Russia and the west

Lilia Shevtsova is not happy about US and Western European policy towards Russia:

A consensus seems to be growing among Western policymakers and intellectuals that Russia is not ready for liberalism and that there are even certain advantages to dealing with the illiberal political order built by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. This may be why Western policy toward Russia has only served to shore up the Russian powers that are pursuing anti-Western interests…

So what would a more principled Russia policy entail? Western leaders must keep liberal and democratic principles in mind while dealing with the Russian elite. They must be wary of the latest fairy tales about “modernization,” avoid naively spreading the Kremlin’s ideas…

Democracy is Russia is a very dim prospect. In a Gallup public opinion poll in February 2009, only 18% of respondents thought that democracy was good for Russia, while close to 70% preferred some sort of dictatorship. This not surprising as Russia’s only experience with democracy was in the 1990s, during a time of deep economic crisis and embarrassing leadership of Boris Yeltsin, while growth exploded and the country regained status as a major power under Putin‘s return to dictatorship. Nevertheless, the regime does not tolerate internal dissent and its discouraging to see democratic leaders fail to highlight this point.