BBC’s interview with Former Austrian Foreign Minister Karen Kneissl and other assorted news
As readers of these pages know well, it is not my custom to embed links to television interviews with political personalities or other celebrities. However, today I will make an exception and recommend to readers the interview taken several days ago with Austria’s former Foreign Minister Karen Kneissl (2017-2019) conducted by the BBC’s Moscow bureau chief Steve Rosenberg.
Putin described as 'most intelligent gentleman' by former Austrian foreign minister | BBC News
The interview took place in St Petersburg, where Kneissl now works as director of the Global Observatory for Russia’s Key Issues, a think tank within the St Petersburg State University. After leaving government in 2019, she had tried to find an academic position in some West European university and to resume her work as lecturer, which she had performed in many prestigious institutions for well over a decade in the past, but her political baggage as a “friend of Putin” marked her as blacklisted.
Kneissl’s unusual and outstanding life, both in its private and public aspects, are set out very well on her Wikipedia entry and I will not duplicate that here. What I do call attention to is the exceptional poise and self-confidence that we see in her answers to Rosenberg’s needling questions.
References to this interview have picked out the raisins from the cake. First is her characterization of Vladimir Putin as “the most intelligent gentleman I have ever met,” a gentleman in the tradition of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, as she further explains. Second is her rejection of Rosenberg’s suggestion that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had turned the world upside down. No, said Kneissl, that was not true at all. It was the war in Iraq that turned the world upside down. With both answers, she left her interrogator-interviewer speechless.
Bear in mind that Rosenberg puts his accusatory remarks to her softly, softly, in contrast to the frontal assault approach of his BBC colleague Steven Sackur, host of Hard Talk. A brief clip of the exchange between Sackur and Kneissl from an earlier BBC interview is included in the link above. Rosenberg’s fleshy face corresponds to his fat cat personality. Sackur’s lean and mean face speaks for itself. Kneissl handles herself very well with both.
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In the Russian news, one of the lead stories has been Vladimir Putin’s announcement yesterday that he will stand for re-election in 2024. The date has now been set at 15-17 March.
Today’s 20.00 o’clock Vesti program devoted perhaps ten minutes to the electoral campaign team that Putin has assembled, drawn from leaders in all walks of life.
At this point, he is the only declared candidate. It will be interesting to see whether any of the Duma parties decide to put up their own candidates to challenge him. I would say it is unlikely given the full-throated support of the Communists, A Just Russia and the Liberal Democrats for the war leadership of the President up to now. Instead, such candidates as emerge are to be expected from existing or to be formed parties enjoying less than 5% support in the electorate, and we may expect that Putin will not participate in any televised debates that may be scheduled.
Since 2024 is also the year of U.S. presidential elections the topic of who will stand for election there has been a source of amusement to Russian television viewers. In last night’s Vladimir Solovyov talk show, the consensus of panelists was that Russia will throw its backing to both Biden and Trump because the victory of either one spells the continued self-destruction of the United States. Brain-dead Biden supervises contradictory foreign and domestic policies that are tearing America apart while bankrupting the Treasury. Trump achieved the same by gross incompetence. As the Russians say, ‘Oy, oy, oy.”
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I close out today’s ruminations on the state of the world by a brief comment on the impact Ukrainian ‘war refugees’ have had on Brussels. You see it most everywhere if you take the time to look around. I think, for example, of how the International Press Club of Brussels, which was always CIA financed and had its share of spooks on the board of directors, was swiftly renamed and repurposed as the Ukrainian Press Club. That is what the sign on the door tells you today.
But a bigger issue is in the linguistic domain. Going back to the early days of Russia’s Special Military Operation when we had a substantial influx of Ukrainians arriving in Belgium to escape the war, to make their fortunes, or for whatever other reason, the Belgian government did what it could to reach out to them in what was assumed to be their own language. I remember how at the Covid testing and vaccination center in downtown Brussels that my wife and I visited, there were signs in proper Ukrainian outside and inside the building to guide any of the refugees who came in for processing.
Now on the basis of what I hear around me, I would say that the Belgian authorities got it all wrong. I use public transport and I see and hear a lot of Ukrainians around me. But these folks are all Russian speakers.
In two years I have yet to hear anyone speaking Ukrainian on the streets of Brussels, whereas Russian speakers are today many times more numerous than in the pre-2022 past, when we still welcomed Russian tourist groups. There can be no doubt that today’s Russian speakers who seem to be permanently installed here have arrived from Ukraine and not from Russia, because for all practical purposes there are no visas being issued to Russians from the Russian Federation for tourism or for business.
The commonplace fact of Russian speaking Ukrainians here is such that a couple of weeks ago when taking a bus out to the suburbs I overheard a Russian speaking passenger conversing in Russian with a Russian speaking “Belgian” bus driver with whom he had just met and somehow entered into a conversation.
These seemingly random observations confirm a very important truth: that Ukraine before the coup d’etat of 2014 and onset of its civil war had a very large Russian-speaking minority of perhaps 40% of the general population that could be compelled to learn and speak Ukrainian, as the folks in the West of their country wanted, only at the point of a gun.
And at the point of a gun, sensible people pull up stakes and leave.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023