Free Republic

Cold War: The White House has announced our absence at ceremonies marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, Russia has been practicing a nuclear invasion of an abandoned Poland. The Berlin Wall has been a famous backdrop for American presidents sounding the battle cry of liberty in the struggle against tyranny. It was there that John F. Kennedy expressed our solidarity with the encircled residents of that outpost of freedom with his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner." And it was there that Ronald Reagan, with a defiant "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," voiced our...

USSR, 1959: I am a "young pioneer" in school. History classes remind us that there is a higher authority than their parents and teachers: the leaders of the Communist Party. The story of young pioneer Pavlik Morozov is required reading. Pavlik reported his father to the secret police for disobeying government regulations. His life exemplified the duty of all good Soviet citizens to serve their government. From the first year in school, all of us are made aware of our ethnicity (ethnic Russian, Jewish, Asian, etc.) and class (proletariat, intelligentsia), around which society is structured. This inherent divisiveness makes it...

MOSCOW — Nearly two decades after the collapse of the Communist Party, Russia’s rulers have hit upon a model for future success: the Communist Party. Or at least, the one that reigns next door. Like an envious underachiever, Vladimir V. Putin’s party, United Russia, is increasingly examining how it can emulate the Chinese Communist Party, especially its skill in shepherding China through the financial crisis relatively unbowed. United Russia’s leaders even convened a special meeting this month with senior Chinese Communist Party officials to hear firsthand how they wield power. ..." “The accomplishments of China’s Communist Party in developing its...

OBAMA ABANDONS OUR ALLIES This Morning, In “Move Likely To Cheer Moscow And Roil The Security Debate In Europe,” Obama “Told East European States He Is Backing Away From Plans For An Anti-Missile Shield There.” (Peter Spiegel, "U.S. Shelves Nuclear-Missile Shield," The Wall Street Journal, 9/17/09; Jana Mlcochova and Gabriela Baczynska, "U.S. Backs Away From Missile Shield In Europe," Reuters, 9/17/09) Today Is 70th Anniversary Of Soviet Invasion Of Poland. “For Poland, the timing of the announcement is particularly sensitive. Thursday marked the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland following a pact between Moscow and Nazi Germany,...

President Bush was often criticized by his detractors for alienating America's allies. Yet Obama seems to be getting a pass for doing the same thing. In an earlier post, I mentioned Obama's poor treatment of the UK's Gordon Brown. Apparently, the UK is not the only ally that the president has chosen to snub. Today, on the anniversary of the soviet's attack on Poland, Obama announced his intention to scrap plans to build a missile shield based in Poland and the Czech Republic. According to Reuters writer Gabriela Baczynska, Obama means to shelve the plans in order to improve ties...

The Shadow People (too polite a name for who they really are) have been at this intensely for decades. They are serious about enslaving us. Notice two points out of the many in this amazing treasonous letter from Ted Kennedy to Chairman Andropov of the USSR in 1983. (It is completely authentic and surfaced in London in the 1990s after KGB files came to light.) Kennedy was setting things up to undermine President Reagan. Note: (1) Kennedy's secret messenger Tunney (Kennedy's former college roommate, later a Democrat Senator from California) told the Soviets that, quote: "A few well known economists...

BANGKOK, Thailand - A Russian dubbed the "Merchant of Death" for allegedly supplying weapons to Africa's bloody conflicts over power and diamonds was arrested Thursday in Thailand on suspicion of conspiring to smuggle guns to Colombia's leftist rebels. Viktor Bout, 41, whose dealings reportedly inspired a 2005 movie about the illicit arms trade, was arrested at U.S. request in his hotel room in Bangkok, said police Lt. Gen. Pongpat Chayapan. Bout had eluded arrest for years and was finally seized after a four-month sting organized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. In New York, federal authorities unsealed a criminal complaint...

US President Barack Obama made a major gesture of conciliation to Iran on Thursday when he admitted US involvement in the 1953 coup which overthrew the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. "In the middle of the Cold War, the United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government," Obama said during his keynote speech to the Muslim world in Cairo. It is the first time a serving US president has publicly admitted American involvement in the coup. (snip) Obama also said: "For many years, Iran has defined itself in part by its opposition to...

