Analysis Extra: The Pull of Putin
Analysis
BBC
4.6 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 2017
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why do populist politicians across the West want warmer relations with Russia? Are they just Kremlin agents? Or are they tapping into a growing desire to find common cause with Moscow – and end East-West tension? Tim Whewell travels from Russia to America and across Europe to unravel the many different strands of pro-Moscow thinking, and offer a provocative analysis which challenges conventional thinking about the relationship between Russia and the West.
Donald Trump is just one of a new breed of Western politicians who want warmer relations with Vladimir Putin. Most Western experts say that’s dangerous: an aggressive Russia is plotting to divide and weaken the West. But Trump and others seem to have tapped into a popular desire to reduce tension and discover what Moscow and the West have in common. Could Moscow now lead a “Conservative International”, promoting traditional social values and national sovereignty around the world? On the right, some see Russia as a spiritual beacon. Others, both on the right and left, simply think the threat from the East is much exaggerated – and are warming to Russia as a protest against the Western establishment. Maybe it's time for a new way of understanding relations between the old superpowers.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks for downloading this podcast. |
| 0:02.0 | It's not exactly an addition of analysis, |
| 0:04.2 | but a program that the analysis editor thought |
| 0:06.3 | listeners might like to hear anyway. |
| 0:08.5 | It's been made by me, Tim Huell, |
| 0:10.3 | and it's called The Pool of Putin. I'll be asking why some in the West now want a warmer |
| 0:15.9 | relationship with Russia. Donald Trump has made clear that he does and some European politicians |
| 0:21.5 | agree with him. |
| 0:22.7 | There are those who say that Russia's been unfairly judged, |
| 0:25.9 | and others even think that we could learn from its example. |
| 0:29.4 | There's certainly minority views, |
| 0:31.7 | but not quite as rare as they were. So stay with me over the next half hour |
| 0:35.6 | or so and find out why in the pool of Putin. On Red Square in Moscow in Moscow, a astrich going to |
| 0:45.0 | on Red Square in Moscow, |
| 0:50.0 | the bells of the Kremlin's spaskey tower |
| 0:52.0 | are striking the hour, echoing over the cobbles. |
| 0:56.1 | They still sound to me as they did when I first heard them 40 years ago in Soviet times. |
| 1:01.5 | Cold, harsh, slightly sinister, quite unlike the chummy bells of Big Ben. |
| 1:08.0 | Everyone remembers that this was the centre of what Ronald Reagan called the evil empire and under that former KGB agent |
| 1:15.8 | Vladimir Putin the Russian state has become in many people's eyes pretty evil again |
| 1:21.2 | Prince Charles no less is reported to have compared Putin to Hitler. |
| 1:26.2 | And yet the person who's now the most powerful in the world is immune to all that talk. |
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