Political Quotes

“Thank you for posing this question which has not come up in the many hours I have been standing here but is very relevant to the question of what happens under authoritarian control and, worse, recognizes that Russia retained some trappings of democracy, but it is clearly a dictatorship, and that is the danger. When you have that authoritarian presence--certainly, Putin is that personality, and he did get the Duma basically to become the rubberstamp, and he did get the courts under his control, and everything that flows, flows out from his authoritarian presence. When it comes to how he views the Russians that he is sending to war, he says that they are expendable pawns. I mean, they were sent on unbelievably unsupported missions to be shredded. Over time, certainly the Russian military has gotten much better, but in those phases where he just wanted to pour people into the front, and enormous numbers were dying--I still think the actual number is pretty high per day--it was, you know--again, he is not accountable to the people. One thing he did which was very effective is control over the press because I expected the mothers of all those folks being sent in to be shredded to become a massive force, a resistible force that would shake the foundations of Russia. But they didn't, in part because the information was so dramatically controlled.”