- Nineteen prisoners use cutlery to break out of cells at Winchester prison
- France wants progress in Ukraine before Russia returns to G7
- Italy president begins talks to seek way out of government crisis
- Italian PM expected to resign as political chaos deepens
- Russia says US cruise missile test ‘regrettable’
- Kremlin - No date set for Normandy talks on Ukraine despite Macron meeting
- Egypt court hands out 6 death sentences on terror charges
- Putin says Russian nuclear explosion poses no threat
- Russian panel eyes alleged foreign interference in protests
- Gran Canaria wildfire triggers evacuation of thousands of people
- PM Johnson calls on Germany and France to compromise on Brexit
- Sudan's ex-president Bashir arrives at corruption trial
TEHRAN, June 07 -Vladimir Putin is struggling to get a summit with Donald Trump, has little hope of ending Western sanctions, and is seen in much of the West as a pariah. So hosting the World Cup this month is a welcome moment in the global limelight.
TEHRAN, Young Journalists Club (YJC) -Vladimir Putin is struggling to get a summit with Donald Trump, has little hope of ending Western sanctions, and is seen in much of the West as a pariah. So hosting the World Cup this month is a welcome moment in the global limelight.
In the Russian president’s eyes, it sends a message of defiance to the world and his own people which fits his favored storyline: Russia is succeeding despite Western efforts to hold it back.
“For Putin, hosting the World Cup speaks to the failure of sanctions and the failure of Western efforts to isolate him,” said Professor Sergei Medvedev, of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, referring to Western sanctions first imposed on Russia after it annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014.
“Despite all that, (his mindset is) we still have Crimea, we are pursuing our agenda, and yet look everyone has come to the World Cup”, Medvedev said.
Putin does not want Russians to think their country is isolated because that could undermine his narrative of Russia as an influential great power with a seat at the top table of global affairs.
Thirty-two teams will compete in the June 14 to July 15 tournament, being hosted in Russia for the first time in World Cup history, at an official cost of 683 billion rubles ($11 billion).
A senior Russian government official, who declined to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said the tournament was the latest in a series of events which showed Western attempts to isolate Russia were breaking down.
“If this is isolation, then we are enjoying it,” the official quipped.
Polls show Putin’s message that Russia is on the up despite a hostile West plays well with voters. It is amplified by government officials who have spent months complaining of a shadowy Western plot to discredit Russia’s World Cup.
“The stronger the anti-Russian campaign ahead of the World Cup is, the more people will be genuinely amazed when they see there is no barbed wire at the stadiums,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova told reporters last month.
A suggestion by British foreign minister Boris Johnson in March that Putin would use the World Cup to bolster Russia’s image as Adolf Hitler used the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany was seen as proof the West wanted to spoil Russia’s moment.
Zakharova said Johnson was “poisoned with hatred”.
‘THE BIG RED MACHINE’
Re-elected in March after a big win in a vote international observers said lacked real choice, Putin is seen wanting the world to recognize that Russia, like it or not, is a force to be reckoned with, a message the World Cup helps convey.
“He (Putin) needs international prestige and everything he does is a nod to that,” Dmitry Bykov, a well-known satirical Russian writer, said last month in the Sobesednik newspaper.
“He wants the world to talk about us like it talked about the Soviet ice hockey team in the 1970s. We are the ‘Big Red Machine’. We are feared. Not loved, but admired. He doesn’t want us to be loved. Loves passes, but fear never does.”
Russia won the right to host the “greatest show on earth” in 2010. Putin denied media allegations that Moscow had bribed its way to victory.
Since then, Russia’s image has taken a pummeling, prompting Russians to fear Moscow would be stripped of the tournament, something some Western politicians called for in vain.
Moscow’s list of crimes, in the eyes of the West, is long.
It annexed Crimea in 2014, backed a pro-Russian uprising in Ukraine that same year, and has since been accused by the Netherlands of complicity in shooting down an airliner, and by international officials of running a state-sponsored doping program at the 2014 winter Olympics.
Moscow’s backing for Syria’s Bashar al-Assad has also put it at odds with the West and it has been accused by Washington of election meddling, and by Britain of the attempted murder of a former double agent and his daughter using a nerve agent.
The quantity and gravity of these allegations, many of which Russia denies, means few Russians expect the World Cup to help Moscow shed its pariah image in the West.
“The World Cup will not have any significant impact on Russia’s image because it is just too toxic,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, a think-tank.
Kolesnikov pointed to the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow, saying they too had done little to improve the image of the Soviet Union, which had invaded Afghanistan the previous year.
Many say Putin sacrificed any political dividends Russia gained by hosting the 2014 winter Olympics by annexing Crimea afterwards. Some Kremlin critics, citing that precedent, fear something similar after the World Cup.
Source:Reuters
Your Comment