Russian President may push 'new world currency'

Westernism is giving way to Orientalism in Moscow's outlook, if the past week's happenings are any guide. As Russia's ties with the West deteriorate, an upswing in its strategic partnership with China becomes almost inevitable. The resumption of Russia-NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) dialogue has gone awry. And the nascent hopes regarding a "reset of the button" of the Russian-American relationship are belied. With Moscow under multiple pressures from the West, two top Chinese officials have arrived in the Russian capital to offer support - Defense Minister Liang Guanglie and Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi. Moscow angrily reacted to NATO's expulsion...

A recent story in the Guardian confirmed my suspicion of a lingering liberal indulgence toward the former Soviet Union. Headlined ORPHANED BY THE STATE, it consisted of an interview with Robert Rosenberg, the younger son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, executed by electric chair in 1953 for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union. Robert was then six, and surely anyone with the most minimal human feeling must sympathize deeply with his account of his bewilderment at the time. The interviewer, Joanna Moorhead, tells us that she had tears in her eyes as he related the story, thereby imparting an...

WASHINGTON -- Cyberspies have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid and left behind software programs that could be used to disrupt the system, according to current and former national-security officials. The spies came from China, Russia and other countries, these officials said, and were believed to be on a mission to navigate the U.S. electrical system and its controls. The intruders haven't sought to damage the power grid or other key infrastructure, but officials warned they could try during a crisis or war. "The Chinese have attempted to map our infrastructure, such as the electrical grid," said a senior intelligence official....

If we don't rise up and stop this Joker now, we will be in a depression, close to famine and at war with China, Russia, Syria & Iran by 2012. The Axis of Evil is going to wait for the Cap n Trade to cause our agriculture sector to grow for fuel or not at all and then China (through Venezuela), after it stops importing to the US, will force Brazil (Third Largest Exporter in the World) & Other Central/South American Countries to stop exporting to the US (20% of total distribution). The damage of removing Farm Subsidies coupled with...

WASHINGTON, March 26 (UPI) -- The continuing tensions over Russia's refusal to sell its state-of-the-art land warfare advanced weapons systems to China hasn't interrupted the rhythm of major joint military exercises between the two major land powers on the Eurasian landmass. The latest in the regular, biennial series of exercises between the two nations has been confirmed for this summer. The next in the now well-established series of exercises called Peace Mission 2009 will be carried out in northeastern China, the Russian Defense Ministry announced March 18, according to a report carried by the RIA Novosti news agency. The first...

There is a lot of chatter these days – on talk radio, Fox News and conservative web sites -- about the sheer incompetence of Obama in actually governing now that he is President. One of the few dissenting voices has been Newt Gingrich's. Perhaps, he hints with a sly smile, governing is not what Obama is really about. The truth of the matter came to me while trying to discuss the AIG bonus flap with a right wing populist. His argument went something like this: “It matters not if the egregious AIG bonuses are taxed at 120% and their recipients...

This was undoubtedly a free-lance enterprise, and despite the success of such individual initiative in protecting national security, one supposes it couldn’t happen today, what with so many “managers,” “planners,” “controllers,” “manipulators” in the mix of things. Having an army that had always relied heavily on artillery, [the Soviets] were also particularly interested in the small shells similar to the one fired during the 1953 “GRABLE” shot. Thus, some time later, the Russians were delighted when a U.S. Army major walked into the Soviet residency in West Germany offering to rent them the latest model of a nuclear artillery shell....

In a new book, two former nuclear weapons scientists make the case that Soviet spies didn't just steal atomic secrets from the Manhattan Project in the 1940s—something historians have known for years—but say a previously unknown spy also helped the Soviets design their first hydrogen bomb. The Soviet Union detonated its first thermonuclear bomb in 1955, only a year after the first American H-bomb was tested, ending the period of nuclear supremacy the U.S. military enjoyed after World War II. In The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and Its Proliferation, published this month, Danny Stillman and Thomas...

