“We had become accustomed (to the fact) that the Berlin Wall has fallen,” the Dalai Lama said, alluding to the shattering of the Communist bloc begun 25 years ago. Now President Putin seems to want to rebuild it. But he is hurting his own country by doing this. Isolation is suicide for Russia.”
Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama criticised Russia’s President Vladimir Putin as “self-centred” in a German newspaper interview Sunday, saying Putin seems to want to “rebuild the Berlin Wall”.
“His attitude is: ‘I, I, I’,” the Dalai Lama said, pointing out that Putin had served as Russian president, then prime minister and then president again.
“That’s a bit too much,” he told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper. “This is very self-centred.”
The Buddhist leader also had more criticism for Russia, now in the worst standoff with the West since the Cold War, than for China, which has ruled Tibet since its 1950 invasion.
“China and Russia, these are two very different cases,” said the Dalai Lama, voicing hope that “the modern world supports China becoming a democratic country”.
“China wants to be part of the global political system and will be ready to accept the international rules in the long run,” he said in the interview conducted in English.
“I don’t have the impression that this accounts for Russia and President Putin, as well, at the moment.
“We had become accustomed (to the fact) that the Berlin Wall has fallen,” he said, alluding to the shattering of the Communist bloc begun 25 years ago.
Now President Putin seems to want to rebuild it. But he is hurting his own country by doing this. Isolation is suicide for Russia.” – AsiaOne, 7 September 2014
Filed under: EU, russia, USA | Tagged: berlin wall, dalai lama, EU, geopolitics, imperialism, NATO, psychological warfare, russia, russian imperialism, selfishness, USA, vladimir putin |
Russian President Vladimir Putin is under Satan’s spell, says Patriarch Filaret – Reuters – New York Daily News – 6 September 2014
KIEV – President Vladimir Putin has fallen under the spell of Satan and faces eternal damnation unless he repents, a top Ukrainian clergyman said on Saturday in an unusually blunt statement that squarely blamed the Russian leader for the war in Ukraine.
Patriarch Filaret heads the Kiev Patriarchate, a branch of the Orthodox Church that broke away from Moscow in 1992 after the fall of the Soviet Union and the declaration of an independent Ukraine.
His church, a rival of the Moscow Patriarchate which is closely linked to Putin, strongly supports Ukrainian nationhood and the Kiev government’s struggle to defeat pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
“With great regret I must now say publicly that among the rulers of this world … there has appeared a new Cain, not by his name but by his deeds,” Patriarch Filaret said, invoking the Biblical character who killed his brother Abel.
“Like the first fratricide of history Cain, these deeds show that the afore-mentioned ruler has fallen under the action of Satan,” he said in the statement, published on the patriarchate’s website in Ukrainian, Russian and English. The statement, entitled “New Cain”, was released on the first full day of a ceasefire between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian rebels. At least 2,600 people have died in fighting in eastern Ukraine since it erupted in April.
Putin is a baptized Orthodox Christian and has forged close ties with Russia’s Orthodox Church, seeing it as a valuable ally in his battle with what he sees as a decadent Western world.
Filaret, who recently took over the Kiev patriarchate, said Putin had deliberately stoked the conflict in Ukraine by sending mercenaries, troops and weapons across the border and had spread lies via Russia’s mass media about what was really happening.
Putin denies sending Russian troops into Ukraine or arming the separatists, despite what Kiev and its Western backers say is overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
“This ruler is cynically lying, saying his country is not a party to the conflict in Ukraine, though he did everything in order to foment the conflict and maintain it,” said Filaret.
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