Bait And Switch: The Devil, Western Plutocracy, And Vlad, World Impaler

Committed by their tremendous crimes, Putin and his associates now believe that their “meat waves” tactics in Ukraine will bring them victory, as they reckon that the brainwashed Russian people feel Ukraine is worth the sacrifice. The alternative, for the Kremlin gang, is arrest and death. 

The leaders of the West pretend that nobody saw this coming [1]… When it was obvious since Putin’s genocide in Chechnya in 1999, that Putin was a despicable mass murderer. Actually Putin was their man, the man of the West, an employee of global plutocracy, in charge of diverting Russian resources out of Russia, from capital, to gas and oil. The relentless Kremlin tyranny was an instrument of extraction of Russian economic product to put it under global banking management, thus increasing the power of said banking. Never mind that it blew up the price of real estate in Western Europe’s attractive areas. 

The Western “leadership” is made mostly of arrogant twerps who listen carefully to the “Powers That Be”… those in power, generally tycoons, plutocrats and their attached think tanks, institutions and universities.

The West is ruled mostly by so-called “representative democracies”, which are neither representative, nor democracies. The nature of these regimes is closer to representative oligarchies. 

Oligarchy means: the rule of the few.

The ultimate state of oligarchy is plutocracy, generally viewed as the power of money, but, more generally, the power of evil (aka, Pluto, Satan, Hades, Diablo, etc.). The historical mechanism is always the same: to stay in power, an oligarchy has no choice but to opt for the worst means, because nothing else would do (Putin himself demonstrates this). 

Ever since the direct democracies of Antiquity fell, most of the time, in most places in the West, plutocrats and their bankers have managed states. Naturally, they prefer to deal with dictatorships. .

This is how the tyrants of the Twentieth Century arose often in cooperation with the mightiest Western plutocrats. A well-known example is Henry Ford who inspired and financed Adolf Hitler. An example that is less known, but perhaps even more spectacular and instructive was Averell Harriman and Stalin. Harriman was viewed, inside the Kremlin, as the real leader of Russia. Among other things, Harriman financed the Baku oil fields and insured early massive US help to Russia in 1941 (help which had been refused to France a year earlier, in spite of treaties with France…) 

The global plutocracy which controls France, Germany and the corrupt West in general, bet heavily on Putin. The way global plutocracy sees it, it had nothing to lose, everything to gain… even if, and especially if, Putin messed it up! More than a century ago glaobal plutocracy already used that strategy with Lenin, Stalin and Mussolini (plutocratic support was then extended to dictatorial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Franco… by extending oil, lines of credit, equipment, etc.). Plutocracy is tyranny friendly as its fundamental purpose is fundamentally evil (Pluto). 

Eastern Europe has been at the receiving end of these bad treatments for centuries thanks in part from selfish, self-absorbed Western European indifference…in 1240 the Mongols killed Kyiv, and put the Kremlin’s Alexander Nevsky, in control… Of Kyiv! At the time, and since, Eastern Europe observed that Western Europe did not come to the rescue of Kyivan Rus against the Mongols… although it launched plenty of crusades at the time, including against  Novgorod… although Anna Princess of Kyiv was ruling queen of France in 1051-60 CE.

Macron is fundamentally a banker who used his connection to the state at his advantage… A particular case of Western finance and Davos (WEF) welcoming and using Putin, that is the Russian state, to their advantage. Each time Rosatom sells a nuclear reactor, France gets a billion dollars… Rosatom sells the most nuclear reactors in the world.

If anything, the present crisis exposes the enormous corruption in Western Europe, which laundered in plain sight the money that Russian oligarchs stole from Russia. “Socialist” ex Chancellor Schroder set up the Nord Stream pipelines, while French Total set up the giant gas liquefaction installations in Siberia. 

Putin, his evil accomplices and his oligarchs could claim they have been tricked and enticed. They actually started to have their vile Western propagandists push for that point of view:”It’s not us, but them who enticed us to steal children in Ukraine!” 

But it is neither here, nor there. Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito and Franco also went through the same process. After they committed their massive war crimes, they were the massive criminals. The role that Western plutocrats played in enticing and enabling them has been carefully covered up, and is never mentioned. Yes, that role should be exposed.

But most self-declared leftists are actually posers who are careful to not go the bottom of things… lest they get less of a following.  

