Возвращаемя к Теме: Прочитал очень хорошую статью в газете, и спешу поделить с вами. Прочитая это, я успокоился, может Запад начинает понимать позицию России?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/12/world ... ?ref=world

"Stung by Criticism Over Georgia, Putin Asks West for a Little Understanding"

MOSCOW — For three and a half hours on Thursday, in tones that were alternately pugilistic and needy, Vladimir V. Putin tried to explain himself.

More than a month has passed since Russia sent columns of armor into Georgia, asserting its sphere of influence with a confidence not seen since the days of the Soviet Union. But since the first hours of this crisis, Russian leaders have been asking the same question with mounting frustration: Why is everyone blaming us for this?

Mr. Putin, Russia’s prime minister, made his case on Thursday in Sochi, Russia, before the Valdai Discussion Club, a collection of Russia experts from around the world. Comments aimed at the West were, at times, rueful — he said he liked President Bush more than many Americans do — and even respectful, as when he asked for a moment of silence in honor of the victims of Sept. 11.

As for the criticism that has cascaded down on his government, Mr. Putin expressed only bafflement that those in the West did not accept Russia’s explanation that it had simply acted in defense of its citizens. How did they expect Russia to respond to the shelling of its peacekeepers in Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital, he asked — with “slingshots?” Did they expect him to “brandish a penknife?”

“What else could we do?” the Interfax news agency reported him as saying. “Do you think we should have wiped the bloody snot away and hung our heads?”

His plea was serious. This week, Russia’s diplomatic relations with Europe frayed badly during negotiations about a withdrawal of troops from Georgia. President Dmitri A. Medvedev’s decision to recognize the enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia has made even longtime allies like China and Serbia wary of standing with Russia.

But while Russia has been unbending across the negotiating table, what its leaders seem to want more than anything is to be understood.

Mr. Putin issued a great number of reassurances on Thursday: He said Russia had “no ideological conflict” with the West and “no imperial ambitions” in Eastern Europe; he said he supported eliminating stockpiles of nuclear weapons; he said he expected Georgians to oust their president, Mikheil Saakashvili, without any help from Russia. Russia, he said, is “not against anybody.”

Well, almost nobody. Mr. Putin spoke of the Western news media with unbridled contempt.

“I am surprised at how powerful the propaganda machine of the so-called West is,” he said. “This is awesome! Amazing!”

Early in the crisis, monitoring Western news sources from Beijing at the start of the Olympics, he said, he saw “absolute silence, as if nothing was happening. As if this was commanded. I congratulate you. I congratulate those who were involved in this.”

In his remarks to the group, which included prominent political scientists and journalists, Mr. Putin offered a detailed account of Russia’s thrust into Georgia, which he characterized as restrained.

For the first time, Mr. Putin suggested that the military action was aimed in part at quelling instability in the Russian north Caucasus, where he said “certain nongovernmental organizations in certain republics” had “raised the question of separation from Russia under the pretext of nonprotection of South Ossetia.”

“We would have had a new problem if we had not done that,” Interfax reported him as saying.

Mr. Putin is clearly still stung by language used by the European Union, which condemned the Russian invasion as “a disproportionate response” to Georgia’s attack on Tskhinvali. He said Russians had no choice but to proceed beyond the conflict zone to eliminate Georgian posts and ammunition depots — a move he compared to that of the Soviet Army in World War II, which pursued Nazi forces across Soviet borders and into Western Europe.

“By the way, it was not only Soviet forces that entered Berlin,” he said. “There were Americans, the French, the British there. Why did you go there? You could have done some shooting along the borders and called it a day.”

In this conversation — unlike a recent interview on CNN — Mr. Putin gave measured answers, expressing as much regret as defiance. At times, he seemed to be enjoying himself, as when he was asked about the power dynamic between himself and Mr. Medvedev, his prot