Clinton vows to thwart new Soviet Union

[WestVirginiaRebel]

 

Financial TImes:

 

The US is trying to prevent Russia from recreating a new version of the Soviet Union under the ruse of economic integration, Hillary Clinton warned on Thursday. “There is a move to re-Sovietise the region,” the US secretary of state told a news conference in Dublin hours before going into a meeting with her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov. “It’s not going to be called that. It’s going to be called a customs union, it will be called Eurasian Union and all of that,” she said, referring to various iterations of a Moscow-backed plan to deepen economic ties with its neighbours. “But let's make no mistake about it. We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it.” Mrs Clinton said efforts at regional hegemony had been accompanied by new campaigns of repression from pro-Moscow regimes throughout the former Soviet Union. Her tone signalled that the US was rethinking its “reset” in relations with Russia, declared in 2009, during which criticism of its human rights record has been muted and Moscow appeared to have a freer hand in the former Soviet region. The integration efforts she was referring to were championed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a newspaper article in October calling for deeper political and economic integration into a “Eurasian Union”.

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For a minute, I thought she was going to challenge her boss there...