As a personal aside, I was banned from commenting in several European media, for example the European Tribune, and the reason given was that I pointed out the financing of Hitler and Stalin by Western banks and financiers… I was told, in writing, that the bankers who financed those media asked me to be banned. That was more than a decade ago, and both yours truly and this general subject disappeared from much of the information space… Not coincidentally, Obama “reset” his relationship with Putin and gave him a greenlight to invade Crimea… And its offshore oil deposits…    

If Putin had been able to exploit Ukraine, as he does Russia, global plutocracy would have been happy. But, after being stunned by the invasion of Crimea, which it did not resist, Ukraine fought back triumphantly when the Donbas was invaded. Russia, France, the US, the UK, and the dictator in China had clearly violated the 1994 Budapest accord, according to which Ukraine gave 1900 nuclear warheads to Russia, in exchange for security guaranty for its territory, forever.

“Representative democracy” is a half way house between pure dictatorship and real democracy. Clearly, it has become unsustainable… Be it only because of the problem of too many nukes in too few hands… But real democracy, direct democracy will not be achieved without maximizing truth…

Patrice Ayme

“Socialist” Schroeder, ex-PM of Germany, embracing his employer Putin, himself in charge of exploiting Russia for global plutocracy’s profit.

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[1] The connivence between Western leadership and Putin was long obvious… even among politicians. In 2006, Poland’s defense minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, likened plans to build the first Nord Stream pipeline to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact — the half official, half secret agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union dividing Eastern Europe into spheres of influence, and providing the Nazis with the Kremlin’s help to wage war. It made the Kremlin’s Berlin indispensable ally: the Wehrmacht invaded Western Europe fuelled by Russian oil. Sikorski in 2006: “Poland has a particular sensitivity to corridors and deals above our head,” Sikorski said at a security conference in Brussels. “That was the 20th century. We don’t want any repetition of that.”

Putin A Tool? Double Machiavellianism Festering In Russia

Putin is a virus, and its vaccine is called Ukraine. To get rid of Putin, and foster democracy, one had to encourage him to attack Ukraine. What better to fight a tyrant than full war with a powerful democracy? Nothing else would do, the tyrant was too well installed, with towering popularity. So his internal enemies had to convince Putin that invading Ukraine would be a walk in the park, shooting off Nazis. 

How that popularity was won is itself a measure of how evil Russia became. In 2014, Putin wanted to invade Crimea. His two most powerful collaborators, Shoigu, minister of defense and a personal friend, a native of poor and isolated Tuva, in the mountains of Siberia, and Gerasimov, the commander in chief of the Russian army, apostle of hybrid warfare  

Who had an interest in getting rid of Putin? Putin’s kleptocracy has stolen Russia, to invest the stolen wealth in the West, overpaying while purchasing Western oligarchs’ properties, making all oligarchs happier. What was stolen by Russian oligarchs made Western oligarchs even wealthier..So Western oligarchs loved Putin and its wealth-transferring-to-the West oligarchy. Now, of course, the Western oligarchs are frustrated as Putin’s unraveling is threatening to dismantle the entire exploitation contraption.

Distinct lack of enthusiasm in some French and German circles of power has everything to do with the fact Franco-Germania organized much of its economy around Putin. It was not just getting gas from Putin; the French Total oil giant provided the Putin Reich with vast and ultra expensive installations similar to those provided to Qatar, to put on méthanier boats liquefied Siberian gas heading to Asia. These boats are some of the largest in the world, and pack several times the explosive power of Hiroshima.  

European ecologists and the likes of Merkel, were financed, or controlled, from the Kremlin. At least so say retired heads of French secret services. So the ecologists were anti-nuclear, and even anti-Western European gas (France has one century of gas reserves; so the ecologists, pushed by the Kremlin, had France pass a law outlawing the extraction of gas… in France. If the gas was provided by the Kremlin tyrant, that was fine).

So the only remaining hypothesis is that elements inside the FSB misled Putin about Ukraine, in the hope of having Putin destroy his regime there. Instead, it’s Russia which may end up destroyed. 

This is not the sole mechanism at work there. In the 1990s, Western advisers (Harvard, etc.) persuaded Yeltsin that Russia needed to be led to prosperity by an oligarchy. As the oligarchy was bound to steal Russia and make it stupid, the very origin of the Putin regime may not lay just in Alexander Nevsky’s sick ideology of ruling inside with brutality by allying oneself with evil (the Mongol invaders). 