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev`s statement on the Stalin-era famine provoked disappointment in Ukraine, the country`s ambassador to Russia said on Tuesday, RIA Novosti reported. In a letter to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko released by the Kremlin on Friday, the Russian president accused Kyiv of using the Stalin-era famine, known as the Holodomor, to drive a wedge between Ukraine and Russia, and urged efforts to forge a common position on the tragedy. In the letter, Medvedev said Ukraine`s attempts to declare the Holodomor an act of genocide by the Soviet authorities meant he could not attend commemoration events in Kyiv. "Of...

Leaders from around the world Saturday marked the 75th anniversary of the famine that the ripped through the Ukraine in the early 1930s, as Ukrainian leaders seek to bring more attention to the plight of the millions who died from hunger. But conspicuously missing from the honoring of Holodomor , or "death by hunger," were leaders from Moscow, who have objected to recent calls for the deaths to be labeled as genocide. Emma Stickgold has this report for VOA in Moscow. The anniversary of Holodomor is traditionally marked in late November, when the food shortages began resulting in the death...

We know that history holds many surprises. One doesn't expect to learn more about the secret history of of the Gulag than we already know from both Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Acrcipelago" and Anne Applebaum's "Gulag: A history." This feat, however, is exactly what author Tim Tzouliadis has accomplished: the previously unknown story of the thousands of Americans who, during the Depression, sought employment and a better future in the "worker's paradise" built by the Bolsheviks. All kinds of Americans joined the exodus. Some of them were Communists or fellow-travelors but the majority were average Americans - skilled workers promised paid passage,...

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has accused Ukraine of sending military personnel to fight against Russia in Georgia. Mr Putin said that Ukrainian specialists operated anti-aircraft missile systems used against Russian aircraft during the August war. Russia has said Ukraine helped arm Georgia before the war, but Mr Putin said missile sales may have been conducted after the war already stated. And he said the systems were operated by Ukrainians. Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko said a parliamentary panel in Ukraine would investigate allegations of arms sales. She said that under Ukrainian law the president and his Security Council is...

We know that history holds many surprises. One does not expect to learn more about the secret history of the Gulag than we already know from both Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A History. This feat, however, is exactly what the Greek-born British documentary filmmaker Tim Tzouliadis has accomplished, in a book that should be placed alongside the others as a must-read account of the horrors Joseph Stalin inflicted upon his victims. What Tzouliadis offers is a dramatic account of the previously unknown story of the thousands of American citizens who, during the Depression, sought employment and...

MOSCOW -- For months, the owner of a muckraking news Web site had stayed away from his home after receiving warnings to tone down his critique of Kremlin-backed authorities in the Russian province of Ingushetia, friends said. But Magomed Yevloyev finally boarded a plane to return to Ingushetia this week, and there he encountered a surprise: The local governor was riding on the same plane, a few seats away from him in business class. When the plane landed in Ingushetia, the governor was met by a Mercedes that whisked him away. And Mr. Yevloyev was arrested at the airport, deposited...

It has been 25 years since Korean Airlines Flight 007, carrying 269 passengers and crew, including Congressman Larry McDonald of Georgia, was fired on by a Soviet fighter jet off the coast of Siberia. At the time, McDonald was chairman of the John Birch Society (a subsidiary of which publishes THE NEW AMERICAN). Although several speakers eulogized McDonald at a Washington, D.C., memorial service 10 days following the September 1, 1983 attack, the words most remembered by both this magazine’s editor, Gary Benoit, and this writer were delivered by the late Senator Jesse Helms, who passed away on July 4....

Russia put the West on alert for a new Cold War that the Kremlin is ready to fight, its President said yesterday. President Medvedev set tensions soaring when he recognised the independence of two breakaway republics inside Georgia. “We are not afraid of anything, including the prospect of a Cold War,” he said. Hours earlier he had ordered his Foreign Ministry to start establishing diplomatic ties with the secessionist regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The move brought instant condemnation from the United States, Britain, France, Germany and other Western countries. President Bush appealed to the Kremlin to “reconsider this...

