Putin talks about The Jungle Book – again: Joanna Mellin, Stockholm April 23 at 05.32 – Foreign Chronicle

Stockholm, Friday.

The past weeks The world, or at least parts of it, was in full swing.

Is a new war brewing – in Europe? Is Russia about to shock its surroundings again as it did in 2014 when young men in green clothes quietly occupied and seized Ukrainian Crimea?

This time, in this case, it will be done with great fanfare. With tens of thousands of Russian troops, field hospitals and every conceivable weapon on the Ukrainian border. Foreign journalists traveled to Ukraine. I traveled to Ukraine. On Wednesday, we awaited the response, when Russian President Vladimir Putin will deliver his annual speech to Parliament.

We waited in vain. Putin talked about the jungle book. Rudyard Kipling Classic. Putin said Kipling was a great writer. He has quoted from The Jungle Book before.

Russian President Compare an unnamed sinister force, perhaps the United States, to the evil tiger Shere Khan, now transformed by a pitiful little jackal. Putin said, howls to please his boss.

Putin said, as usual, that the outside world accuses Russia of all kinds of evil. It has become like a new international sport. We in Russia are watching patiently until the day comes when we must respond, when our red lines are violated. Vladimir Putin added that wherever the red lines go, Russia decides on a case-by-case basis, and then we who listened did not become the wisest of all.

Would we interpret it as the tens of thousands of soldiers who ordered the repulsion of the Ukrainian border as they lay there waiting to break through the red line and then prepare for counterattacks?

He is an old Russian a story. The question revolves around how one surrounds a hostile world that accuses, slanders, threatens and undermines Russia’s national and international interests. Russia can do nothing but defend itself.

To an outside observer, it might seem quite the opposite, that it was Russia that annexed parts of another country, that in Russia opposition figures and journalists were killed, and that the country’s prominent opposition politician, now Alexei Navalny, was first poisoned, then imprisoned, but not Include it in the Russian official version of the story.

I was watching Russia For a long time, but I have to admit that it still, from time to time, totally makes me dizzy. In the end, you do not know what is outside nor in, what is right or wrong, what is fabricated and what is actually real. Perhaps this is the goal.

By the way, yesterday came news of orders for Russian soldiers to return from the Ukrainian border to their original positions. The danger is over for this time.

Joanna Mellin
[email protected]