NEWSWATCH: “Russia cannot live with the west – or without it; Technological backwardness increases its dependence on liberal democracies” – Financial Times/Lilia Shevtsova

File Photo of G7 Leaders and other Officials Around Round Table at the Hague, with Flags

“Great power status and the desire for external domination have long been central components of the Russian system of personalised power. … With diminishing resources, the Kremlin has increasingly resorted to intimidating … liberal democracies into accepting Russia’s grand ambitions. At the same time, the country has to wrestle with … how to preserve its role as a global power without simultaneously undermining its ability to exploit liberal civilisation for its own ends. …. Two successive eras of Russian modernisation, led by Peter the Great and Stalin, were achieved with western technological and intellectual input. … since the end of the cold war, the irony is that the liberal democracies have succeeded not in helping Russia to transform itself but in preserving a construct … alien to western values. * * * If the west resists Russia’s policy of being ‘with the west and against the west’, Moscow will up the ante. True, any assertiveness on the Kremlin’s part would have the aim not of provoking confrontation, but of persuading the west to engage on its terms and to decide that it is safer to play along with the grumpy nuclear power’s game of ‘let’s pretend’ … what the west has been doing for decades.”

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