AI Translated: Putin’s 2007 Munich Security Conference Speech in English, Voiced by Putin Himself(and short history of Russia and Putin by Max Blumenthal)

Unfortunately, I don’t know Russian, and I don’t trust Western translations. However, we have an AI translation that, in my opinion, is not biased. This speech was also what Max Blumenthal mentions in one of the videos I posted, which provides a short history of Russia.

A brief history of the new US cold war with Russia(and Putin) w/ Max Blumenthal 25 April 2019

A brief history of the new US cold war with Russia w/ Max Blumenthal

3:31

Yeltsin basically becomes too drunk to continue on. He appoints Vladimir Putin, who had been involved in the privatization project in St. Petersburg. He was close to Anatoly Chubais and the kind of guys who had been around Gorbachev and moved into Yeltsin's administration as partners of the Harvard boys. Everyone thought, "Oh, Putin is gonna be great. He's going to keep this thing going." If you go back to 2000-2001, you can find a lot of people, including Bill Browder, praising Putin.

What Putin proceeds to do is start throwing the oligarchs in prison—the oligarchs who wouldn’t pay into Russia’s economy, from Yukos Oil and so on. This sent shockwaves through the national security state in the US and the foreign policy establishment in Washington. Putin was no socialist; he was basically re-centering the economy around a kind of state capitalist model.

We responded with color revolutions in Georgia, removing Eduard Shevardnadze first, then moving on to Ukraine with the Orange Revolution. These are revolutions that may have been guided by the CIA but were carried out through foundations like the Open Society Institute and the National Endowment for Democracy, which is mostly US-funded. We created private media to drive these revolutions, and many of the students who participated in them were earnest, good-hearted people who thought, "We just want freedom. We just want what the West has to offer." But they were ultimately used as pawns in a geopolitical game that continued this process of destabilization.

At the Munich Security Conference in 2007, Putin stands up with John McCain sitting next to Joe Lieberman in the front row. I think it was Lieberman. Remember "Joe-mentum"? His only endorsement for president was from The New Republic under Marty Peretz. It’s really inspiring. You should go back and look at that video and the look on John McCain’s face when Putin speaks. Putin says, "We will now act in Russia’s national security and national interests and we will not tolerate expansion on our borders any further." He basically puts his foot down, and that was, I think, when this new Cold War process really started to intensify.

The next year, Georgia invaded South Ossetia, which is Russian territory. We’re constantly told Russia invaded, but no, it was a Georgian invasion by Mikhail Saakashvili, who himself was a CIA National Endowment for Democracy project and was egged on by the US. He wound up eating his tie on national television, literally, and got stomped—another event that sent shockwaves through the national security state in the US.

Georgia started war with Russia: EU-backed report

An independent report blamed Georgia on Wednesday for starting last year's five-day war with Russia, but said Moscow's military response went beyond reasonable limits and violated international law.

Putin steps aside to Medvedev after 2008. Medvedev comes in and was not particularly popular in Russia. The Libya events really showed how Medvedev’s presence frightened Russia’s military intelligence apparatus. When there was a critical vote at the UN on whether to allow a no-fly zone in Libya, Russia abstained. What's Libya now? Open-air slave auctions, the destabilization of North Africa, the rise of Boko Haram, the arms blowout to the south, from Libya to Syria—complete chaos.

Putin steps back in after the Magnitsky sanctions come in. The Magnitsky sanctions were the product of Bill Browder, someone who’s widely hailed as this "Free Russia" expert today. He was at Hermitage Capital. He was one of the oligarchs, and I think he’s actually the grandson of Earl Browder. He had come to Russia to loot the economy. He owed something like $240 million in taxes. The standard official story is that his lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was beaten to death in a Russian prison. If you watch Andrei Nekrasov's film, which is effectively banned in the US—Browder has prevented it from being shown at the European Parliament—you’ll see an entirely different story. This Norwegian filmmaker, who is anti-Putin, started following Browder around, thinking he was going to make a film about this great dissident, and found out that he was an international con artist and vulture capitalist who had used his personal fortune to doctor American foreign policy and engineer a 99-to-nothing vote in the US Congress to sanction Russia unprovoked. There was no clear provocation for these sanctions. The Magnitsky sanctions deepened the sense of enmity, mistrust, and fear in Russia that the US is coming back for more.

Now the Magnitsky sanctions have been expanded to the global Magnitsky sanctions, so they are now being applied against Venezuela and will soon be used to destroy Nicaragua’s economy, and so on. We have to see the repercussions of the Cold War globally.

Ukraine is next with the Maidan. Remember that it was another color revolution-style operation with many of the figures in the Maidan supported by the foundations—National Endowment for Democracy, Open Society Institute—along with the street muscle of Right Sector. Right Sector are Nazis. I remember at the time, the neocon Jamie Kirchick wrote about Putin’s "imaginary Nazis" in Foreign Policy. Well, those imaginary Nazis just celebrated the SS battalion last month in the open. They’ve renamed streets after Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych, who were involved in pogroms against Jews. They actually renamed the street that leads to Babi Yar, the site of Jewish extermination, after Stepan Bandera. So, I don’t think we can imagine they’re real—those Nazis are real.

This is part of it. You have to understand Russia's fear of having Nazis on their border. Then, of course, there’s Syria. I don’t want to spend more than 10 seconds on it, but we enacted a $1 billion program to arm and equip what we consider to be moderate rebels in the only allied state in the Arab League—the only state allied with Russia. So, Nazis and jihadists coming at you on your borders or in your ally in the middle of your allied states, marching on their capitals.