Russian Sanctions Are Now Syriza's Bargaining Chip [View all]

[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.

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