Merkel admits Minsk Agreements were designed to buy time for Ukrainians to get ready for conflict with Russia, yet Putin?

Sooner or later people in the West are going to have to wake up to the hard truth that their enemy is not at the gates but within the gates — this in the shape of ruling elites that have driven our world to the brink of destruction economically, ecologically, environmentally, and militarily with their lust for power, hegemony, domination and riches.

Before we go on, though, let us take a moment to deal with the usual ordure that gets shovelled in the direction of those in writing in the West who dare not type the name Putin in a sentence without also including words such as ‘tyrant’, ‘dictator’, ‘monster’ either before or after it — and preferably both. Here it is just as Eduardo Galeano said: “The marketplace of fear requires a steady supply of monsters.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin is a brutal man leading his country through a brutal period in human affairs. But he is not the architect of this brutal period; on the contrary, the Russia he has led since 2000 has been among the most grievous victims of it.

Canadian author and journalist Naomi Klein, in her remarkable work Shock Doctrine, describes how Russia was used as a laboratory by US free market think tanks, gurus and economists…