Financial times

The west is without direction and losing sight of moral convictions, writes Sergey Karaganov The Soviet Union’s sunset years hardly felt like an innocent age to those who lived through them, but to recall the hopes and aspirations of that era is to rue the naiveties of those days.

President Vladimir Putin has been trying to bring together most of the countries of the former Soviet Union in an economic alliance. This would have strengthened the region’s economic competitiveness and helped ward off the kind of instability that bedevilled the Weimar Republic after the dissolution of the German Empire.

When the eurogroup of finance ministers first issued its ultimatum to Cyprus demanding a levy on deposits – requiring their de facto partial confiscation – many Russians were indignant. Even Russia’s leaders called the Eurogroup demand absurd, non-professional, unfair and dangerous.

I am amazed that the country is still alive and functioning after ten years of revolutionary chaos and turmoil in the 1990s. That came after 70 years of communist dictatorship that cost the country tens of millions of lives in the civil war, Gulag camps, artificial famines, forced collectivisation and so on.