Geopolitics

An open letter to Swedens two biggest daily newspapers

Excuse me, you people on the editorial staffs of Sweden’s two big daily newspapers, Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, but can’t you control yourselves and your staff, and stop running the errands of western power bases, frightening your readers unnecessarily with talk of war and unrest? Putin is not going to make moves on the Baltic states, nor East Europe, probably not even Ukraine. Have you not been able to see and read the calm with which he and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, possibly the only diplomat in the world today, as it seems, have steered the world time and again back from the armageddon which the west seems dead set on? What does Putin have to win from further annexations in today’s climate?

Russia has had a large military base and its Black Sea Marine base in Sevastopol for over 130 years, and suddenly the russian leaders see that the US, as is its wont, begins to hire neo-nazis and mercenaries to overthrow the democratically elected government of Ukraine, however corrupt it may have been, this time to set up Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland’s puppet government, to first reneg on the treaty with Russia under which its base in the Crimea is secured, and then to bring in the forces of NATO.

Naturally he takes his chance when the inhabitants of the Crimea, who are almost entirely russians or with strong ties to Russia, decide that they don’t want to live under a hoard of unelected gangsters in Kiev. (By the way, would your editorial staffs want a Kiev style government in Sweden?) The Crimea decides on independence from Ukraine, and Russia offers them a chance to join the Russian federation and in doing so, secures its base.

And don’t display your ignorance by lifting your hands in shock over ten thousand military personnel strolling around in the Crimea prior to the referendum. Your reaction should not have been “Goodness me, so many” but “Goodness me, so few”. Russia has had an agreement for up to twenty-five thousand troops in the Crimea since at least the middle of the nineties.

Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland wanted three puppets: Vitaly Klitschko, Arseniy Yatseniuk och Oleh Tyahnybok (I have used the Wikipedia spelling of their names) and guess which three people became the leaders of the undemocratic government. Now Klitschko has left the sinking ship, whether as a rat or because he couldn’t face the company I don’t know.

But I should like to know who lies behind the new disturbances in eastern Ukraine. It’s unlikely to be Putin. He has nothing to win by pissing off an America which dances around like a druggie on speed and tries with every available tool to find a reason to justify an attack. It is just possible that it is the russians in that part of Ukraine who are hoping for a similar ‘get out of jail free’ card to the one offered to the Crimea, but I would be surprised if Putin doesn’t have the means to advise them to lie low. On the other hand, we know that the west is very eager to lay its hands, not to say its boots, on Ukrainian ground, so why not try and create even more embarrassment for Putin. Although his embarrassment is more likely to lie in the fact that his opponents are such mediocrities.

However, if your newspapers do not have sufficiently experienced journalists to be able to report cogently on geopolitics and give a more reasoned explanation of what is going on and why, may I suggest a telephone call to Pepe Escobar, who writes regularly for, amongst other newspapers, the Asian Times, and who can explain the whole in simple words which your journalists should be able to understand and translate into Swedish.

© James Wilde 2015