Some European leaders should think carefully about what they are doing by breaking the isolation of a criminal like Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n
On November 15, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz Olaf Scholz called Putin<\/a> and spoke to him for an hour. On the same day, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned: \"Olaf's call, in my opinion, is Pandora's box.<\/strong> Now there may be other conversations, other calls. Just a lot of words. And this is exactly what Putin has wanted for a long time: it is crucial for him to weaken his isolation.<\/strong> Russia's isolation.\"<\/em><\/p>\n History shows that appeasing tyrants has the effect of empowering them<\/strong> and pushing them to flex their muscles. Unfortunately, some European politicians, such as the German chancellor, seem to have forgotten this historical lesson. A day after Scholz's call to Putin<\/strong>, Russia launched a massive attack on Ukraine<\/a> with 120 missiles and 90 drones.<\/p>\n History has been repeating itself with the same cadence this week. On December 11, Viktor Orb\u00e1n called Putin<\/a> and spent an hour on the phone with him. The same thing happened as with the Scholz call, but on a larger scale:<\/strong> yesterday Russia launched a massive attack with 290 missiles and drones against Ukraine<\/a>. The vast majority of them have been shot down by Ukrainian anti-aircraft defences.<\/p>\n Given Moscow's reaction to these calls, if any European politician wants to talk to Putin on the phone, he should know what the consequences will be the next day<\/strong>. There is no room for excuses such as \"I just wanted to talk\". When calling a criminal on the phone has these consequences, those who make these calls cannot wash their hands<\/strong>, as if they had no responsibility for the effects of their actions to break the isolation and try to appease a tyrant who has been killing Ukrainian civilians for years. How many more European politicians are planning to try this Russian roulette with the heads of Ukrainians?<\/strong> How many of them would play this roulette if the immediate consequence was a Russian attack on their countries?<\/p>\n All of Europe must accept that Russian imperialism is not a problem exclusive to Ukraine<\/strong>, or that only the countries closest to Russia, such as Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, need to worry about. Having a thug in Moscow killing his neighbours for pleasure is a continental problem<\/strong>, because what Putin wants is to bring the West to its knees, as the Kremlin demonstrated with the ultimatums he sent to NATO and the US<\/a> two months before the Russian aggression against Ukraine.<\/p>\n ---<\/p>\n Photo: Mikhail Svetlov.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some European leaders should think carefully about what they are doing by breaking the isolation of a criminal like Vladimir Putin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10373],"tags":[10929,10670,16361,10731,16153,15307,7786,7887,16074],"class_list":["post-58055","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world","tag-germany","tag-hungary","tag-olaf-scholz","tag-russia","tag-russian-invasion-of-ukraine-of-2022","tag-ukraine","tag-viktor-orban","tag-vladimir-putin","tag-volodimir-zelenski"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58055"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58055\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.outono.net\/elentir\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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