In an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta, Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev spoke about the tasks of Russia’s special operation and the role of the United States in supporting neo-Nazis. He also discussed the near future of Europe, Russia’s foreign currency reserves and sanctions, and also the changes that await Russia in the near future.
Nikolai, today perhaps the term ‘second cold war’ no longer seems like an exaggeration. The Americans do not hesitate to declare that they have won the confrontation with the USSR and that they will now win it too. How do you assess these views?
The tragic scenarios of world crises, both in previous years and today, are imposed by Washington in its desire to consolidate its hegemony by resisting the collapse of the unipolar world. The United States does everything to ensure that the other centres of a multipolar world do not even dare to raise their heads, while our country not only dares, but loudly declares that it will not play by the imposed rules. They have tried to force Russia to give up its sovereignty, its identity, its culture, its independent foreign and domestic policy. We do not have the right to accept this approach.
In an attempt to suppress Russia, the Americans, using their proxies in Kiev, have decided to create an antipode of our country, cynically choosing Ukraine for this purpose, seeking to divide an essentially united nation. Finding no positive basis to draw Ukrainians to its side, Washington indoctrinated Ukrainians into the exclusivity of their nation and hatred of all things Russian long before the 2014 coup. However, history teaches us that hatred can never be a reliable factor for national unity. If anything unites people living in Ukraine today, it is the fear of the atrocities of nationalist battalions. Therefore, the result of the policy of the West and the Kiev regime under its control can only be the disintegration of Ukraine into several states.
Europe, as you warned a year ago, has ended up facing an unprecedented crisis, including one caused by the flow of Ukrainian refugees. How could this affect the internal situation in the European countries themselves?
Europe is facing a deep economic and political crisis for its countries. Rising inflation and falling living standards are already affecting the wallets and feelings of Europeans. Moreover, large-scale migration adds new challenges to old security threats such as illegal drug trafficking and transnational crime. Almost five million Ukrainian migrants have already arrived in Europe. Their number is set to rise to ten million in the near future. Most Ukrainians who come to the West believe that Europeans should support and provide for them, and when they are forced to work, they begin to rebel.
Representatives of the criminal community who have fled Ukraine will try to occupy niches that are profitable for them and put local criminal groups under their control, which will undoubtedly be accompanied by a complication of the criminal situation in Europe. A ‘new lease of life’ will also be given to such a widespread business as the trafficking of orphans taken from Ukraine for subsequent illegal adoption in Europe. The West has already seen a resurgence of the shadow market for the purchase of human organs from socially vulnerable segments of the Ukrainian population for clandestine transplant operations for European patients.
The flow of migrants from Ukraine began long before 2022, and has now reminded Europe of long-forgotten diseases. After all, only a tenth of the refugees from Ukraine are vaccinated against infection with coronavirus, viral hepatitis, tuberculosis, rubella and measles. Because in this once prosperous republic of the Soviet Union, the system of health and epidemiological control and basic health care has almost collapsed.
The aim of denazification is to defeat the neo-Nazi bridgehead created by Western efforts on our borders.
But this is just the beginning, isn’t it?
You’re right. This is only the beginning. Against the backdrop of anti-Russian sanctions, the world is gradually sinking into an unprecedented food crisis. Tens of millions of people in Africa or the Middle East will find themselves on the brink of starvation because of the West. To survive, they will rush to Europe. I am not sure that Europe will survive the crisis. Political institutions, supranational associations, economy, culture, traditions may become a thing of the past. Europe will still bite its elbows, but America will be freed from its main geopolitical fear, the political and economic union between Russia and Europe.
The US and its allies are quietly ignoring the neo-Nazis and openly fascist ideology in Ukraine, filling it with the most modern weapons. Is it not time to recognise a number of hostile countries as supporters of fascism, with all the consequences this entails?
Europe is already facing an intensification of officially banned manifestations of fascism and neo-Nazism, as immigrants from Ukraine are fleeing an inevitable trial along with adopted Bandera criminals with neo-Nazi ideas. This will lead to a resurgence of Nazi ideas in Europe, to demonstrations that not so long ago were considered impossible. The rise of far-right sentiments cannot be ruled out, fuelled by tens of thousands of Ukrainian radicals trained and experienced in combat, who have already found common ground with European Hitler fans.
