In early July 2022, in an interview with French TV channel LCI reported in Le Figaro, and later TF1, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and former President of Poland Lech Walesa blathered publicly about what his masters discussed mainly in private: He called for the population of Russia to be reduced to 50 million people. Walesa was the leader of Poland’s Solidarnosc movement which received major financial backing from the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy, and spearheaded the anti-Communist uprising in the 1980s, and was described by former U.S. President Ronald Reagan as “a weapon in the Cold War.” Solidarnosc reportedly received at least $30 million from the Reagan administration.
According to Walesa, Russia’s political system must be changed or its population would have to be reduced from 144 million to less than 50 million. “We can count 60 peoples that were annexed like the Ukrainians today. We have to help these peoples that were annexed by Russia to rise up. … It is necessary to either change the political system of Russia or to bring its population down to below 50 million,” Walesa argued.
At the same time, in his opinion, the West could have done this at the end of the 20th century. “They should have brought Russia down. But Gorbachev was too smart for that. At that time, we said to ourselves: `There was Stalin, Brezhnev, but Gorbachev, he’s likable.’ So we left them alone. Russia had expected hard times, and now it wants to continue as it has for centuries and continue annexing peoples into its empire. That was our mistake back then. For myself, I wanted to do it differently, but I was not allowed,” the politician emphasized.
According to Walesa, “we have to force a change in the political system, or else organize popular uprisings.… Even if Ukraine wins this war, in five years the same thing will happen again, and in ten years we will see a new Putin emerge.” Figaro paraphrases Walesa’s thinking that unless there’s a complete change in Moscow’s political regime, world security can only be ensured by dismembering Russia now, which he considers is still imperialist.
“There are now two systems: on the one side, the democracies and NATO, which want to expand, but by democratic means, soliciting the decisions of the people, on the other side, Russia and China, which resort to the old methods of annexation,” he said.
“It has to be understood that the West expands its power through NATO, through the European Union, expanding but by democratic means. Russia does it through violence,” the former President, now 79, insisted. (https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/guerre-en-ukraine-lech-walesa-suggere-de-ramener-la-russie-a-moins-de-50-millions-d-habitants-20220710 )
