in all things. It has already agreed to sell more gas to China and Western sanctions will only increase job opportunities for Russian workers in the long term. It can well survive Cameron’s opprobrium, better than the British economy can survive the loss of the enormous economic opportunity of participating in the modernization of what was the central power of the old Soviet Union.

Britain, its foreign office and its lack lustre political class have been anti Russian in sentiment since the collapse of the Soviet empire. There has never been a serious attempt to think in strategic terms; only to advance the hand of friendship on conditional and censorious conditions which require that they become like us. They were blamed for Syria, yet they prophesied the current mayhem would be the outcome of our original policies. They were blamed for the seamless return of Crimea to Russia without any significant violence and with overwhelming  support of the Crimean population.

In Northern Ireland we allow the protestant unionists  to attach themselves to us for historic reasons, rather than the country of which they were originally a part. We call them loyalists. Yet when the same sentiment breaks out among ethnic Russians in Eastern Ukraine, for equally good historical reasons, we call them separatists. Russia is nervous of the ever eastward advance of NATO and the EU, in violation of promises previously made and without a serious attempt to bring Russia westwards.

Unless the Ukrainian government in Kiev had a hand in bringing down MH17 (unlikely but as yet not fully discounted), it is now accepted that tragic though it was, MH17 was shot down in a catastrophic mistake by people who had the basic skills to fire the missile, but not the skill required to confirm identification of the target. US intelligence has confirmed that its sophisticated tracking, surveillance and eavesdropping has produced no evidence to show Russian complicity or participation in the disaster.

So the accusation is that Russia supplied the weapon. Coming from one of the greatest arms exporters, Britain, this is hardly an intelligent platform on which to stand on such an issue. The aim all along should have been to make Russia a full partner with the West, in which case the turmoil in Ukraine would never have happened. Now the West is hell bent on turning Russia in on itself to become a rival. Russia will then turn to China. If they gang up together the West will have nothing to gain and a good deal to lose.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2014 at 4:52 pm and is filed under Malcolm Blair Robinson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.