EDITORIAL: Putin on the Edge


Putin on the Edge

An extraordinary YouTube video was making the rounds in Russia circles last week.  It showed Vladimir Putin in his shirtsleeves being confronted outside a government building in Nizhny Novgorod by a throng of enraged local residents who had watched their lives go up in flames.

Putin is attacked for having done nothing to prepare the local population for the disaster of spreading wildfires, and for having failed to make a timely response to the disaster after it occurred.  In brutal, condescending language, talking to Putin as if he were a child, the residents demand action, and Putin stammers ridiculous promises about rebuilding homes from the ground up.

Needless to say, the confrontation was not aired on any national broadcast television, because all those stations are owned and operated by Putin himself.

But the world knows what Russian citizens do not:

Elderly resident Vera Sakharova complained that firefighters had come too lat. “We did not have any help,” she told AFP. “We had to do everything ourselves.” Sceptical of promises of state help, Sakharova predicted: “They have given us nothing, and they won’t give us anything. I don’t know what we are going to do after this,” she added.

“You aren’t doing anything, everything is burning,” another woman can be heard shouting in the footage, which has been viewed more than 30,000 times but was not shown on state television. “Our administration is working very badly, it needs to be convicted,” another woman shouts, as Putin is shown turning and walking away.

Directing this kind of hot rhetoric at Putin while cameras roll, and having that footage go public, shows that Mr. Putin is slipping.  His government is not prepared to deal with national crises like the wildfires, which are clearly the result both of bungled environmental policy and a total failure to diversify and develop the economic base.

Instead, Putin has pursued aggressive cold-war provocation at every turn, behaving exactly the way his Soviet fathers and mothers did. They drove their nation to ruin trying vainly to compete the with far superior United States, and Putin is hurtling down the same road at breakneck speed.

Soon, Russia’s neck will indeed, once again, be broken.

29 responses to “EDITORIAL: Putin on the Edge

  1. “But the world knows what Russian citizens do not:”
    At least some Russian citizens do know. A couple of days ago my father watched the official ‘edited’ version of this footage on an official TV channel, where they showed the bit in which Putin is promising to rebuild the burnt-down houses and give the victims money. My father then turned on his computer and went searching for the video on youtube, pretty soon he was watching the ‘director’s cut’ with the desperate women cursing Putin for inaction.
    they really f.u.c.k.e.d up royally this time, sitting on their asses for over a month while the fires spread.

  2. Far superior United States? please, Kim do i have to make you cry again by proving you wrong to shut you up? if yes i can’t be asked to type out that essay i wrote you, so just go back and read it again, then go cry a bit and then come back and contribute something decent

  3. “It’s always darkest before dawn”

    we shall overcome!

  4. Bogdan from Australia

    No doubt that ANDREY has been created from liquified and then cristalise KGB FART!

    The best prof lies in his incoherent rant.

    America experiences temporaty problems because the leftist degenerates (like Putin and yourself) managed to get the grip on the US government.

    But it will be over soon.

    The Leftists will be running for their lives in an animalistic fear and licking Putin’s arse while begging for asylum in your glorious Mother RUSSIA.

    But even faster they will realise that the life (even as a poor commie bastard) in US is million times better than in the Putinist “worker’s paradise”

    And you will ate GOVNO…

    • Laszlo Tooth Jr.

      Bogdan wrote: “The Leftists will be running for their lives in an animalistic fear and licking Putin’s arse while begging for asylum in your glorious Mother RUSSIA… And you will ate GOVNO

      Exactly, Bogdan! All the Leftists from around the World (including 150 million here in USA) will be running for their lives to Russia in an animalistic fear while you are shooting at them with your machine gun, where they will ate gauno and will drunk vodka , until their English grammar will improved from learning from an intellectual russophobic giant like yourself.

      • Hi Ostap, still changing names to make up for your total lack of real life friends I see.

        BTW, going to apologise for lying now that Putin has recognised the spies as hero’s of Russia?

        • Остап Бендер

          Hi Andrew,

          First of all. let me complement you on your improving English grammar: “hero’s of Russia” is not as bad as your usual grammar. You are getting almost as good at English (your native tongue) as Bogdan.

          Second, could you please remind me what I “lied” about in terms of “Putin recognising the spies as hero’s of Russia?” Did I “lie” that he DID recognise the spies as heroes of Russia? Or did I “lie” that he DIDN’T recognise the spies as heroes of Russia? Or both? Please provide relevant quotes.

          • Well Ostap the retard, you claimed that they were not spies, that it was a frame up by the FBI, that the spies were simply poor innocent civilians, this was all lies.

            By the way, you do realise that you have to use / to stop italics don’t you?

            You are pathetic.

            • Остап Бендер

              So, what exactly did Putin say that proves that they were spies and not money launderers for KGB’s and other Russian mafias?

              • Wel that they were great Russian patriots, who suffered hard working conditions while serving their country etc.

                Public welcomes by the PM are not usually given to money launderers you sack of waste.

                • Остап Бендер

                  So, you now admit that you lied when you called these money launderers as “spies”, retard?

                  They had their day in the US court. So, which one of them was convicted of “spying”? None.

                  It is just that you are too retarded, Andrew, to understand that these people were accused and convicted of not registering as official employees of the Russian government and/or money laundering, not of spying.

    • Putin leftist? I thought he’s right wing dictator.

      • Well, he certainly supports a lot of leftis dictators, Hugo Chavez springs to mind….

      • Of course not he’s not leftist, he’s only out for power and money. Gangsters like him are criminals and not politicians, and it doesn’t matter if they call themselves “socialist” or “comrade” like Saddam and Milosevic.

