A (very loose) rendition of @BrunoTertrais's exasperated diatribe about the dumb clichés that emerge from French leaders with every new Russia summit. "A new European Russia." "A new European security architecture." A "Russian reset."
"They're dreaming of another Russia."
He notes Macron is the third president to try what Obama tried--a reset. "Every time, we have this dream that if we're just *really nice* to them, we could bring Russia back into the concert of reasonable nations."
"When you say 'Russia is European,' it's not even half right." The position of Putin's Russia is precisely, and they never shut up about this, that they're in the middle, they're a Eurasian power. "'We're in Europe and Asia at the same time.'
That's not European.
They have a position on the role of Islam in Russia that's extremely welcoming--'Everyone has a place in Russia'--maybe because in Chechnya; their guys are thugs-- there's no other way to describe someone like Kadryov.
"But anyway, when we talk about this--
"We're not in the era of Catherine the Great anymore. I say this because every time the president, or the ministers, call for these summits, they rabbit on about Catherine the Great. Putin's Russia? It's not that."
"And then there's this infamous question--we saw it again in those exchanges between the two men - these old dreams about a 'new European security architecture,' which the Russians have proposed many times since the end of the Cold War--"
And the French accept this without thinking it through, because the Russian project is very simple: Separate Europe's defense from the United States. We've got a lot of differences with Trump, it's true, but that doesn't impede our military cooperation. It still works.
Most Europeans have no desire to waste time.
The dream for Putin's Russia, just as in the Soviet Union, is to play for time so that they can exercise force over their neighbors and destabilize--above all neutralize--them, and maximize Russian influence over its neighborhood."
Indeed, @BrunoTertrais. But this really does seem awfully hard for people to grasp. What part of "If Putin's Catherine the Great then I'm the Empress Dowager Cixi" is proving so difficult for people to grasp?
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