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Russia’s Putin Is Erecting Economic Barriers with the West

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin brazenly used his Dec. 4 speech to his nation’s parliament and government ministers to blame the West for the fallout from his choices to intervene militarily against neighboring Ukraine, to precipitate a humanitarian crisis in Crimea and to clash with his nation’s trade partners.

The effect of his actions has been to hurt the Russian economy, to strain relations with the West and to damage the value of his nation’s currency, the ruble. Putin’s remarks seem designed to prepare his nation’s people for further repercussions from his faltering policies that also have led to rising food prices, which hit low- and moderate-income Russians particularly hard.

Putin seems willing to kick to the curb the goodwill built by former Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev, whose popularity with Americans was on display when people reached out to shake his hand after he stopped his motorcade during a 1987 visit to Washington, D.C. Gorbachev, who presided over the break-up of the former Soviet Union and championed “glasnost” (openness) with the West, cautioned recently that the rising East-West tensions threatened to push the world toward a new Cold War, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.

In an odd twist for the leader of a country that has persecuted religious groups, Putin used his speech to recall the history of Russia’s conversion to Christianity, after a Kyiv prince called Vladimir the Saint conquered the Greek trade colony of Khersones, which has become the city of Sevastopol in the Ukraine. Putin claimed that Russians view that historic site on a seaside port of the Crimean peninsula as having the same “sacral and civilizational importance” as Temple Mount in Jerusalem for Muslims and Jews.

But his support of separatists in Crimea has come at a high price in the number of lives lost and diminished.