The war may look insane, and it is. But it developed because of deep manipulations from very dark minds… who may have hoped that this sort of madness would develop as the intricate mess it has become… precisely because it could be exploited. The FSB may have incited Putin to commit a terrible mistake, so that he could be brought down. And the West certainly long collaborated with Putin, inciting him subtly to become ever worse. 

Now the ongoing existence of the largest land empire, by far, is being called into question, and democracies themselves can’t let Putin win. Anything at all. 

If Putin is a tool, does that mean that there are even more evil forces out there? Indeed! The cause of an evil is, in a sense always a greater evil. And causes work best when unexplained, undetected, and unexpected. This is why it is important to understand Machiavellianism, the art of making people do something while believing that there are doing the opposite. 

Patrice Ayme

P/S 1: The first part of the essay above was censored by the Wall Street Journal, which delayed its publication by several days (the italic part was allowed in another comment; in the italic I carefully avoided the notion of Western oligarchy, which may be a banning offense according to the obsequious lemmings). So the WSJ’s readers were made blissfully unaware that:

1. Putin could have been manipulated into invading Ukraine
2. That the plutocratic universities (Harvard, etc.) and other influencers (US and European politicians) were instrumental and perhaps primordial in setting up the Russian mess which later brought up Putin. The same sort of enabling-disabling, bait and switch was used prior and during WWI and WWII. The US power circles are very good at it, their institutions, traditions and mentalities having trained with American natives for centuries. For example, claim that “black lives matter” while making sure that, under the pretext of freedom, blacks live in terrible conditions (bad education, bad housing, bad health care, bad food, sugar billionaires being subsidized, etc…) All this the very dark deep state organizes with mental terror….Don’t say this, don’t think that, etc. And that is enforced by the media, an example being the preceding comment which the WSJ banned. That was after a very interesting article on:

Putin, Isolated and Distrustful, Leans on Handful of Hard-Line Advisers

Russia’s president built a power structure designed to deliver him the information he wants to hear, feeding into his miscalculations on the Ukraine war

MOSCOW—Russian troops were losing the battle for Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine, in late September when a call came in for the commanding officer on the front line, over an encrypted line from Moscow.

It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat.

The president seemed to have limited understanding of the reality of the situation, according to current and former U.S. and European officials and a former senior Russian intelligence officer briefed on the exchange. His poorly equipped front-line troops were being encircled by a Ukrainian advance backed by artillery provided by the West. Mr. Putin rebuffed his own generals’ commands and told the troops to hold firm, they said.

The Ukrainian ambushes continued, and on Oct. 1, Russian soldiers hastily withdrew, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and supplies of artillery to restock Ukraine’s weapons caches. 

Mr. Putin expected the war in Ukraine to be swift, popular and triumphant. For months, he struggled to come to terms with what instead became a costly quagmire, and found himself isolated and distrustful at the pinnacle of a power structure designed to reinforce his belligerent worldview and shelter him from discouraging news…

And now for one of Putin’s war planes going down in flames: a SU 25…

PS 2: Tyrant Vladimir Putin also indirectly attacked Russian oligarchs on December 22, 2022, along lines similar to those I drew above (and in many of my essays prior). Putin stated that Russians who drain Russia’s money from abroad and do not have a connection with Russia “represent a danger” to Russia.Putin claimed that while the majority of Russian businessmen are patriots, there are some who are not. Putin had nationalized many non-compliant oligarchs from a similat logic 20 years ago.

Nazis Often Exhibited The Characteristics They Condemned: Not A Coincidence, But Sadomasochism. See Putin.

Intriguingly, many Nazis ressemble more the parodies of “Jews” that they depicted, condemned, rejected and despised… whereas often the “Jews” look like ordinary people. One reason for this is that many Western European Jews had ancestors who converted to Judaism, so their distant ethnic origins were not necessarily exclusively from the Middle East. 