  5. You think things are bad now that the leftists took over? hahahahaha, the last republican president was Bush, and he didn’t cause any problems at all, i mean he was a saint.
    Pppffff i don’t know why i even bother arguing with you

  6. Sing whatever song you want, and even though living standards are lower in Russia, lets look at some of the faults of the great America.
    HHmmm…..bankers controlling puppet leaders in the White House, hence you can say whatever you want about Putin, he is his own man, your ‘President’ is a puppet on the strings of wealthy bankers that start wars, burn cities in foreign countries for ‘freedom’ and ‘salvation’ and of course have nothing to do with the natural resources of those countries.
    Also, you are the nation that is responsible for around 90% of global oppression, violence and destruction. Your nation portrays anyone who refuses to bow to them and lick their ass as a terrorist or rebel, then release media lies to slander them so that people like you around the world and in your precious America will sing along with you and approave huge expenditure of the tax payers money and the lives of soldiers in wars and violence that will only benefit a few rich families that run your country.

    • Andrey, why don’t you compare Russia to Somalia or Afghanistan or some such place? I mean if the only way to prove that Russia doesn’t really suck that much is by finding someplace that sucks even more then that would be the way to go.
      The US is not perfect in the sense that self-reliance is not everyone’s cup of tea, some people prefer to have a big state taking care of them, thus there’s Europe and Scandinavia, but boy, Russia’s a place where there’s a huge government that not only doesn’t take care of you, but it also does everything in its power to prevent you from taking care of yourself, so it kind of doesn’t make sense.

    • If you say that the President of the United States is a puppet of some bankers, prove it!

  7. When you come up with a decent retort, please post it, and i’m not interested in being called KGB or commie or any other outdated rudness directed at Russian people who prove you wrong

    • I will do my best to come up with “a decent retort” (as you have quaintly put it) but I don’t know what your argument is, so how can I refute it? What is your argument?

  8. The kremlin created this problem because the kremlin does not care about the russian sheeple.

    The polluting smog comes from fires of peat bogs to the south and east of Moscow. The bogs were drained in Soviet times to harvest the peat, leaving them prone to wildfires — especially in heat waves.

    Read more: http://www.kyivpost.com/news/russia/detail/76804/#ixzz0vjRhhE1u

  9. Putin Sang Songs While Russia Burned

    04 August 2010

    By Yulia Latynina

    Since the first wildfires started a month ago, 125,000 hectares of Russia’s forest have been destroyed in 17 regions, and 40 people have died.

    Russia’s statistics on casualties from fires have always differed drastically from those in the West. For example, four firefighters died during wildfires in Washington state in 2001. Nine firefighters died in Colorado in 2002. Eleven firefighters died during Spain’s fires of 2005. Only one firefighter has died during this summer’s fires in Russia.

    In developed countries, citizens don’t perish in fires. Firefighters perish. In Russia, it is directly the opposite, and there is a very good reason for this. In so many cases, there are no firefighters to put out the fires. Take, for example, the village of Verkhnyaya Vereya in the Nizhny Novgorod region, where all of its 341 houses burned to the ground and seven people died. There was no fire station in the village, and the two firefighting vehicles on watch drove the other way when they were called to duty.

    People don’t die this way in Europe or the United States. This is how people die in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

    Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited Verkhnyaya Vereya. While wearing a neatly pressed button-down shirt, he promised to severely punish bureaucrats who did not properly fight the fires. In reality, there is really only one bureaucrat who is responsible for this tragedy — Putin himself. After all, it was Putin who signed the Forest Code in 2007. The code placed the responsibility for defending forestlands on those who had the rights to use them. What an ingenious idea. This means that the Forest Code allows the Khimki forest to be “protected” by those who are now cutting it down.

    In 2008, there were 200,386 fires in which 15,165 people died in Russia. In the United States for the same time period, there were 1,451,000 fires in which 3,320 people died. Here are the conclusions that can be drawn from these statistics: First, 99 percent of all fires in Russia are not registered. Second, the number of deaths from fires per 1,000 people is 10 times higher in Russia than in the United States.


    • The officially-approved soundtrack to Russia burning down is apparently “From Where the Motherland Begins”.

      Could someone provide me with lyrics or an mp3?

  10. RV, my comment was not for you, it was for Bogdan from Australia .
    He said that the problems in his country are just because the leftists took over, and my arguement is that how can he criticise the leftist government in place in the U.S. right now, when the last Republican government messed things up so badly that the U.S. will be dealing with these issues for atleast another two decades.

  11. Hi Robert,

    I found this:

    Russian barbarian soldiers blowing up bridges, burn forests!

  12. The kremlin’s Potamkin village lives on.

    Putin’s Pee Joke: It Would Be Funny if it Weren’t so Sad


  13. Pingback: Official Russia | Video: Putin Accosted by Angry Victims of Wildfires

  14. The kremlin finds an innovative way to dispose of their obsolete military hardware:

    Update: Forest fire destroyed 13 hangars at navy base near Moscow

    The tabloid-style Lifenews.ru website, renowned for its hard-hitting stories, said around 200 planes and helicopters, worth up to 20 billion roubles, were lost in the blaze. It broadcast a video clip showing charred equipment and ash.

    Read more:


  15. Offices close as Moscow chokes

    Today at 14:06 | Reuters





    Read more: http://www.kyivpost.com/news/russia/detail/77217/#ixzz0vpkHLh6q

    PS A comment from the above link:

    Russia has little respect for the environmment, environmentals vandals its time to psy. Thats a lesson for Russia, Moscow is Russia and thats what happens when you have such a concentration of assets and people in one place. This will reduce the price of Moscow real estate and its overvalued flats. The fire should keep burning for a year to teach arrogant Putin a lesson in humility, Russia is not s superpower, its a failed state and Putin is s small puppet breathing dirty air through his nostrils, hope he chokes.

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