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Putin’s Speech in the UN: The Leopard Cannot Change His Spots

September 2015. The Russian Federation is going through a systemic crisis caused by the well-known foreign policy course of the Kremlin, which is completely inconsistent with the international law. Under the impact of international sanctions Russian economy is in stalemate, oil prices are growing down and the dollar is raising. Furthermore the dynamics of Russian-American relations reached perhaps the lowest point since the “Cold War”. Against the backdrop of such a comprehensive crisis President Putin decided to take a desperate step: to come to New York and from the UN rostrum persuade the international community in his indisputable rightness and exceptional purity of intentions.

As expected, Putin's speech was mainly focused on the need of creating an international coalition to combat terrorism. One day, in September 2001, Putin had already performed a similar trick. At that time, in response to the military support provided by Putin in the course of the war in Afghanistan, President Bush helped Putin to improve his reputation. Consequently his reputation tarnished considerably because of the so-called “counter-terrorist operation”, conducted by the Russian federal forces in Chechnya. Today the stakes are much higher. In exchange for fighting ISIS in the Middle East, Putin offers the international community to turn a blind eye to the actual Russian aggression against Ukraine. Gradually, by freezing conflict in Donbas region, Vladimir Putin prepares Russia for a new venture – intervention in the Syrian interfaith crisis.

Naturally, the topic of the fighting terrorism was preceded by several passages concerning the guilt of the West and, particularly, the United States of fomenting revolutionary processes in the North Africa, Middle East and Ukraine. Putin also threw up NATO, the umpteenth time stressing inexpediency of its existence and, especially, expansion on the East. Making reference to fundamental WTO principles, Putin remembered as well the illegitimacy of international economic sanctions against Russia as “a means of eliminating competitors in the market”. To be brief, the same old story.

The most noticeable part of Putin’s nearly half an hour’s speech was an active protection of the existing world order. Considerable part of his speech Putin devoted to the justification of the need to maintain the leading role of the UN on the global political arena. The reason is clear: the Russian Federation is able to stay afloat only by having the veto right in the UN Security Council. The times of bipolar confrontation between the two world systems have long been in the past and now Russia has only two ways: either actively cooperate with the member-states of the Euro-Atlantic space, while playing by certain rules, or become the next global outcast, waiting for the complete collapse of the economy and further disintegration of statehood. And no “integration of integrations” within the framework of the Eurasian Economic Community and the Chinese “New Silk Road”, so coveted by Putin, will not help!