Georgia condemns announcement after Medvedev signs decree on independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia Russia today stepped up its defiance of the west by wasting little time in recognising the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, Georgia's two breakaway provinces. Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, said he had signed decrees to that effect, just weeks after Russia and Georgia fought a short war over South Ossetia. "I have signed decrees on the recognition by the Russian Federation of the independence of South Ossetia and the independence of Abkhazia," Medvedev said in a televised announcement, in a move bound to escalate...

Russia announced today it has begun withdrawing its troops from Georgia. But neither Georgia nor wary and openly impatient Western powers saw any evidence of the tanks, trucks and troops leaving. "The pull-out of peacekeeping forces started today," Col-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn said during a daily official press briefing. Georgia's Interior Ministry said Russian forces had been blowing up stores of Georgian ammunition and weaponry at a base near the western town of Senaki in their drive to weaken Georgia's 29,000-strong army. Spokesman Shota Utiashvili said Moscow's troops had also destroyed the runway at the base, about 240 km (150 miles)...

GEORGIA'S actions in South Ossetia were excessive and "must not go unpunished", Russian news agencies quoted President Dmitry Medvedev as saying. "What the Georgian authorities did exceeded human understanding. Their actions cannot be explained and moreover must not go unpunished," Mr Medvedev was quoted as saying in remarks to military personnel. "We take a hard line on security throughout the region, in assuring peace and stability in South Ossetia. "We will do whatever is necessary, and no one should have any illusion" about this, the Russian leader said.

Russian forces were today seen strengthening their positions in the city of Gori, despite assurances that they had started to withdraw troops from Georgia under a French-brokered peace plan. "The pull-out of peacekeeping forces started today," Colonel-General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the deputy chief of staff of Russia's military, told a daily official briefing in Moscow. However in Gori, 55 miles west of the capital, Tbilisi, Russian forces showed no sign of leaving and appeared to be digging in. The only movement seen by Associated Press reporters was in the opposite direction from Russia — toward the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. In...

The world was well aware of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) stockpiles. Politicians from both parties admitted that Saddam would not disarm voluntarily, and that military force was the only solution. Intelligence sources estimate that Iraq had 100 million tons of munitions, which is an astonishing 60 percent of our own arsenal. According to the House Armed Service Committee, Saddam himself admitted to possessing thousands of tons of WMD. Since we have not found the “smoking gun” proof of a WMD arsenal, they must have gone somewhere else. Prior to our liberation of Iraq, it was clear we...

State Duma deputies warned Lithuania against agreeing to place U.S. missile defense sites on its soil, saying Wednesday that such a move could trigger a Russian military buildup in the region.

Publisher Peter Osnos, who admits to personally working with former Bush White House press secretary Scott McClellan on his new book, What Happened, began his career as an assistant to I.F. Stone, the pro-communist "journalist" named as a Soviet agent of influence who was the uncle of Weather Underground communist terrorist Kathy Boudin. But the connections don't end there. Boudin's son Chesa was raised by Barack Obama associates Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, who were Boudin's comrades in the communist terrorist group, after Kathy Boudin went to prison for her involvement in an armed robbery and assault that took the...

British soldiers seriously injured in Iraq and Afghanistan are being denied government compensation because they were wounded by the 'wrong type of bomb'. The Ministry of Defence has refused payouts for injuries under its criminal injuries scheme that may have been caused by landmines left by the Soviet army in Afghanistan or other discarded ordnance. Under the MoD's criminal injuries compensation overseas scheme, frontline troops can claim for an injury or death not caused by military operations against the Taliban or Iraqi militia. Alternatively, troops injured after April 2005 can also apply for financial support under the armed forces compensation...

The increasing vitriol of the Democratic presidential WrestleMania shouldn't distract from the opportunity before progressives. The election this year has the potential to be not simply a change election but a sea-change election, one that marks the end of the conservative era that has dominated our politics for nearly three decades. It could be the progressive equivalent of the conservative triumph of 1980. In 1980 Ronald Reagan, the self-described "movement conservative," took the White House from incumbent Jimmy Carter while Republicans picked up thirty-four seats in the House and gained control of the Senate, sweeping out liberal stalwarts like George...

