NEWSLINK: USA to reckon with ‘Putin factor’ after magazine power ratin – pundits

[USA to reckon with ‘Putin factor’ after magazine power rating – pundits – BBC Monitoring/Ekho Moskvy Radio – January 4, 2013 – no open link exists to this product]

Ekho Moskvy Radio addresses what it terms Foreign Policy magazine’s move to call Russian President Vladimir Putin the world’s the most powerful person, including the fact that the magazine actually listed him second and left the first position blank.

Some observers crowed over Putin’s significance, and highlighted what they considered the necessity for the United States to deal with him:

[Higher School of Economics Leonid Polyakov indicated that] the high assessment of Vladimir Putin’s position, in fact, means the failure of all attempts to discredit the Russian president abroad. “We know that in the past year such attempts were made and failed. … The assessment of the ranking allows us to expect that the so-called ‘Putin factor’ will play a significant role in US foreign policy for the next five years,” Polyakov said.

In fact, the top position was left blank, which other observers used as an opportunity to undermine the West:

… head of the Institute of Social, Economic and Political Studies foundation Dmitriy Badovskiy told RIA Novosti agency * * * … that [he] believes that the magazine’s decision to leave the first position vacant is linked with the crisis of leadership among Western politicians. “As regards Foreign Policy’s decision to formally leave the first place vacant, this is a little trick, the meaning of which is that in fact the magazine is saying that we wanted to give the first place to some of the Western political leaders, but we understand perfectly well that today we can not do this because there is a crisis of leadership in the West,” he said.

In his opinion, this is due to economic difficulties in the European Union and the difficult situation in US politics. “(German Chancellor Angela) Merkel and (US President Barack) Obama, those people who embody leadership on the Western political scene, are not going through the best period in their careers … In these conditions, the first place went to Putin,” the expert said.

An Ekho Moskvy commentator highlighted Putin’s reputation as a strongman:

According to Ekho Moskvy regular radio commentator Anton Orekh, Putin’s first place in the list of most powerful people on the planet is not a matter of pride. Speaking in his regular commentary slot on editorially independent Ekho Moskvy radio station on the same day, Orekh said the ranking “means one simple thing – the level of autocracy”. “It does not mean that Russia has become the most influential and powerful country in the world, or that our leader is the most competent, the most intelligent, to whom the whole world listen,” he said.

“Russia’s influence, of course, is lower than that of the USA or Germany. But Putin is a person who decides in this country absolutely everything,” he said.

“This is not a ranking of heroes. This is a ranking of dependency of the fate of millions of people on the will and desires of an individual. In this sense, President Obama and Chancellor Merkel can not influence the fate of their citizens in such a radical way as Vladimir Putin can influence our fate. I am not sure that we can be proud of this,” Orekh concluded.