An angry commentary on the foreign policy columnist for the ‘Independent’ newspaper, Mary Dejevsky.
On 9 December 2022 the ‘Independent’ newspaper published an article written by its foreign policy commentator Mary Dejevsky, titled: “There will be no peace in Europe until Russia feels safe”.
As a regular reader of this newspaper, which pretends to be “liberal”, critical of Brexit and highlighting blunders committed by the recent Tory governments, I repeatedly get angry when reading Ms. Dejevsky’s articles on Russia. The essence of her most recent commentary says it all: “Putin is Russia – Russia is Putin”. She says that the former KGB man in the Kremlin, who is a criminal mafia boss controlling his country with his various secret services, can only “feel safe”, when the NATO refrains from expanding to the East and the Western countries will give Russia “security guarantees”.
What nonsense! To equate Putin with Russia is to neglect and cover up all the atrocities, murders, and other crimes against his own population – even before he started attacking his neighbours – Georgia and Ukraine. The Putin rule is nothing but a ruthless dictatorship, camouflaged by the Orthodox Church and historic nostalgia. To quote the former Finnish Foreign Minister and now Professor in Florence, Alexander Stubb, Putin wants to be Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Stalin all together! They all didn’t care about their own people: Peter created St. Petersburg on the bones of countless thousands of workers; Catherine oversaw the bloody conquering of the southern territories including the Crimea; and Stalin – well, he created the famine deaths of some 3 to 5 million Ukrainians in the early 1930s, the Holodomor (to name just one of his many crimes).
How can you expect a ruthless dictator to “feel safe”? The answer is only if he is able to control every single potential challenge. Like a mafia boss can only feel safe if there is no more police!
Yes, Ms. Dejevsky, in advocating to appease Putin, you are spreading defeatism in the UK.
You are acting like a ‘Trojan Horse’ for the Russian dictator.
The main shareholder (41%) of the ‘Independent’ newspaper, Evgeny Lebedev, is the son of Alexander Lebedev, who bought the newspaper in 2010 and is a former officer of the First Chief Directorate of the USSR’s KGB and later its successor SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service). A friend of Boris Johnson, Evgeny Lebedev, became Baron Lebedev of Hampton and Siberia, a member of the House of Lords on 19 November 2020.
There is a saying: “Once a KGB agent, always a KGB agent”. Vladimir Putin’s father was a member of the NKVD (Stalin’s Secret Service), and he passed this thinking on to his son. Could it be that Alexander Lebedev did the same to his son? It’s worth noting that, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Alexander Lebedev was put on Canada’s sanctions list.
By employing Ms. Mary Dejevsky, who is blatantly whitewashing the Putin dictatorship, as a foreign policy ‘expert’, Lord Lebedev is helping to spread disinformation in the UK, thereby trying to weaken Western resistance against ‘Tsar’ Vladimir Vladimirovich.
Ukraine, the Western countries and the Russian population can only live in peace if Putin’s dictatorship collapses. The West needed some 40 years of containment before the USSR collapsed. Hopefully it will not take so long until Putin’s vicious rule comes to an end. Only then can we all, including Ms. Dejevsky, “feel safe”.
PS: Thankfully other journalists are not pedalling such fake news. For example John Sweeney writes in UK’s Byline Times, 15 March 2022, on “Lebedev. The KGB Spy Who Helped Put Putin in the Kremlin”. He recounts in detail the late Soviet and post-Soviet career of Alexander Lebedev and quotes the Italian investigative journalist Jacopo Iacoboni: “You never quit from the KGB. You are (…) a dead man if you try to quit the KGB.” Sweeney also recounts some unpalatable details of Boris Johnson’s relationship with father and son Lebedev.
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