If there exists one visional depiction of the Cold War’s end, it is still a Eurocentric one, November 9, 1989, the day East Berliners joined with those of the city’s West in celebration of the Berlin Wall’s demise. Three weeks earlier, on October 19, 1989, Stalinist East German dictator Erich Honecker, facing mass internal opposition, was forced from power when the Kremlin, overwhelmed with comparable resistance on many fronts, for the first time refused to provide the East German dictatorship with the political or military cover it had come to expect in its Cold War defense of the regime’s totalitarian...

LAURENS - Republican White House hopeful Fred Thompson said Wednesday that the United State's spending on programs like Medicare and welfare puts the country on a course for the same financial oblivion that brought down the Soviet Union during the Cold War. "We're doing it in a different way," Thompson said during a radio interview in response to a question about President Ronald Reagan's strategy of outspending the Soviet Union and whether the U.S. was now on the same course. "The bottom line could be the same." Recurring spending demands for programs that pay for health care, welfare and social...

Calling most existing textbooks “Russophobic, the Putin Regime has approved a revised version. The new Russian history textbook praises President Vladimir Putin as “a savior in the heroic tradition of Joseph Stalin.” "I have analyzed books on Russian history in neighboring countries and come to the conclusion that our neighbors excel at educational Russophobia," said Alexander Filippov, editor of the new textbook. “They portray Soviet domination of Eastern Europe as a bad thing. Overlooked is the fact that Russian tanks are all that stood between these nations and Western decadence. As we have seen, since the withdrawal of this protection...

The official presidential portrait of John Fitzgerald Kennedy tells quite a story. His pensive expression, curled shoulders and folded arms are not mere emblems of the physical ailments he so manfully absorbed; they help cut the figure of a northeastern liberal -- a Democrat -- who through inspired oratory and steely resolve faced down Soviet communism. This, at a time when many were resigned to the inevitability of its expansion. But Kennedy -- historic though his presidency was, and beatified though it has become -- in his time was not breaking the mould of the Democratic party in the United...

Fifty years ago, a small Soviet satellite was launched, stunning the U.S. and sparking a massive technology research effort. Could we be in for another "October surprise"? Quick, what's the most influential piece of hardware from the early days of computing? The IBM 360 mainframe? The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer? Maybe earlier computers such as Binac, ENIAC or Univac? Or, going way back to the 1800s, is it the Babbage Difference Engine? More likely, it was a 183-pound aluminum sphere called Sputnik, Russian for "traveling companion." Fifty years ago, on Oct. 4, 1957, radio-transmitted beeps from the first man-made object to...

Newspapers like to play gotcha games with presidential candidates and their stump speeches. Most of the time, the fact-checking sessions focus on number-juggling on tax proposals and spending policy, and they find plenty of daylight between claims and reality. However, when the Washington Post attempts to fact-check Fred Thompson on historical references, they reveal more of their bias than of Fred's. They try to take apart Fred's claim that Americans "have shed more blood for other people's liberty than any other combination of nations in the history of the world", and manage to completely miss the point: The number of...

“Al-Qaeda Stronger than Ever.” “U.S. Concern at Al-Qaeda Strength.” These and similar titles accompanied news stories that began breaking during the second week of July, announcing leaks of a disturbing new classified intelligence report. Prepared for President Bush by the National Counter Terrorism Center (NCTC), the five-page report entitled Al-Qaeda Better Prepared to Strike the West paints a picture of a revived, more dangerous terror network led by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Associated Press reported on July 11 that an unnamed counterterrorism official familiar with the still-unreleased report paraphrased the briefing paper as finding that al-Qaeda is...

Russia and China today carried out joint war games after both had warned the US not to interfere in central Asia. Some 6,000 troops and hundred of armoured vehicles and fighter jets took part in military manoeuvres in the Ural mountains watched by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao. The two men, as well as the leaders of a clutch of former Soviet central Asian republics, had taken part in yesterday's regional summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The meeting concluded with a thinly veiled warning to the US to keep away from the energy-rich...

