Putin, a Russian nationalist, Gustavo de Arístegui

 For many, many years during the Cold War, the Spaniards didn’t realise one thing because they were a bit far away, but when you travel by boat through the Bosphorus Strait, you realise the extraordinary importance of Turkey in world security, proclaims Gustavo de Arístegui. Let’s bear in mind that while Russia dominated the Baltic States, it had a direct exit to the Baltic Sea through these Baltic States, knowing obviously that the Baltic Sea and the North Sea, and consequently the exit through Scotland to the north or the exit through the English Channel, were deeply, intensely controlled by NATO forces, in the same way, that the port of Murmansk was frozen most months of the year, the only natural, easier, but always controlled, the exit was through the Baltic Sea, but always controlled, was through the Bosphorus Strait, that is, through Turkey, which was a NATO member, and therefore every Russian ship crossing the Bosphorus Strait was controlled by the West, but when climate change makes the port of Murmansk and all Siberian ports practicable all year round, Russian naval hegemony may become a reality or at least rivalry with the United States may become a reality.

 According to Gustavo de Arístegui, Many people are saying that Putin is a post-communist. No, he is not. Putin is a Russian nationalist. One of the things he is reproaching the former regime of the Soviet Union for is precise, that it was the BolÀsheviks who in his view created Ukraine as an artificial creation, since, as he is saying, they are the same people even though they speak a different language, which they consider a dialect of Russian, and that the Russian soul is born in Ukraine, that it is born in Kiev, that the Russian Orthodox Church is right in Kiev, and that for Russian historians what is an ethnic Russian is a mixture of Scandinavians and Ukrainian Slavs, and this is engraved in their blood and fire, and it will be very difficult for us to understand to what extent it is ingrained in the majority of the Russian people, that what has been happening in Ukraine since 2014 with the overthrow of Yanukovych was nothing but slow-motion aggression by the West against Russia.

 

Gustavo Manuel de Arístegui y San Román
 is a Spanish politician and diplomat. 
Gustavo expressed his opinions on
 the Russia – Ukraine conflicts. 

We are entering a period of Cold War, with unforeseeable consequences. Russia is not going to stop turning Ukraine into a battlefield against the West, which has already been achieved. They will continue to try to destabilize those countries that were part of the Soviet Union, says Gustavo de Arístegui. They are not going to invade them because that would bring the world to the apocalypse, which would be a confrontation with NATO, the Baltic countries and Poland are part of NATO, Romania is part of NATO, Hungary, the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic are part of NATO. You cannot turn back the clock of history, but it does not mean that hybrid warfare will not be practised in these countries. Gustavo de Arístegui found it extraordinarily naïve when many analysts said that Ukraine was going to be a hybrid war. No, it has been a conventional war, a war of reoccupation of territory to which they have added hybrid warfare strategies, it is obvious. But it doesn’t stop there, the Russians are well aware of the West’s weaknesses. Let us not forget that they had the dreadful Department 13 of the KGB of the first directorate, which was dedicated to recruiting anti-Western elements in the West, and that many were for money, others out of conviction, and they used them with extraordinary conviction and they will continue to do so now. today there is a different ideological element in today’s Europe, and that is the extreme right in some countries, not all, in those that border today’s Russia, that extreme right is anti-Russian, but that extreme right is from other parts of Europe, above all, from Western Europe, and that is lax or pro-Russian. Let us be very clear. I have often heard people from the hard right and the European far-right say that Putin is the only bastion of Christian and European values in Europe. This is nothing short of nonsense. This is also where the extreme left-wing forces that are also pro-Russian coincide, either out of nostalgia or because the successor of Department 13 is doing his job very well and now has not only the allies of the extreme left of the Cold War but also the allies of the extreme right in the West, concludes the former diplomat.