This is true even for superman super Nazi Reinhard Heydrich… and certainly for Nazi photographer Herman Heukels. Dr. Goebbels, Hitler’s fanatical Nazi chief propagandists and successor, who killed  his 6 children, aged 4 to 12 years old… started to hate Jews after he was rejected by a Jewish girl. Goebbels also advocated the assassination of handicapped people… although he himself was so handicapped that the German army refused him for military service… And so on. Nazis seem to have been so full of hatred that they hated even themselves, and thus pretended to not be who they were, or looked like. Hitler asked himself whether the “Jews” were German… And deduced that they were not… Although Hitler was certainly not a German, as he was born and educated as an Austrian… And besides Hitler could not prove that he was not a “Jew” according to the Nazi definition of “Jew”, as one of his paternal grandmother was employed by a wealthy Jew, and got a child of unkown male parentage.

The most famous example of an “Aryan” baby was actually the picture of a… Jewish baby… which throned as the cover of a Nazi propaganda magazine (I have written an essay on this, years ago).

Nazism was then also an adventure in sadomasochism, rejection of reality and self-rejection, not just racial hatred… As seen in today’s war, that invasion of Ukraine officially motivated by claiming Ukrainian nationalists are Nazis…

Obviouly those massively engaging in “Nazi” behavior in Ukraine are those obsessed by Nazism in Ukraine, namely Putin and his orcs.

Sadomasochism is one concept. The sadist extolls pain, giving pain, but then receiving it belongs to the same universe… One doesn’t go without the other…

Patrice Ayme

Reference: Photos That Helped to Document the Holocaust Were Taken by a Nazi

Historians have relied on Herman Heukels’s pictures of Jewish persecution in World War II, but it’s not widely known that the Dutch photographer shot them as Nazi propaganda.

Herman Heukels looked more like the Jewish archetype which he condemned to extinction… than the pictures of Jews he himself took… The latter looked quite often like fully ordinary Europeans… This may be why the Nazis, ultimately did not use the pictures he made…

PUTIN, PLUTOCRACY & The WEST (Standard)

Putin played the West. But first the West played Putin. Or more exactly the powers that be in the West played Putin [1].  This deliberate instrumentalization of Putin by the West became obvious early on. 

A number of events, perpetrators and witnesses revealed that Putin an the secret service he used to lead, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, lit. ‘Committee for State Security, FSB/KGB the Russian/Soviet secret security political police, had orchestrated the bombing of appartment building blocks in Russia.

Why?

The KGB/FSB had constrained (elected) Russian president Yeltsin to choose and nominate Putin as Prime Minister, first. Then Yeltsin made Putin President. The KGB/FSB had made Yeltsin an offer he couldn’t refuse, obviously. 

However elections had to be conducted soon and Putin was pulling only 2%. One factor that had humiliated and weakened Yeltsin was the first war with Chechnya, which Russia had lost, giving that Muslim country de facto independence. Putin accused Chechnya to have done these multiple apartment building attacks, which killed hundreds of Russians, and viewing this as a casus belli, Putin attacked Chechnya with maximal force…. Conveniently discarding all rules about civilized warfare… in the grand old tradition of Russian wars, especially those conducted in the Caucasus mountains. 

One Chechnen out of six was killed, the capital, Grozny was leveled, and Putin won totally over his imaginary enemy. Putin became wildly popular and got elected Russian president in a landslide. Considering how he got elected, though, we should not view him as a legitimate president.

Western intelligence knew all of this, and it was obvious Putin had orchestrated it, as Chechnya had no interest whatsoever to disrupt the status quo… whereas Putin had. 

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The West kept on shaking Putin’s hand, because the West knew the evil Putin did in Chechnya, and how he got in power, leveraging that. Knowing that he knew they knew, Western leaders thought Putin was their man, who would do their thing, namely a cheap energy policy. But minds, and, in particular evil, have an inertia of their own. So Putin kept on doing evil, what he did best, and the West kept hoping he was their man, providing cheap fossil fuel energy.

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Then Putin became the darling of the West. A genocidal mass murderer became central to world energy policy. At first sight, this is counterintuitive and paradoxal: how could a tyrannical murderous evil monster become the friend of representative democracies?

Well, what if these representative democracies are mostly only democratic in name, and mostly represent global plutocrats?

There is nothing new in this strategy: in the 1930s, the Western plutocrats did the same with Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and, less well-known, Stalin. Hirohito got oil to invade China from US plutocrats. Plutocracy means evil-power. It was evil to enable these evil-doesr, but most profitable to Western plutocrats.

Plutocrats love evil tyrants: their kind, writ large.