History is spiralling. After all, the West was in denial about the dangers of the Nazi regime almost until September 1939. In 1938, ‘Time’ magazine declared Hitler the man of the year.
In the 1930s, the West not only did not deny, but actively promoted the establishment and increase in power of fascism in Germany. Above all, big business distinguished itself. Later, after the war, Western historians created a myth about German industrialists who supposedly made a great contribution to Hitler’s war economy. Some American companies collaborated with the Nazis until 1943, i.e. until the decisive turning point in the war.
There is even a theory that the Zyklon B gas used by the Nazis to kill people in the death camps was created using Western technology.
You should read how the Nazis organised this whole process. Everyone knows, for example, IBM. It was on its computers that the Nazis counted and planned the process of exterminating people in the concentration camps. Its CEO Watson received a medal from Hitler. And this is just one of many examples. Now history is repeating itself. The West is even now giving the most active support to Ukrainian neo-Nazis, continuing to pump Ukraine with weapons.
The American and European military-industrial complex is rejoicing, because thanks to the crisis in Ukraine there is no shortage of orders. Not surprisingly, unlike Russia, which is interested in ending the special military operation as soon as possible and minimising losses on all sides, the West is determined to drag it out at least to the last Ukrainian. For some reason, the world still thinks that militarists and aggressors necessarily wear uniforms. But don’t be fooled by Anglo-Saxon respectability. No needle dress can mask hatred, anger and inhumanity.
If all the import replacement orders of the head of state had been carried out on time, we could have avoided many problems in the economy.
Many of our opponents around the world say they do not understand or recognise the objectives of a special military operation, believing them to be far-fetched.
The special military operation has specific objectives, the achievement of which depends not only on the welfare, but on the lives of millions of people, on saving the people of the LPR and DPR from the genocide that Ukrainian neo-Nazis have been perpetrating for eight years. In its time, Hitler’s fascism dreamed of destroying the entire Russian population, and today its followers, following Hitler’s precepts, blasphemously try to do so with the hands of the Slavs. Russia will not allow this to happen.
Speaking of denazification, our goal is to defeat the bridgehead of neo-Nazism created by Western efforts near our borders. Demilitarisation is necessary because an arms-saturated Ukraine poses a threat to Russia, including in terms of the development and use of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Do you think the US can really orchestrate such provocations in Ukraine?
You are talking about a country whose elite is incapable of valuing the lives of others. Americans are used to walking on scorched earth. Since the Second World War, entire cities have been wiped out by bombing, including nuclear bombing. They have flooded Vietnamese jungles with poison, bombed Serbs with radioactive munitions, burned Iraqis alive with white phosphorus, helped terrorists poison Syrians with chlorine. I don’t think the lives of Ukrainians are of concern to the US, which has repeatedly demonstrated its aggressive anti-human nature. As history shows, NATO has never been a defensive alliance, only an offensive one.
Why do American elites need all this?
America long ago divided the whole world into vassals and enemies. From childhood, people in the US got it into their heads that America is a shining castle on a hill, and the rest of humanity is just a testing ground and an appendage of resources. Four hundred years ago English immigrants robbed and killed Indians because they considered them uncivilised savages. Now all this has been replaced by the rhetoric of democratisation and human rights and piracy continues on a global scale. American elites remember how the US managed to become a superpower after two world wars, and now they do not want to accept that the US global empire is agonising.
Is the collapse of the US-centric world a reality, in your view?
It is a reality in which we have to live and build an optimal course of action. In this regard, Russia has chosen the path of full defence of its sovereignty, firmly defending its national interests, cultural and spiritual identity, traditional values and historical memory.
Our spiritual and moral values allow us to remain ourselves, to be faithful to our ancestors, to preserve the individual, society and the state. Europeans, for example, have made a different choice. They have adopted so-called liberal values, when in fact it is neo-liberalism. It advocates the priority of the private over the public, individualism that suppresses love of country, the progressive erosion of the state. It is now clear that with such a doctrine, Europe and European civilisation have no future. Apparently, the lessons not learned will be repeated again.
