Stunning sanctions

Seven more Russian officials will not be able to go to the West and use Western banks and payment systems. Another 17 Russian companies will lose their American assets. The most powerful blow to Russian expansion! Obama shakes with indignation, we are from horror, and Putin is from laughter. Is this the "high price" paid by Russia for the annexation of Crimea and the destabilization of the situation in Ukraine?

I’m afraid that President Obama and his Western European colleagues either do not understand what is happening between Russia and Ukraine, or, conversely, understand everything too well and play the same gate with Mr. Putin. One option is worse than the other.

Do not understand that the bets in Putin's game in world leadership is much higher than those that the West responds can only very naive people. It seems that Western politicians are still not like that. We are talking about the hegemony of the Kremlin at least throughout the former USSR, and in the future - about creating an effective pole of confrontation between Western democracy.

Vladimir Putin did not hesitate to set out his plans from the moment the president was elected. He spoke of the largest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century - the collapse of the USSR, about the inadmissibility of a unipolar world with a center in the USA, about Eurasian prospects and the search for a Russian national idea. Almost all these years he talked about what he had now started to do. It is strange that they had not paid due attention to this before, considering all these reasoning the empty blessed of a small person intoxicated by the authorities.

In the same way, in the last century, they did not attach the proper importance of Hitler's book “My Struggle” published in 1925, in which he openly and in detail outlined plans for what he began to carry out after 1933. And long after that, both in the West and in the east with Hitler tried to agree, sometimes agreed, sacrificed countries and territories, divided Europe, traded, forgave loans and traded again. Until the very beginning of hostilities, that is, respectively, until June and December 1941, the USSR and the United States supplied Germany directly or through intermediaries ore, oil and other strategic raw materials.

Even today, the West is strikingly trading with Putin's Russia, turning a blind eye to which monster they feed in the eastern hemisphere. Maybe the fate of Ukraine was the first call for them, alarm? It seems that it did not.

It is difficult to imagine that leading Western politicians seriously expect the effectiveness of their sanctions. Moreover, the press and political analysts quite adequately assess the futility of these steps. Senator McCain already called on President Obama either not to threaten sanctions at all, or to use them for real. John McCain understands who he has to deal with - it was not for nothing that he drummed five and a half years in the communist concentration camp. This is the school that is not enough Obama to build relationships with the Kremlin.

However, no matter how regrettable, the point is most likely not in poor political training. Obama, and after him, most European politicians go to sanctions against Russia reluctantly, through force, inferior to public opinion and the requirements of their opposition. They probably would be happy to spit on Ukraine (as they had already spat on the Crimea), if only Putin would not wave with strategic missiles and would not go on energy blackmail. However, Western society does not want to see its politicians weak and compliant. Therefore, the latter has to simulate indignation, readiness for decisive action, to depict cool guys as a cool and from time to time to declare new fierce sanctions. Which Vladimir Putin probably laughs, rightly believing that the West gives him another carte blanche to continue the previous policy of expansion and territorial claims.