Russia, US slipping into familiar 'chill'?

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Russia, US slipping into familiar 'chill'?

By Fred Weir, Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

MOSCOW - Call it Cold War II, the sequel.

An intensifying shouting match between the US and Russia has stirred fears that the two former adversaries could be drifting back to a familiar ideologically charged rivalry.

Most experts play down the new mood as a worrisome "chill," and some suggest that a change in leadership - slated for 2008 in both countries - might reverse the slide in mutual ties. But many Russians, who have watched as Western influence has thrust decisively into the former Soviet heartland since the USSR's 1991 demise, see it in darker, more visceral tones.

The US is bent on spreading its power by "buying leaders and organizing state coups" throughout the former USSR, says Yevgeny Ivanov, chief ideologist for the pro-Kremlin group Nashi, Russia's biggest political youth movement. He's referring to the recent wave of pro-democracy "colored revolutions" that wrenched Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan from Moscow's orbit. "Their type of globalization is aimed at having the right to decide the world's destiny," he says.

At the other end of the age spectrum, Fyodor Suvorov, a retired military officer, agrees. "What is the US doing [in the former USSR]? It's as if Russia went to 'protect its interests' in Mexico. While we give in to their pressure, the Americans have pushed NATO right to our doorstep," he says.

A January poll conducted by the independent Levada Center in Moscow found that 57 percent of Russians regard the US as a "threat to global security," while just 33 percent think it isn't.

As in the original cold war, which lasted from the end of World War II until the 1991 Soviet collapse, each of the two sides blames the other for the rift.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20060417/wl_csm/ocoldwar_1

No wonder Putin blindly props up the regime of Aleksander Lukashenka in Belarus with below market oil & gas. Hopefully travel to both countries will not be a problem in the future for my wife and I to visit relatives.

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...the Americans have pushed NATO right to our doorstep...

Fukc yeah.

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there is one thing I learned as a very young man reading history book after history book.... history repeats itself.. always! The technologies and names change but the way things happen never do.

Fact of the matter is... the US could push Russia back into reforming and some of the lesser countries to rejoin a bastardized Union of Soviet Republics. Throw the new developments with Iran into the mix... someone want to call the firemen because I smell smoke!