McFaul: We underestimate Russia's power and capabilities
To believe that the Russian Federation is not a strong state is a delusion.
Michael McFaul, a former US Ambassador to Russia, a professor at Stanford University, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, said this during an online discussion at the Kyiv Security Forum, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
“There is a widespread belief that Russia is not a powerful power, it is just a gas station posing as a state. Senator McCain said this many years ago, and people still repeat this idea when they talk about Russia. This is a wrong view. If we believe that Russia is already declining, we need to focus only on China, as we often hear in the United States. This is mistake.
Russia has instruments of intervention with which it can harm the liberal democratic world, to which Ukraine belongs. And we underestimate the ideology that Putin is introducing. In my country, it is fashionable to express the idea that Putin is only capable of individual transactions. When I worked in government I heard that he was only interested in certain equipment.
This is an obvious underestimation of his ideology, his nationalism and Orthodox-imperial ideals, in which he invests a lot of money to propagate them not only through social networks, but also through tools of direct intervention, as was the case with my country in 2016,” McFaul said.
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