We could spend a lot of time unpacking Putin’s presentation. One could easily forget that the Putin who took to the stage in New York is the very same man who personally oversaw last year’s annexation of Crimea — the first time since the end of World War II that a European power has seized land from a neighbor by military force. So much for those hallowed U.N. principles of peaceful conflict resolution and respect for territorial integrity. And the image of the sober statesman at the General Assembly doesn’t square with the less savory picture of a leader who doses dissenters with radioactive poison and raises thugs like Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov to key government positions.
Putin’s speech will undoubtedly meet with rave reviews from his usual fan club — that odd collection of Orthodox homophobes, Hollywood has-beens, and grumpy populists (both left and right). So be it.
But this time around the Russian president was really aiming for bigger fish. As befits his grandiose surroundings, he was clearly wooing serious policymakers. He made his plea for an anti-Islamic State coalition by invoking the anti-Hitler alliance of Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt — reminding his audience that defeating big enemies sometimes requires unlikely bedfellows. “On the basis of international law,” he said, “we must join efforts to address the problems that all of us are facing and create a genuinely broad international coalition against terrorism.”
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