Larsson läser
Janerik Larsson
Janerik Larsson
I en lång analys redovisar Sunday Times idag den nya grekiska regeringens nära relationer med Putins regim. Här en glimt:
Several of Putin’s new friends, from the National Front in France to Hungary’s Jobbik, have been elected to the European parliament. But Tsipras is the first to win national power. And never before has Greece had a cabinet so stuffed with fans of the Kremlin.
Tsipras himself is one of the cheerleaders, having visited Moscow in May last year after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. He met key Putin allies, including Valentina Matviyenko, chairwoman of the federation council of the Russian Federation, and Alexei Pushkov, chairman of the Russian parliament’s foreign affairs committee.
Both are on the American sanctions list. Matviyenko also figures on the sanctions list of the EU. They no doubt appreciated the way Tsipras parroted the Kremlin’s hostile rhetoric towards the “fascists” running the revolutionary government in Kiev.
However, nothing better exemplifies the depth of pro-Russia feeling in the ranks of the Syriza party than the antics of Nikos Kotzias, the new foreign minister. A former communist, he wrote a book decades ago attacking Poland’s Solidarity movement. More recently he has defended Russian actions in Crimea and Ukraine as the understandable behaviour of a superpower “encircled” by America and destabilised by Germany.
Even more alarmingly, he was photographed in 2013 on the steps of Piraeus University next to Alexander Dugin, a bearded Russian nationalist who has expressed admiration for the Nazis and wants to extend the Kremlin’s sway into western Europe.
Kotzias, a former professor at the university, introduced a lecture by Dugin, one of the most fervent advocates of a Russian military invasion of Ukraine. In it Dugin argued that Greece should participate “in the recreation of the architecture of Europe” to form an “eastern pole of European identity” with Serbia and other supporters of Russia.
Detailed evidence of Syriza’s ties to Dugin surfaced last December when a Russian hacker group released several emails between a close friend of Dugin who had lived for several years in Greece and an official in Dugin’s “Eurasia” movement. Some of the emails related to efforts by Dugin and Konstantin Malofeev, a Russian oligarch who supports him, to create a network of European politicians and intellectuals sympathetic to Russia.