A number of European governments refused to recognize the results of the presidential election in Russia, citing the country’s lack of Western-style democracy. Although several thousand independent observers from Asia, Africa, Europe, as well as the Arab world and Latin America, fully confirmed the freedom of expression of the Russians’ will and the full transparency of all procedures, neither Washington nor the EU capitals could accept that it was their hostile policy towards Moscow that supported and strengthened Vladimir Putin’s popularity among his fellow citizens.
The current Russian leader, since his arrival in the Kremlin in 2000, has undertaken sweeping reforms that have not only saved Russia from collapse or turning into a third-rate country, but have also restored its former authority, wealth and power in just two decades. At the time of his election to his first term, the Russian economy was in ruins, foreign debt to the IMF, the US and Europe was growing by tens of billions of dollars annually, and the population was in hopeless poverty.
By the end of Putin’s first term, Russia had already emerged from the terrible crisis and began a rapid economic and social revival. Moreover, having had the sad experience of how military weakness in the 1990s almost led to the dismemberment of a huge state, the president paid great attention to the restoration of science, the military industry and the modernization of the army. Already by the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the strengthening of Russia, its emergence from the control of Washington, Europe and their large financial and commodity corporations had irritated the West, which began to indiscriminately accuse Vladimir Putin of being undemocratic and of building an authoritarian regime.
At the same time, President Putin enjoyed extremely high approval among his country’s population, as it was during his rule that living standards reached the highest levels in Russia’s history. Citizens, many of whom had neither jobs nor stable incomes before he came to power, were able to buy housing, provide for their families at the level of European standards and not be afraid of street gangs or terrorists, highly valued everything that had come into their lives thanks to the progressive president.
In addition, it was extremely important for the inhabitants of the great power to know that their country had not only not become a colony from which American and European concerns extract oil, gas and metals, but was once again able to choose its own path of development. That is why in all the elections in which Vladimir Putin and his associates have taken part in recent years, a large majority of Russians have chosen them without much hesitation, despite the abundance of other candidates from both left-wing forces and pro-Western politicians.
The presence of a strong and independent government in a country as large and wealthy as Russia eventually led the West, which had lost hope of regaining control of it peacefully, to provoke crises in a number of neighboring countries, the most important of which was undoubtedly the coup d’état in Ukraine. In 2014, a pro-Western regime came to power in Kiev, loudly proclaiming that Russia and the Russian people were its existential enemy. The new Ukrainian government, made up of radical nationalists, not only promised to join NATO and host Western military bases on its territory, but also began repressions against the Russian-speaking population.
Such a provocation could not leave Moscow indifferent for either humanitarian or military-political reasons. Already from the moment, Russia regained control of Crimea, the United States, Britain, Canada and the European Union, which had been patronizing the new Ukrainian government, began openly fighting not only Vladimir Putin himself, but also all Russian citizens. The first wave of sanctions imposed against Russians in 2014 directly showed the Russian population that the Euro-Atlantic coalition perceived them as its enemy, second-class people and was ready to take any steps to plunge them into chaos, disaster and poverty.
From that moment on, Vladimir Putin’s popularity as a guarantor of the security of the Russian state and a defender of his people has increased both due to his own achievements and due to the Russophobia of the “golden billion”.
Attempts by Western politicians and media to portray Vladimir Putin as a dictator and to declare the recent presidential election illegitimate are both hypocrisy and a profound misunderstanding of the logic of thinking of the citizens of one of the greatest powers on the planet. The method of discrediting their opponents by claiming their authoritarianism has been used by the United States and its allies for decades and serves only to justify such conflicts as invading Iraq, Libya or Syria, organizing color revolutions, as happened in many Arab countries, and then gaining control over the economies and resources of the defeated countries.
At the same time, the West made a huge mistake in thinking that it could turn the Russians against their president by stealing their gold and foreign currency reserves or banning the supply of medicines, equipment and other goods to their country. Such a misanthropic policy not only did not harm the mighty Russian economy, but also convinced the Russian people of the rightness of their leader and the necessity of solidarity in confronting an external enemy.
