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Johnson: ‘Impossible to normalise relations with Putin and to allow him to win would be to give a green light to all the autocrats in the world’.
Boris Johnson made it very clear at the UK Conservative summit in Blackpool: “It is impossible and damaging to normalise relations with Vladimir Putin”. The British Prime Minister took stock of the very difficult situation in Europe and Russia’s war on Ukraine.
And the summary is that the West will no longer be able to normalise its relations with Putin, also because so many things have been said between leaders that even humanly it seems difficult.
Then Boris Johnson urged the countries of the West not to repeat the mistakes made after the annexation of Crimea. Which ones? Those of a guilty inertia that would condemn other countries today.
This is because letting Putin win means “allowing him to intimidate neighbouring countries and give a green light to autocrats around the world. And for the Uk prime minister, the invasion of Ukraine was ‘a barbaric attack on innocent civilians, the likes of which have not been seen since the 1940s’.
And there is a real danger: ‘Letting Putin win would be the end of any hope of freedom in Moldova and Georgia. There are people in the world, even in Western governments, who think it is better to agree with tyrants. I think they are profoundly wrong. To normalise relations with Putin after what happened, as we did in 2014, would be to repeat the same mistake.”
And mind you, Johnson is very sceptical about a ‘democratic spring’ in Russia: ‘Democratic freedoms are not going to bloom any time soon, I don’t believe at all that Ukraine would join Nato and I don’t believe that semi-mystical stuff about the origins of the Russian people, that mix of Nostradamus and Russian Wikipedia’.
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Johnson: 'Impossible to normalise relations with Putin and to allow him to win would be to give a green light to all the autocrats in the world'"