For Putin Ally, U.S. Sanctions Only Add to Anti-Russia Conspiracy Theory
Article from The Wall Street Journal
Railways Chief Yakunin Sees U.S. Seeking to Subvert Russia; No Impact on Ukraine Policy
MOSCOW- Vladimir Yakunin, a longtime friend of President Vladimir Putin, is still indignant that he was slapped with U.S. sanctions in March. But asked whether they have changed the minds of Kremlin insiders like himself regarding Russian policy in Ukraine, his answer is a resounding no.
“That’s wishful thinking,” he scoffed in a recent interview.
Mr. Yakunin, president of state-owned Russian Railways, the country’s largest employer, says the Ukraine crisis has vindicated his long-held stance that the U.S. and Russia are ineluctable rivals, and that U.S. efforts to sabotage Russia have continued since the end of the Cold War, using weapons as varied as Hollywood movies and monetarist economics.
Critics who dismissed a study he co-wrote a year ago as “a work of conspiracy theory” now recognize “it’s a very realistic assessment of the situation,” he says.
The hardening attitudes suggest repairing the worst breach in East-West relations since the Cold War could be difficult, if not impossible, as long as Russia’s current leadership remains in power.
“Within the elite, this ideological matrix has really taken over,” says Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a sociologist who has studied the Russian ruling class since the 1990s. “They believe there is no way to mobilize the nation around the leader without an enemy.”
The Kremlin portrays Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko as an American stooge, installed after a U.S.-fomented revolution overthrew his pro-Russia predecessor and bent on bringing his country into the U.S. orbit-presenting an existential threat to Russia’s security.
Such views, conveyed nightly by anti-Western reports on state television, have spread broadly in Russian society. Fully 74% of Russians in a poll this summer said they viewed the U.S. unfavorably, up from 44% in January and the highest since the poll was first conducted in 1990.
While most of the hard-liners in Mr. Putin’s inner circle are tight-lipped about their views of the world, Mr. Yakunin is a prolific author and speaker and part-time professor at Moscow State University.
Not only is the U.S. determined to prevent Russia’s emergence as a global power, he says, but at the same time it aims to sabotage Europe’s economy by forcing the European Union to follow suit in imposing sanctions on Russia, one of its major trade partner.
“The Anglo-Saxons have always been very practical people,” says Mr. Yakunin, who served as a Soviet diplomat in New York in the 1980s. “They respect strength.”
The monograph, which Mr. Yakunin wrote in his capacity as a professor, runs for more than 400 pages, cataloging what it portrays as decades of efforts by Russia’s “geopolitical enemy” to undermine it. Issues from trade liberalization to anticorruption efforts and what it calls “the simulacrum of global terrorism” are used to undermine Russia, which the study calls “the main obstacle on the path of realizing the ‘Western project’ of global domination.”
In the end, the authors conclude that they couldn’t prove the existence of the secret plan to subvert Russia because it is secret.
For Mr. Yakunin and his colleagues, the idea professed by some in the U.S. of a cooperative relationship with Russia is absurd. “If Ukraine hadn’t happened, something else certainly would have,” he says.
Mr. Yakunin, 66 years old, has known Mr. Putin since the early 1990s, when they were both part of a small summer-cottage cooperative outside St. Petersburg called Ozero. Most of its members have since taken up powerful jobs in business and politics-and been targeted by Western sanctions.
He calls the current “demonization” of Mr. Putin in the West inaccurate and “a crude propaganda trick.”
Asked whether Mr. Putin shares his views about the U.S., Mr. Yakunin is coy, saying that he will speak only for himself, although that reflects “other people my age and in posts more senior than mine.”
He has denied persistent allegations of corruption, which he says are the work of unnamed enemies trying to sabotage him.
Despite his strong pro-Russia views, he told the official TASS news agency Monday that his children now live in Europe.
He says the U.S. sanctions-banning him from obtaining a visa and freezing any assets he might hold in the U.S.-have “created certain complexities” for him, and admits the broader measures are hurting an economy that was already slowing down.
“Of course, the atmosphere that is arisen has had a big effect on the business climate,” with potential foreign partners turning away from Russia, he admits.
The use of financial sanctions against Russia has also confirmed his long-held view of the dangerous influence of what he calls “the global financial oligarchy” over the world economy. He doesn’t spell out just who falls into that category other than to say they aren’t all Americans, however.
But he says it is up to the West-Europe, in particular-to see the error of its ways and return to traditional values that will inevitably bring it closer to Russia.
“I have this feeling of bitterness, frankly, because, while I didn’t believe the sweet promises of the West thanks to my professional preparation, I didn’t think the West would go this far,” he said.
Write to Gregory L. White at
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