The Putin problem is a plutocratic problem. It’s global plutocracy which played us, and Putin was one of its pawns, as Hitler and Stalin were. 

Patrice Ayme

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[1] (The French secret services were ordered in the 1990s, by elected leaders, not to have anything to do with Russia anymore; source the “25 years in the secret services” of “Pierre Siramy”, a top DGSE operative, who thought in 2010 that the policy of ignoring Russia was the gravest mistake; it is likely the same order was given to their US and UK colleagues.)

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P/S 1: The essence of this comment, that many of the world’s tyrants, in the last century, were instruments of global plutocracy, was censored by the plutocratic New York Times. Hundreds of innocuous comments were allowed, though.

I then sent another comment, not directly accusing global plutocracy, the one in italics underlined above. It was immediately published.

One has to understand that the descendants of those who crucially helped Stalin and  Hitler to get or stay in power, are themselves in power… And act through countless schemes, foundations, universities, think tanks, corporate boards, etc… All this held by anonymous corporations… 

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P/S 2: Many naive and ill-informed left leaning individuals, following sheepishly the propaganda they are submitted to by their minders in the Kremlin, believe that Putin is an opponent of the “West”… because that’s what he says. Hitler also pretended to be a defender of minorities, and just like Putin, was an instrument of global plutocracy. Hitler knew this, and told confidantes he was exasperated with making nice talk with plutocrats… For example before a dinner in Italy he told Rommel he resented having to sit next to some extremely wealthy Italian aristocrat…

Naive leftists have then made a weapon of global plutocracy, Putin, into their hero. 

Just as Hitler, or Mao, or Hirohito, Putin, forgetting that he is where he is because of Western plutocracy, has gone rogue.

Amusingly the French secret services (DGSE) knew very well that, in the 1990s, Western ecologists were paid by Putin and his ilk, the Russian intelligence services. So follow this: Putin and his ilk are put in power by Western fossil fuel plutocrats, and then, on their (apparent) own, feed ecologists, who, not by coincidence, demolish nuclear industry and nuclear research (for better nuclear industry)… With the final effect of ostering fossil fuels domination by Western plutocracy and its proxies (say ARAMCO)….

Putin did this in Chechnya, here is Grozny, 23 years ago. Then he did it in Aleppo an ancient metropolis in Syria, then in many places over Ukraine. The point is that Western leaders knew very well about Chechnya… and it excited them… Western elected politicians are selected, then elected, becuase they are most qualified to represent eil power. In Putin, they seriously saw their man, and kept shaking his hand. And this is not just a case of the big bad evil US governing classes… German and French leadership obviously look at the Warsaw-Kyiv axis with a jaundiced eye. Those who know history well know that, for centuries, Poland, Ukraine and Lithuania were the same imperial power. Hence the diatribe of the French leader against the Polishone, and unfounded accusation of corruption against Ukraine on French “service public” TV… While the blatant corruption in France (how come the hyper wealthy pays no tax, and thus kept getting wealtheir and more influenctial?) is carefully not adressed…

TYRANNICAL GAS: European Union Feeds The Nuclear Tyrant.

Europe’s TYRANNICAL GAS:

The EU must “GET RID OF” the gas provided by Putin and his henchmen, the head of the European Commission said on Wednesday February 16, 2022. Let’s call it TYRANNICAL GAS.

Speaking to a plenary session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, (German born, polyglot and polycultural) Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, criticized Russia for “weaponizing the energy issue” in its conflict with the EU and its associate, Ukraine. (The European Union has three presidents right now presiding over different part of the European government; the rotating presidency is held by Macron, that is, France, just as it was when Putin invaded Georgia, a weird coincidence…)

Arguing that Moscow is not a credible energy supplier anymore since Gazprom restricted natural gas supplies to Europe in the last few months despite high demand, while claiming it didn’t, von der Leyen noted that the EU has since stepped up efforts to diversify its energy imports, securing more liquified natural gas supplies from international partners.

She claimed that the Union possessed enough gas reserves for the winter in case Russia disrupts the supply.

“We must diversify our energy sources, to get rid of the dependency of Russian gas, and heavily invest in renewable energy sources,” she said, asking the bloc to draw lessons from the current crisis with Russia.

