MESOP NEWS TODAYS ANALYSIS MEMRI Special Dispatch No. 7207 – Russian Military Expert Goltz: Putin Is Trying On Stalin’s Yalta Boots – 4 Dec 2017

The Russian military affairs expert Aleksandr Goltz argues that Russian President Vladimir Putin, having failed to secure a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump at the APEC summit in Vietnam, “desperately needed some visible proof that he was still a global leader”. The proof was presumably supplied by the Sochi meeting that many Russian analysts defined as the new Yalta without Americans. Goltz explains that Putin in Sochi sought to ratify his perception on the workings of world politics: the big and strong nations decide the fate of the smaller and weaker ones. However, according to Goltz, Putin’s partners, Iran and Turkey, did not meet the criteria of great powers and above all they were players with chequered reputations and contradictory interests. This makes the trilateral Russian-Iranian-Turkish partnership inherently unstable..

Goltz concludes that Sochi may merely serve as a prologue to another confrontation. “A confrontation in which allies will quickly become enemies, and there will be no new allies for Moscow. After all, there are not that many pariahs in the world…”

Below are excerpts of Goltz’s article, titled “Putin Is Trying On Stalin’s Boots”:

https://www.memri.org/reports/russian-military-expert-goltz-putin-trying-stalins-yalta-boots