Which ones?
There are many. Don’t forget that all historical upheavals begin with the spread of popular but potentially destructive ideas. Think of the French Revolution. Its misinterpreted slogans gave rise to the tyranny of Napoleon, who drowned half of Europe in blood, but broke his teeth in Russia.
What has our country done? France dismembered, Paris burned? No, Emperor Alexander I restored French statehood and in 1815 initiated the Holy Alliance in Europe. The union aimed to respect the territorial integrity of states, suppress nationalist movements and ensure forty years of peace in Europe.
Just over a century later, the ideology of Nazism emerged. The Soviet Union did everything in its power to destroy it, but at the same time initiated the rebirth of an independent German state. Stalin insisted on this at the Yalta conference. The Soviet Union was also the first to support German unification in the late 1980s. Our country has historically played a special role in shaping not only the geopolitical but also the moral climate of the world.
You have figuratively described the Anglo-American style of communicating with the world as piracy. Now the West is conducting a similar piratical incursion against Russia. And this raises the question: how justified was the decision to place gold and foreign exchange reserves abroad?
This decision turned out to be unjustified from the point of view of the financial security of the state. Another thing is that by doing so, the West is hitting not only Russia, but also itself. The current global financial system is based solely on trust, including in the United States as the issuer of the world’s reserve currency. Half a century ago there was a gold factor, but in 1971 the US pegged its currency to its quotations, which allowed it to issue money in a virtually uncontrolled manner.
In an attempt to prop up its economy in a steady pre-crisis state, the US actively pumped its banks, businesses and the public with money backed by government bonds. The result has been high inflation in America and Europe. At the same time, the US foreign debt exceeded $30 trillion. And the Americans, for some reason, are discussing a possible default by Russia. It is time for them to default. To overcome the negative consequences and new enrichment, the US is creating a man-made global crisis. That is, they want to solve their own problems at the expense of the rest of the world, among others, especially Europe.
Europeans are not confused by this, in my opinion.
More than that, they willingly walk into the abyss that the United States has dug for them. In this sense, much has changed since the Cold War. Back then, Europeans resisted Washington with more confidence. Probably due to the fact that the old generations of realist politicians are still around. At that time the wall was in Berlin, whereas today’s European elite have a wall over their heads.
I don’t think the lives of the Ukrainians are important to the US, which more than once has demonstrated its aggressive anti-human nature. NATO has also never been a defensive alliance, only an offensive one.
In the 1980s, in an attempt to weaken the economy of the USSR, the US tried to ban European companies from buying hydrocarbons from Moscow. At the time, Europe did not accept Washington’s demands. The US banned its own companies from selling offshore drilling technology to the Soviet Union, and dozens of American and Japanese companies were affected as a result. Washington used disinformation to delay the Soviet Union’s construction of a gas pipeline to Europe. Sound familiar?
And what must we do to guarantee the sovereignty of the rouble?
For the sovereignty of any national financial system, its means of payment must have internal value and price stability, without being pegged to the dollar. Experts are now working on a project proposed by the scientific community to create a dual-circuit monetary and financial system. Specifically, it is proposed to determine the value of the rouble, which should be backed by both gold and a group of commodities that are currency values, to bring the rouble’s exchange rate in line with real purchasing power parity.
Similar ideas have been expressed before. However, some experts have said that they go against the conclusions of economic theory…
They do not go against the conclusions of economic science, but against the conclusions of Western economic textbooks. The West has unilaterally appropriated an intellectual monopoly on the optimal arrangement of society and has been taking advantage of it for decades. Let me remind you that the shock reforms of the 1990s in our country were carried out strictly according to American methods.
The preoccupation of our entrepreneurs, who came out of that era, with market mechanisms alone, without taking into account the specificities of our country, is a risk factor. We are not against the market economy and participation in world production chains, but we are well aware that the West only allows other countries to be its partners when it is profitable for it. Therefore, the most important condition for ensuring Russia’s economic security is to rely on the country’s domestic potential and to restructure the national economy on a modern technological basis.