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin sent 14 bomber aircraft on patrols far beyond its own territory today, marking the permanent return to a Soviet-era practice. Mr Putin said the resumption of flights was a response to security threats posed by other military powers. “We have decided to restore flights by Russian strategic aviation on a permanent basis,” Mr Putin said at joint military exercises with China and four Central Asian states in Russia's Ural mountains. “Today, August 17 at 00:00 hours, 14 strategic bombers took to the air from seven airfields across the country, along with support and refuelling aircraft. “In...

MOSCOW (Thomson Financial) - A Moscow court has given the green light for the seizure of 100 pct of the shares of the Russian oil group Russneft, Russian news agencies reported, citing a Russian interior ministry statement. 'A Moscow court has approved the seizure of 100 pct of the shares of the company. Russneft shares have now been seized,' the statement said. The ministerial press office was unavailable for comment. The seizure follows a judicial procedure launched in January by the interior ministry's committee responsible for tax arrears. Another Moscow court had found in favour of the Russian fiscal authorities...

MURMANSK, Russia - Heavy sedatives keep Larisa Arap languishing in a woozy haze at a mental asylum, the victim not of a troubled mind, her family says, but of a Soviet-era practice that continues to muzzle and punish dissent in today's Russia. Earlier this summer, Arap, an activist with former chess champion Garry Kasparov's opposition movement, co-wrote an article that alleged abusive practices at local psychiatric clinics. When Arap appeared at a Murmansk clinic to pick up a routine medical certificate July 5, a doctor called police and had her taken to a local asylum. The doctors handling Arap's case...

The riddle of Afghan graves By Bilal Sarwary BBC News, Kabul On a dusty desert plain a few kilometres north of Kabul, Afghan security officials recently revealed to reporters the latest mass grave discovered in the country. Some of the bodies were still in a sitting position in rooms built underground the former weapons depot in the Shomali plain. Others were in a lying position. Some still had clothes on. What is known is that the bodies are of victims of Afghanistan's war-torn past. But what is not known is - from which war? Afghanistan is no stranger to such...

A little over a week ago, Vladimir Putin tested a weapon deadlier than anything developed by the Soviet Union. A missile launched from a submarine in the White Sea entered the stratosphere and returned precisely on target 3,800 miles away in the Russian Far East — the other side of the world. Such tests are meant to send messages. The target could just have easily been Tehran, Los Angeles or London. It signalled that Russia means business. After a hiatus of two decades, the arms race is back. ...The Russian military is once again treating Nato as the glavny protivnik,...

"Vladimir Bukovksy, the 63-year old former Soviet dissident, fears that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union. In a speech he delivered in Brussels last week Mr Bukovsky called the EU a “monster” that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a fullfledged totalitarian state. ... Hence, we have now been warned. Meanwhile they are introducing more and more ideology. The Soviet Union used to be a state run by ideology. Today’s ideology of the European Union is social-democratic, statist, and a big part of it is also political correctness. I...

Remembering Communism’s Victims By Jacob Laksin FrontPageMagazine.com June 15, 2007 Washington D.C. -- Holocaust victims have one. So do the fallen of World War II and Vietnam. But what of the estimated 100 million who perished at the hands of the last century’s greatest tragedy, communist totalitarianism? Until recently, these silenced masses -- victims of Soviet gulags, Vietnamese concentration camps, Cambodia‘s killing fields, the East German, Cuban and North Korean police states -- had no fitting memorial to remind the world of their unjust, and often inhuman, fate, let alone of the ideology that abbreviated so many lives. That changed...

In an interview with the Globe and Mail, Russian President Vladimir Putin has threatened to target Europe with missiles, including potentially nuclear weapons, in a dramatic escalation of his Cold War-style showdown with the United States. Mr. Putin, in an interview at his country residence outside Moscow, said he considers U.S. plans to build an eastern European anti-missile site to shoot down Iranian missiles a provocation aimed at Russia. Asked what he might do to retaliate, he said he would return Russia to the Cold War status where missiles were aimed at European targets. "It is obvious that if part...