{"id":410162,"date":"2022-02-26T21:58:36","date_gmt":"2022-02-26T18:58:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/why-sanctions-over-the-ukraine-invasion-wont-stop-putin\/"},"modified":"2022-02-26T21:58:36","modified_gmt":"2022-02-26T18:58:36","slug":"why-sanctions-over-the-ukraine-invasion-wont-stop-putin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/why-sanctions-over-the-ukraine-invasion-wont-stop-putin\/","title":{"rendered":"#Why sanctions over the Ukraine invasion won’t stop Putin"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Why sanctions over the Ukraine invasion won’t stop Putin<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n Terry Glavin: Xi Jinping has the Russian leader’s back as the two advance the authoritarian political model around the world\n <\/div>\n
\n If you\u2019ve been asking yourself why the Russian strongman Vladimir Putin app<\/a>ears so confident that he can get away with a war of conquest in Europe aimed at the subjugation and takeover of a NATO-backed democracy, you might want to consider the findings of an exhaustive, data-driven study of the meteoric rise of police states\u2014and the 16-year retreat of democracy worldwide\u2014released this week.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Freedom House study<\/a> also helps explain why China\u2019s Xi Jinping, Putin\u2019s key ally in foreign relations and the United Nations Security Council, is going out of his way to give contradictory and seemingly ambivalent responses to<\/span>\u00a0Putin\u2019s belligerence in Ukraine, as though he were just hedging his bets: Yes to Ukraine\u2019s sovereignty, yes to Putin\u2019s invasion. But only three weeks ago, Xi unambiguously endorsed Putin\u2019s foreign \u201cpolicies\u201d and his professed grievances against NATO in a historic, 5,300-word manifesto the two autocrats jointly authored and published, setting out their vision for a new world order.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

A non-partisan American institute that has been tracking these things since 1941, Freedom House concludes, in a nutshell, that the world is dividing in two, and the dictators are winning. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe global order is nearing a tipping point,\u201d it says, \u201cand if democracy\u2019s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In the Moscow-Beijing manifesto, published on the eve of Putin\u2019s hero\u2019s welcome at the Winter Olympics opening ceremonies in China, you could say Putin and Xi agree with the Freedom House analysis, and they\u2019re downright chipper about the authoritarian model they\u2019re advancing all over the world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

It has become commonplace to raise the spectre of the Cold War now that the \u201crules-based international order\u201d is crumbling and the regimes of theocrats, kleptocrats and Dear Leader cults are in the ascendant from Tehran to Caracas and Minsk. It\u2019s an imperfect analogy\u2014the apparatchiks of the Cold War weren\u2019t often welcome guests in the parlours of democracy\u2019s capitalist legislators. But Xi and Putin are content to double down on the analogy and take it further: what they\u2019ve got going on between them, they say, is better than back in the days before the Berlin Wall came crashing down.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this new world, \u201cinter-State relations between Russia and China are superior to [the] political and military alliances of the Cold War era. Friendship between the two States has no limits,\u201d the manifesto boasts, adding, \u201cthere are no \u2018forbidden\u2019 areas of cooperation.\u201d So, however robust the NATO capitals\u2019 new tranches of economic and targeted sanctions against Russia might appear, no dealings are \u201cforbidden\u201d to Xi and Putin. And Xi affirmed that he\u2019s got Putin\u2019s back by announcing, in tandem with the manifesto, that the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) will be buying $117.5 billion of Russian oil and gas over the next 10 years from Russian oil giants Rosneft and Gazprom.<\/span><\/p>\n

No matter what \u201climits\u201d the NATO countries might want to impose on dealings with Russian entities in the new sanctions of this past week, nothing is off limits to Beijing. This presents a particular awkward set of challenges to the NATO countries, especially for countries like Canada.<\/span><\/p>\n

The sanctions Prime Minister Trudeau announced this past week are mostly cut and pasted from the American and British lists of the individuals, entities and corporate bodies that we\u2019re all now forbidden to have dealings with. But as just one example, CNPC, the main buyer in the new China-Russia oil and gas arrangement, holds about $1 billion worth of Canadian oil properties through its various subsidiaries and spin-offs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a bit awkward, and for Beijing, too. It should come as no surprise that, while Xi and Putin endorsed and affirmed one another\u2019s foreign policy benchmarks, Ukraine is not explicitly mentioned in their manifesto. Taiwan is\u2014Russia agrees with the People\u2019s Republic of China\u2019s baseless claim that the thriving island democracy has no sovereignty of its own and is merely a possession of the Chinese Communist Party.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

But Beijing is incessantly hectoring liberal democracies for noticing its brutal occupation of Tibet and its outrages in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, citing China\u2019s sovereignty in its routine outbursts. So Beijing has lately been saddled with the awkward propaganda challenge of squaring the circle of its recognition of Ukraine\u2019s sovereignty with its endorsement of Putin\u2019s right to do whatever he likes to Ukraine.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Putin<\/p>\n

Putin and Xi meet on Feb. 4 for the start of the Winter Olympics in Beijing. They published their manifesto on the eve of the Game<\/a>s\u2019 opening ceremony. (Alexei Druzhinin\/Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Meanwhile, the dictators\u2019 forces fan out around the globe, not just in the shabby fatigues of proxy armies and the crisp uniforms of military attach\u00e9s. There are all those dapper-suited business executives from state-owned enterprises, too, and their inducements have proven quite effective.<\/span> But now, the promise of post-political career appointments to the boards of Russian entities has suddenly become somewhat less tempting. It\u2019s just embarrassing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi has resigned from Delimobil, Russia\u2019s giant car-sharing service. Former Finnish prime minister Esko Aho has now resigned his directorship of Sherbank, Russia\u2019s largest bank. Former Austrian chancellor Christian Kern has just bolted from the Russian rail company RZD. Former German chancellor Gerhard Schr\u00f6der appears to be sticking with Rosneft, however, and former French prime minister Fran\u00e7ois Fillon appears to be keeping his seat on the Sibur petrochemicals conglomerate.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In these comfortable sinecures, awkward questions about torture chambers, mass murders and ethnic cleansings are not fit for polite company.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And that\u2019s just one way that full democracies and fledgling democracies have been backsliding so dramatically. Freedom House notes that 60 countries worldwide have suffered democratic declines just in the past year. \u201cAs of today, some 38 per cent of the global population live in Not Free countries,\u201d the Freedom House report found, \u201cthe highest proportion since 1997.\u201d Only about a fifth of the world\u2019s people now live in free countries.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDemocracy is in real danger all over the globe,\u201d says Freedom House president Michael Abramowitz. \u201cAuthoritarians are becoming bolder, while democracies are back on their heels. Democratic governments must rally to counter authoritarian abuses and support the brave human rights defenders fighting for freedom around the world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And now those freedom fighters are facing Russian tanks in Ukraine.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

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