How successful is this task today? There is still a lot of talk about import substitution, but it is no secret that a decisive breakthrough has not yet been achieved.
The tasks and priorities have been set absolutely right, and we will continue to implement them. Another thing is that we need to significantly improve the discipline of their implementation, including among the relevant agencies.
If all the President’s instructions on import substitution had been carried out in time, we could have avoided many of the problems the Russian economy is facing today.
Let me give you an example. The establishment of a plant in St Petersburg to produce high quality insulin was opposed by a number of structures. Today it is a serious business where the production of medicine is not dependent on imports, except for packaging. However, we have to produce it ourselves, as food producers tell us, for example. Of course, we cannot turn a blind eye to significant achievements. The enterprises of the Rostec Corporation, first and foremost those producing products of the military-industrial complex, have achieved significant success in import substitution.
Another example. Thanks to the Food Security Doctrine developed by the Security Council, we were able to make accurate calculations and increase our country’s basic food self-sufficiency. This is a very serious achievement, which our country failed to achieve completely throughout the 20th century. Therefore, all attempts by Westerners to shift the responsibility for the global food crisis they have caused onto Russia are doomed to failure.
Russia should expand the range of domestic high-tech products. It is important to push domestic developments in production as quickly as possible. We will pay special attention to qualitative changes in the selection of scientific personnel and the evaluation of their performance. Russian science must become the main productive force, one of the engines of our country’s development.
I am confident that we will solve all the problems that have arisen as a result of sanctions. Today, Russia is reorienting itself from the European market to the African, Asian and Latin American markets. We are giving priority attention to the EAEU, the importance of which is growing by leaps and bounds in the current environment. We are intensifying cooperation with the BRICS and the SCO, which unite some three and a half billion people on the planet.
You mentioned science, but under the current conditions, I think it is necessary to restructure not only science, but also higher education and schooling.
I am sincerely convinced that we cannot develop successfully without a clear understanding on the part of the whole society of our national aims and objectives, the depth of our spiritual and historical identity. So every inhabitant of our country, every Russian must know and understand from childhood what we as a nation live and work for and what we strive for.
The West, on the other hand, continues to act in line with the anti-human doctrine of the “golden billion”, which implies a significant reduction of the world population by various means. To this end the West has deviously created an empire of lies, assuming the humiliation and destruction of Russia and other undesirable states. They spit in our eyes and claim it is God’s dew.
Washington and Brussels do not hide the fact that their sanctions aim at the material and spiritual impoverishment of Russians. Destroying our education by imposing so-called progressive educational models is as strategic to Westerners as NATO approaching our borders.
In reality, there is nothing progressive about it. In the United States, for example, many people already declare that we should sing and dance in maths classes because solving problems and equations oppresses and discriminates. We do not need this ‘progress’. The current situation demonstrates the need to uphold Russia’s traditional spiritual and moral values, to reform the educational system and enlightenment, with a return of the historically justified advantages of the national school. I am still convinced that the Soviet school of education was historically the most advanced and progressive in the world, and progress must be made with this in mind.
And what should be done concretely?
More attention should be paid to the development of logical thinking, the formation of sustainable knowledge and the ability to make independent decisions, rather than just putting crosses on tests. Develop applications of the basic sciences.
We must not rely solely on the digitisation of education, as the Internet can be not only a source of encyclopaedic information, but also a source of politicised disinformation. The development of personal intellectual and spiritual qualities is at the centre of everything. Properly educated, fully formed, physically and morally healthy children, who know and understand the history and culture of their motherland, this is our wealth and the guarantee of the successful development of Russia. It is for the sake of our children’s future, and for the sake of a prosperous country in which they will live, that we are working today.
Translation by Lorenzo Maria Pacini
Published on Rossiyskaya Gazeta https://rg.ru/2022/04/26/patrushev-zapad-sozdal-imperiiu-lzhi-predpolagaiushchuiu-unichtozhenie-rossii.html