“I did not want Vladimir Putin to come to Gdansk and apologize and abase himself for Stalin’s actions seven decades ago, but I would have liked him to clearly admit they were wrong.”
The chance of Putin taking anything approaching a moral view of this or any other issue connected with Stalinism is zero. Putin’s view of what is morally right in international relations is pure KGB: what advances Russia’s interests is by definition right. He doesn’t have any other world view.
Worse, a major plank of Putin’s foreign policy is no more sophisticated than to oppose and weaken, opportunistically as the occasions arise, the USA and the west, for no other reason than visceral dislike. He has after all spent his entire working life in the lawless Russian security services, and that has given him his twisted view of what is honorable . . wtness his hero worship of Yuri Andropov.
This is why he arms the grubs and brutes who run Iran; this is why he embraces Chavez. His security services were probably responsible for the apartment bombings, to serve as a pretext for war in Chechnaya (the mullahs couldn’t care less about that war, of course; apart from anything else, ). Why would Putin be averse to Iran getting nukes, when he contemplates the devastation that could conceivably be wrought on the west, and the US in particular, by an Iranian nuke faling into the wrong hands?
