Is there a certain aggravation of relations between Russia and the United States, or is this a normal process of eternal confrontation? How critical is the current aggravation of relations between Russia and America? Political scientist, founder and president of the Association of Information Operations Specialists Andrey Manoilo shared his opinion on the subject.
"The main confrontation in the world over the past hundred years has been the confrontation between the USSR, then Russia and the United States of America. This planet is always small for us. I have heard many times that the relations between Russia and the United States have never been worse. Are we going through another stage of exacerbation or is it the common political background of international reality?"
"This relationship has always been difficult. It is hard to recollect a moment when it was more or less simple. There were such periods, but there were very few of them in history.
"One of them is a short period of time after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when the Americans recognized Russia as one of the main strategic allies in the fight against international terrorism. They even documented that in one of their doctrines. Somewhere before 2005 there was a period of warming in relations, then they deteriorated again.
"Another moment was during the foundation of the Russian Federation on the ruins of the Soviet Union, when Yeltsin proclaimed a policy of complete openness. Kozyrev became the Foreign Minister, who would never have made his career if it was not for the collapse of the USSR. The Soviet Union collapsed, the Soviet nomenklatura went to waste, the Russian one, led by Yeltsin, took the lead.
Kozyrev earned him the reputation of Mr. Yes - he would catch any signal and do whatever he would be told, as if he were an employee of some secret department. He once asked one of his US colleagues if they could help him determine Russia's national interests. That was a period when the United States did not consider Russia as its enemy. They decided that all i's had been dotted, that Russia was not a country but a territory that the USA had under its control. Their prime goal was not to let Russia pose a threat to the USA. Then there was Bill Clinton, a friend who would pat Yeltsin on the shoulder and laugh his head off at his jokes - privatisation was developing to the tune of the Russian balalaika, under the USA's control."
"When Russia is weak, its president is drunk, then the USA becomes Russia's best friend."
"Now the relations are deteriorating, and there is no limit to this process in sight. The West became cautious about Russia after Putin's Munich speech. Of course, the West does not need Russia to be strong. The Internet has made the world crazy. How should Russia act in the sea of never-ending provocations? They are a very powerful weapon, and no one knows how to resist them. One should identify them in a timely manner not to get carried away. The Skripal case was a major provocation. The British acted as performers, but the operation itself followed the classic American scenario. When I presented my analysis of the Skripal case at the Moscow State University, BBC Canada was filming those lectures for three days. You can find them on the Internet.
"The first stage began with the poisoning of the Skripals on March 4, 2018 and ended later that month. There were four acts of stovepiping - the game of the sequential increase in stakes. With every act of stovepiping, the idea of the incident was modified. Over the course of one month, the idea has evolved from a piece of pie or something that the Skripals were allegedly poisoned with, to the use of weapons of mass destruction in Salisbury. Afterwards, the intelligence project team went on summer vacation, having achieved all the results needed, and the next stage began in September.
Then it was very important for the British to lure Petrov and Boshirov into public space so that they would confirm the things that the police and intelligence could not confirm - that it was them, who went to Salisbury and got filmed on CCTV."
"That weird Petrov and Boshirov interview on RT was made possible only with a permission from the FSB, probably. Could RT chief editor Margarita Simonyan just sit down with them to talk?"
"People like them cannot do anything on their own - they can only do what they are told."
"Who are they then?"
"President Vladimir Putin said at the Eastern Forum that they were neither military men nor officials, that they never served in government service. Afterwards, British intelligence services handed over applications for foreign passports over to two authoritative journalists in the UK. The journalists called the phone that was written on those applications and it turned out that they reached a military unit. The journalists asked those who picked up the phone whether they knew people named Petrov and Boshirov. Afterwards, the phone was unavailable for 24 hours. Some time later, someone picked up the phone and said that it was a warehouse of commercial equipment.
"I believe that it was a shock for Russia to find out that the Brits had photocopies of those passport applications from Petrov and Boshirov. Those were poor quality copies that even kids can make. If Russia had kept silence on the topic, the Brits would have had that story falling apart, because they were supposed to provide original documents for those photocopies.
"However, a representative of an official department announced that there was a criminal case instituted into the loss of information of particular importance. In other words, they were talking about the information was even more secret that top secret information. It goes about information of particular importance from the OVIR office (Foreigner Regional Registrational Office), the passport office, where the passports were issued to Petrov and Boshirov. It was said that several employees of that office were arrested. In a nutshell, it became absolutely clear that those applications were not fake. After all, what kind of secret information can a passport registration office have? This is a matter of personal data only."