The Russian President met yesterday with young entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists who will be attending next week’s St. Petersburg International Economics Forum (SPIEF) to hear their ideas preparatory to the forum on where Russia is “now, where we are going and what we need to do to ensure our absolute and unconditional progress, to make it beneficial for the country and everyone involved in this remarkable process” of transforming and changing Russia.
Putin situated this task within Russia’s continuous fight historically to ensure its sovereignty.
In today’s world of rapid “geopolitical, scientific and technological transformations,” Russia, or any country which wishes to exert leadership in any area, must be sovereign, he told them.
“There is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called … if a country or a group of countries is not able to make sovereign decisions, then it is already a colony to a certain extent. But a colony has no historical prospects, no chance for survival” in what he views as centuries of “tough geopolitical struggle.”
Western leaders with any brain left would do well to give some thought to Putin’s discussion of the essential components of sovereignty: military-political, economic, technical and social. He explained that by “social” sovereignty he means “the ability of society to come together to resolve national challenges, to respect history, culture, language, and all the ethnicities that share a single territory. This consolidation of society is one of the core conditions for growth. Without consolidation, things will fall apart.”
