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"If European countries continue carrying out [Washington's] policies, we will have to talk to Washington about European matters," Vladimir Putin, Interview with Germany's ARD television on Friday, Aug. 29, 2008, RIA Novosti Website story, 8/30/08. |
August 30, 2008
On August 26, 2008, the German news magazine Der Spiegel posted a 2½ minute video summarizing the situation in Georgia on their website. Part of this video was a 59 second clip showing Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in a meeting with an unidentified visitor in the Kremlin. The frequent firing of electronic flash equipment at the beginning of the meeting indicates that this is a media event.
A meeting between an unidentified visitor and the President of Russia, Dmitrii Medvedev, is about to take place in a small room in the Kremlin.
The visitor is most likely Dmitri Rogozin, Russia's representative to NATO in Brussels. Russia's intervention in Georgia on August 8, 2008 to repel US-sponsored Georgian attacks on the nominally independent province of S. Ossetia and the subsequent recognition of S. Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent states by Russia have caused a shift in the balance of power in the region which threatens to interrupt the US' strategy of hostile encirclement of Russia.
I've extracted this 59 second clip from the rest of the video, translated the German voice-over narrative into English, and added them to the clip as subtitles. To remain synchronized with the narrative, the subtitle durations are short, making them difficult to read. I reproduce them here to somewhat mitigate this problem.
Is Medvedev justified in his assertion, "When we are surrounded on all sides and all kinds of countries are drawn into NATO...?"