For Putin Ally, U.S. Sanctions Only Add to Anti-Russia Conspiracy Theory - WSJ

The Wall Street Journal writes about this, Censor.NET reports.

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Mr. Yakunin, president of state-owned Russian Railways, the country's largest employer, says the Ukraine crisis has vindicated his long-held stance that the U. S. and Russia are ineluctable rivals, and that U. S. efforts to sabotage Russia have continued since the end of the Cold War, using weapons as varied as Hollywood movies and monetarist economics.

Critics who dismissed a study he co-wrote a year ago as "a work of conspiracy theory" now recognize "it's a very realistic assessment of the situation," he says.

The hardening attitudes suggest repairing the worst breach in East-West relations since the Cold War could be difficult, if not impossible, as long as Russia's current leadership remains in power.

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While most of the hard-liners in Mr. Putin's inner circle are tight-lipped about their views of the world, Mr. Yakunin is a prolific author and speaker and part-time professor at Moscow State University.

The monograph, which Mr. Yakunin wrote in his capacity as a professor, runs for more than 400 pages, cataloging what it portrays as decades of efforts by Russia's "geopolitical enemy" to undermine it. Issues from trade liberalization to anticorruption efforts and what it calls "the simulacrum of global terrorism" are used to undermine Russia, which the study calls "the main obstacle on the path of realizing the 'Western project' of global domination." In the end, the authors conclude that they couldn't prove the existence of the secret plan to subvert Russia because it is secret.

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For Mr. Yakunin and his colleagues, the idea professed by some in the U. S. of a cooperative relationship with Russia is absurd. "If Ukraine hadn't happened, something else certainly would have," he says.

Mr. Yakunin, 66 years old, has known Mr. Putin since the early 1990s, when they were both part of a small summer-cottage cooperative outside St. Petersburg called Ozero. Most of its members have since taken up powerful jobs in business and politics--and been targeted by Western sanctions.

He calls the current "demonization" of Mr. Putin in the West inaccurate and "a crude propaganda trick."