Russian Sanctions Are Now Syriza's Bargaining Chip

[Purveyor]

Jan 28, 2015 8:47 AM EST
By Leonid Bershidsky

Greece's new rulers are engaging in dangerous brinkmanship: They may be bargaining too hard for the debt write-off they seek from the European Union.

On Tuesday, in one of its first foreign policy moves, the Syriza-led government distanced itself from an EU statement calling for additional sanctions against Russia for its interference in Ukraine. Since these can be imposed only by the unanimous consent of the EU's 28 members, Greece is essentially threatening to torpedo any further sanctions.

The leaders of the far-left Syriza party are blatantly pro-Russia. Alexis Tsipras, the new prime minister, has echoed the Russian line that "neo-Nazis" are part of Ukraine's government (they are not, though some are parliament members, and neo-Nazi units fight on the Kiev side in the eastern Ukraine conflict). He has gone out of his way to stress Greece's "strategic partnership" with Russia. And the first foreign official he met with as prime minister was Russian ambassador Andrei Maslov.

Yanis Varoufakis, the Greek intellectual who has been appointed finance minister, is no friend of Russian President Vladimir Putin -- he once voted against Athens University awarding the Russian leader an honorary degree -- but in March he wrote a blog post calling on the EU to "stop meddling" in Ukraine. He accused the West of double standards in objecting to the Crimea annexation and described Ukraine as "the battleground between Russia's industrial neo-feudalism, the U.S. State Department's ambitions and Germany's neo-Lebensraum policies." In line with this judgment, last September, the six Syriza members of the European Parliament voted against the ratification of Ukraine's trade and association pact with the EU.

Greece's new foreign minister Nikos Kotzias has been photographed in the company of Alexander Dugin, a Russian imperialist ideologue who is close to the Russian private backers of the rebellion in eastern Ukraine.

more...

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-28/russia-sanctions-are-syriza-s-new-bargaining-chip

[geek tragedy]

1. Not much of a bargaining chip as a long-standing

affinity between the far-left in Greece and the government in Moscow, dating back to the fall of Constantinople. It's more tribal than ideological, given that Putin is far, far more rightwing than any member of the much-despised (by Syriza) EU and NATO.

Tsipras, who wants to disband NATO or at least withdraw Greece from NATO, will never support anything remotely critical of Russia, so nothing to bargain over.

[ND-Dem]

2. says bloomberg. must be true then

[Fred Sanders]

3. Yes, the corporate media would do nothing to undermine a socialist government in Europe.

Those pesky neo-Nazi militias and honoured Neo-Nazi MP's are just nothing to bother ourselves about.

What government doesn't want neo-Nazi militia fighting for them?

[ND-Dem]

8. history says it's happened before, so why the sarcasm?

[HereSince1628]

4. if they won't do the IMF/big bank bidding they must be ridiculed

there is no other way to stop the contagion from spreading.

[Igel]

5. "Fascist" has one of two meanings.

It can easily have both or even more.

One is "opposed to socialism or communism." Lots of "fascists" out there.

The other is "anti-Russian" or anti-Red Army. In the '40s they were sort-of/kind-of equivalent. Now they're not, but you get a lot of "fascists" that aren't fascist in any regular usage of the term but simply don't like Russian hegemony.

Thing is, if you say "fashist" in Russian, it takes balls to not translate it as "fascist." Even if the "fascist" in question is actually socialist, Jewish, and gay, but is simply anti-Russian, there's this inexorable drive to keep the form of the word even if the meaning is utterly at odds with the meaning in the target language.

We had the same problem with "right" (conservative) and "left" (liberal) in Russian discourse in the '90s. The "right" was communist and conservative, while the left was (classical) liberal and wanted in some cases very pure laissez-faire capitalism and in other cases was social-liberal or neoliberal. That took a while to sort out.


The Greeks also have the whole Orthodox/break-away Orthodox/Uniate "thing" to deal with in the case of Ukraine and Russia. Russia treats the Ukrainian Orthodox church as non-existent and has shut some of them in the Crimea. As for the descendant of the Uniate church, they treat it like it's a rank heresy worthy of crucifixion, as though the Uniate hell-spawn was a daily threat to the anal chastity of every Orthodox priest and laic.

[DetlefK]

6. "Germany's neo-Lebensraum policies"? WTF?

Of course. All Germans are Nazis, all Russians are corrupt oligarchs and all Americans want to be the world-police.

[NuclearDem]

7. "Neo-Lebensraum"? You've got to be kidding me.

Because it's clearly Germany that's annexing part of other countries based on nationalistic fervor.