D J Webb
I was reading today that the US may impose sanctions against one or more major Russian banks if the ceasefire in the Ukraine does not hold. This would come in addition to the sanctions imposed in March 2014 against Bank Rossiya, declared to be the bank favoured by Putin and his acolytes. Other sanctions have been against named individuals, some of them with little connection to the events in the Ukraine and chosen merely because they are in Putin’s inner circle. Similar sanctions have also been imposed by the EU, including therefore the UK.
We have got used to government by decree in the West. I prefer the rule of law to rule by decree.
Looking at sanctions on named individuals, there has been little attempt to show they are guilty of specific crimes. Why one person and not another? As far as Bank Rossiya is concerned, providing banking services for Putin is not a crime and has no connection with the Ukraine. If sanctions are increased, how will they choose which bank or banks to sanction?
Doesn’t this seem like arbitrary government? If there is a need to restrict economic relations with Russia, it would be better to pass an Act of Parliament saying so and allowing for legal challenges to individual applications of such a law. Such a law was, I believe, in place governing the export of some technology to the COMECON countries behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.
The sanctions strike me as unlawful, as they target individuals or companies in order to achieve an effect on the Russian ruling circle and not because of criminal behaviour by those sanctioned. It would be better to close down relations with Russia as a whole — without picking out potentially blameless targets to sanction — but that would impose a higher cost on the Western economy.
We need to almost entirely unpick the power of ministers to issue decrees and move towards a law-based system of government.
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Mr Webb can rest assured – both the Parliament of the United Kingdom and the Congress of the United States are fully supportive of sanctions against Mr Putin and his cronies (after all large scale business people in Russia are either cronies of Mr Putin – or he puts them jail or has them murdered).
It should be remembered that it is NOT Ukraine that is the chief victim of Mr Putin – it is RUSSIA.
Mr Putin went back on Yeltsin’s promises of trial by jury and an end to conscription – but he went a lot further than that.
Mr Putin ended the free election of State Governors.
Mr Putin ended real diversity in the media – no Russian Fox News or Wall Street Journal, or talk radio (Rush or Glenn Beck or…..).
Mr Putin grabbed control of natural resources – with any businessman who did not play ball being either imprisoned or terminated.
Nor Mr Obama may WANT to do all these things – but he does not (presently) have the power to do them, Mr Putin does and has done them.
The “Federation”, Mr Putin, controls the forces of “law and order” but he and his “ex” KGB associates also control Organised Crime (unlike Mussolini and his Fascists Putin and co do not fight Organised Crime – they have co opted it) and they control the large economic enterprises.
People who concentrate on Mr Putin’s aggression against Georgia or the Ukraine or his moves against the Baltic States miss the point that the chief victim of Mr Putin is RUSSIA.
Civil Society was coming back in Russia after the Soviet nightmare when so many tens of millions of people were murdered (hence the calculated insult of Putin’s thugs when they dance around statues of Lenin and so on – they do not really believe in Marxism, they are just spitting on the many millions of people in the Ukraine who were murdered by the Soviets).
Who is to blame for all this?
Partly Mr Yeltsin – for listening to Western advice on money and banking (which created the financial chaos that Putin used to gain power), but also for trying to cling on to lands in the south (not Islamist at the time, although it is now, – indeed the President was an old Soviet Air Force General married to an Estonian) and Mr Putin used the war (as well as the financial chaos) as a way of gaining more and more power.
But also the West – including those fools Mr Blair and Mr Bush.
Anyone who has watched Mr Putin’s propaganda service “RT” knows that Mr Putin has a pathological (not really ideological – pathological) hatred of the West. Yet Mr Blair and Mr Bush kept trying to make friends with him………
Fool – both of them (Blair and Bush) total and absolute fools.