Putin's Big Blunder
 

NY Post
Dick Morris & Eileen McGann
December 22, 2004
 

Excerpt:
 

RUSSIAN Presi dent Vladimir Putin's brazen scheme to rebuild the old Soviet Empire by annexing Ukraine has backfired. The backlash is brewing throughout the former Soviet republics that Russia calls its "near abroad."

In trying to win the electoral contest in Ukraine for his pro-Russian puppet and then seeking to steal an election, Putin sacrificed valuable political capital and credibility in the region. That his allies in the KGB and the Russian Mafia likely sought to poison pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko when they couldn't defeat him just compounds the blunder.

The overreaching by this would-be czar is most reminiscent of the 1991 Moscow coup attempt by hardline communists. They sought to oust Mikhail Gorbachev and turn the clock back — but instead triggered the liberation of Russia, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the victory of Boris Yeltsin.

The end result of Putin's arrogant assumption that he could take over Ukraine by manipulating its democracy is likely to be a massive rush of nearby states away from the "Confederation of Independent States," set up by Russia to dominate its sphere of influence, toward the European/U.S. camp.

The repercussions of Putin's audacity began to reverberate over the past month and are likely to accelerate after the likely Yushchenko victory in Ukraine's new election Dec. 26.

We are picking up the seismic shock from the streets of Kiev in the little nation of Moldova, where we are helping the pro-democracy forces.

This tiny nation, formerly the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova, was once a province of Romania but was given to Moscow in the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. Nominally independent since the Soviet Union broke up in '91, Moldova has actually been headed by a communist government that would like to go back under Russian hegemony.

Until November, the communists held a comfortable lead in the coming election. A national poll by the International Republican Institute (an international pro-democracy foundation funded by the U.S. Republican Party) found that voters saw Russia as more of a partner than a threat by the lopsided margin of 68 percent to 25 percent.

But now — in the aftermath of the Ukrainian mess — Moldovans are not so sure: They rate Russia favorably as a partner by only 52-38. Now, the polls show that Moldovans want closer relations with the European Union and the United States more than they want to be tied to Moscow.