Vladimir Putin, Godfather of Kurdistan? - THE NATIONAL INTEREST

Kurdish ambitions fit into Russia's plans for the Middle East.
Michael A. Reynolds
March 1, 2016

If Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan thought last November that by downing a Russian Su-24 bomber near the Turkish-Syrian border he could contain Vladimir Putin’s Middle Eastern ambitions, he is certainly regretting that now. An incensed Vladimir Putin vowed that Turkey would come to rue its actions. He warned that Russia would not settle its accounts with Turkey with mere economic sanctions, adding, “We know what we need to do.”

What Putin meant is becoming clear. Earlier this month, in what can only be described as a menacing signal to Ankara, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (or PYD) formally opened a representative office in Moscow, its first in a foreign country. Meanwhile, inside Syria, the PYD’s armed wing has been using Russian arms and Russian air support to aggressively expand the amount of territory it controls along the Syrian-Turkish border. Ankara is alarmed, and rightly so. Despite possessing its own acronym, the PYD is a subsidiary of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistane), or PKK, which is currently intensifying the insurgency it is waging in Turkey’s southeast. There, PKK activists have declared Kurdish self-rule and PKK fighters are holing up in cities, digging trenches and taking on Turkish security forces with everything from snipers and rocket propelled grenades to improvised explosive devices.

This Is What Putin Really Wants | The National Interest

Fiona Hill, February 24, 2015 | Putin doesn't want to restore the Russian Empire or a new geopolitical order. He wants something else entirely... At a news conference in Budapest on February 17, Russian president Vladimir Putin engaged in one of his favorite pastimes: sparring with journalists. One reporter asked if Putin thought the newly brokered ceasefire in Ukraine’s Donbas region would hold. If not, what would Russia do if the United States sent weapons to the Ukrainian army? “Arms supplies are already taking place,” Putin asserted.

A fiery phone call between Erdoğan and Putin ended in firing mutual threats | AWD News

Moscow- Nov 09, 2014,  The pugnacious Turkish President made a rare telephone call to his Russian counterpart to discuss the latest regional developments, particularly Syria’s raging conflict.

 According to Moscow Times, a renowned Russian English-language daily newspaper, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan who stepped up his customary belligerent rhetoric against the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad, told his Russian counterpart that Turkey has allegedly reached a threshold where it cannot remain indifferent toward the “human carnage” in the Arab war-torn country, but to Erdoğan’s surprise, Putin was infuriated and vehemently warned Turkish President from further interfering in Syrian internal affairs otherwise Russia is ready to thwart Turkey from triggering a catastrophic war in the region.

'Putin to western elites: Play-time is over' by Dimitry Orlov | Infowars

A unilateral diktat and imposing one’s own models produces the opposite result | October 30, 2014

Most people in the English-speaking parts of the world missed Putin’s speech at the Valdai conference in Sochi a few days ago, and, chances are, those of you who have heard of the speech didn’t get a chance to read it, and missed its importance.

(For your convenience, I am pasting in the full transcript of his speech below.) Western media did their best to ignore it or to twist its meaning. Regardless of what you think or don’t think of Putin (like the sun and the moon, he does not exist for you to cultivate an opinion) this is probably the most important political speech since Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech of March 5, 1946.