Turning to the rising tensions between Russia on one side and Ukraine and the rest of the West on the other, von der Leyen said: “Ukraine today is a stronger, freer, and more sovereign country than in 2014. This is precisely why the Kremlin is threatening it again,” she observed.

Von der Leyen said Moscow sent “conflicting signals” over the past two days by announcing the withdrawal of troops from border regions, even as Russian lawmakers voted in favor of recognizing the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in eastern Ukraine as independent.

She called on Moscow to de-escalate tensions with deeds and not just words.

Ex-Belgium PM Charles Michel, the President of the European Council, also addressed EU lawmakers. He explained that EU and NATO officials were in daily contact “working at a level of intensity and quality never seen before.” The president of the European Council presides over the meetings of EU leaders elected in the various nations constituting theEuropean Union. So contrarily to what Europhobes claim, it is a completely democratic position (limited to 2.5 years; election by double majority). 

Michel called on Russia to find the “courage” to choose diplomacy over conflict and warned that Moscow would have to face “massive consequences” in case of an invasion against Ukraine.

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What really bothers Putin is Ukrainian DEMOCRACY and its ASSOCIATION with the EUROPEAN UNION [1]. Putin knows that his military edge on Ukraine, in particular his hypersonic advantage, is going to diminish as . It’s a case of use it, or lose it, while everything else goes to waste: the Kaiser Trap.  

Putin’s advanced weapons are full of Western electronics. If Putin had no cash, he would have no advanced weapons.

The European Union has fed a deadly cancer, the mood that the Kremlin should rule over Eurasia. Dictator Putin proposed it initially with sotto voce. Now Putin is using his nuclear voice. It could not be any clearer.  

Patrice Ayme

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[1]

To enlighten the gullible who look at Putin with love eyes here is a (small) part of the Association Treaty Between Ukraine and the EU (including Great Britain):

Article 1 Objectives 1. An ASSOCIATION between the UNION AND ITS MEMBER STATES, OF THE ONE PART, AND UKRAINE, OF THE OTHER PART, IS HEREBY ESTABLISHED. 

2. The aims of this association are: (a) to promote gradual rapprochement between the Parties based on common values and close and privileged links, and increasing Ukraine’s association with EU policies and participation in programmes and agencies; b) to provide an appropriate framework for enhanced political dialogue in all areas of mutual interest; (c) to promote, preserve and strengthen peace and stability in the regional and international dimensions in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter, and of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the objectives of the Charter of Paris for a New Europe of 1990; 

(d) to establish conditions for enhanced economic and trade relations leading towards Ukraine’s gradual integration in the EU Internal Market, including by setting up a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area as stipulated in Title IV (Trade and Trade-related Matters) of this Agreement, and to support Ukrainian efforts to complete the transition into a functioning market economy by means of, inter alia, the progressive approximation of its legislation to that of the Union; 

(e) to enhance cooperation in the field of Justice, Freedom and Security with the aim of reinforcing the rule of law and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms; 

(f) to establish conditions for increasingly close cooperation in other areas of mutual interest. 

GENERAL PRINCIPLES 

Article 2 

Respect for democratic principles, human rights and fundamental freedoms, as defined in particular in the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Charter of Paris for a New Europe of 1990, and other relevant human rights instruments, among them the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and respect for the principle of the rule of law shall form the basis of the domestic and external policies of the Parties and constitute essential elements of this Agreement. Promotion of respect for the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity, inviolability of borders and independence, as well as countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, related materials and their means of delivery also constitute essential elements of this Agreement. L 161/6 EN Official Journal of the European Union 29.5.2014 Article 3 The Parties recognise that the principles of a free market economy underpin their relationship. The rule of law, good governance, the fight against corruption, the fight against the different forms of trans-national organised crime and terrorism, the promotion of sustainable development and effective multilateralism are central to enhancing the relationship between the Parties. TITLE II POLITICAL DIALOGUE AND REFORM, POLITICAL ASSOCIATION, COOPERATION AND CONVERGENCE IN THE FIELD OF FOREIGN AND SECURITY POLICY, etc…

Here is Putin’s answer: Hundreds of Iskander missiles already deployed more than a decade ago, and now with much more advanced versions:

Iskander Hypersonic Mach 7 missile. Explosive power is probably at least 3 tons of TNT (personal computation). It flies at 50 kms altitude, one mile and a half per second, and does evading maneuvers at 30 gs…