By Vestnik Kavkaza
Launching sanctions against Russia, the USA counts on a sharp deterioration of living standards in Russia, according to the Secretary of the Security Council of Russia, Nikolai Patrushev. He thinks that Washington is trying to influence the situation in various regions of the world, initiating “color revolutions.” Financing of American national broadcasting media in Russia – Free Europe Radio and The Voice of America – doubled during the overthrow of the Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovich. According to the Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the Board of Directors for Foreign Broadcasting allocated $22.6 million to programs in the Russian language; it is 104% more than expenditures during the Maidan. At the moment expansion of radio programs is being prepared. They will be oriented toward Russian and Ukrainian audiences.
The academician and director of the Institute of USA and Canadian Studies, Sergei Rogov, said the Cold War between Russia and the USA could have begun in 2008: “If John McCain had won the presidential elections, what has been happening over the last year would have happened already. But the Obama administration went the other way. The fact is that he inherited from George W. Bush a very difficult situation in the country and in foreign policy as well. The Americans have lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the task before Obama was to regroup the US forces, and retreat with minimal losses. In general, it was done, and the reboot just fits into this strategy.”
According to Rogov, the “reboot’s” purpose was “to prevent the collapse of the arms control regime - the two sides agreed to sign the new START treaty. It was about the normalization of economic relations and, in general, the program of rebooting was performed somewhere in the year 2010 and it was at that moment when negative issues began to appear. It was clarified that Washington did not have a further positive agenda "what to do", and the same for us. And as a result, a bad cycle of Russian-American relations was renewed. They were developed almost in a circle - discharge, confrontation, fresh crisis, then again discharge and so on. The start of cooling relations was due to the fact that the Russian-American partnership was largely declarative. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there were many smiles, beautiful words, slaps on the shoulders, but in reality it was a partnership in words. Hence, there was no mechanism for this partnership.”
Rogov also points out the weakness of economic relations and cooperation in the nuclear field: “We keep the model of mutual nuclear deterrence or mutually assured destruction. And this model is, of course, difficult to reconcile with the partnership.”
