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Ideas

Russia's Prime Export Under Putin: Chaos

Russia's president is neither clearly right-wing nor left-wing. As his dubious allies around the world suggest, he simply hates Western liberal democracy and seeks to expand his personal power, at home and abroad, by sowing unrest and conflict.

Photo of Nicolas Maduro shaking hands with Vladimir Putin

A file photo of Putin with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro

© Alexei Druzhinin/Russian PPIO/ZUMA
Héctor Abad Faciolince

-OpEd-

BOGOTÁ — A glance at Vladimir Putin's friends around the world gives us a clear idea of the Russian president's preferences: It is not about a penchant for the left (as you might think, given his friendship with supposedly leftist governments) or the right (and he does have allies on the right).

His real inclination is for governments that despise liberal democracy, or at least democracy as conceived in the European Union, United States, Australia or Japan.


Even leaders from those democratic countries with authoritarian tendencies will immediately reveal sympathies for Putin and his methods.

Strongman friends on the left and right

Wherever you see a strongman spouting nostalgia for past strongmen or determined to unite the country around him, you'll soon find Putin. So Putin is close to Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela — the autocratic leaders of the continent's supposed left — but there is also recent affection between Putin and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro.

The latter recently visited Putin, right in the middle of the Ukraine crisis (declaring there, "Putin believes in God, honors his military and values family"). There is also flirting with the Argentine Peronist (nostalgic of General Perón) Alberto Fernández, another recent visitor to Russia, eager for dollars Putin cannot give him.

Is Putin a killer? Some former colleagues believe so.

The path by which the fascist Bolsonaro has become Putin's new friend in Latin America is pretty evident. When Biden won the U.S. elections, Bolsonaro was the first to side with Trump. Bewitched by his idol and model, he declared Biden's victory to have been fraudulent. Now, Trump was already friends with Putin, owing the autocrat a lot of favors for his own election campaign against Hillary Clinton. And he paid him back, systematically closing his eyes to Putin's crimes. To get an idea of the change between Trump and his successor, Biden bluntly called Putin a killer.

Photo of Vladimir \u200bPutin in talks with Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro in Moscow

Putin in talks with Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro

kremlin.ru

Nostalgia for Soviet influence

Is Putin a killer? Some former colleagues believe so. Take the dissident Alexander Litvinenko, for instance: a former Russian secret serviceman who escaped arrest in Russia and fled to the United Kingdom with his family, where he was given asylum, then naturalized. He accused Putin of having ordered the murders of the disgraced Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya, both fierce critics of his regime.

Litvinenko didn't survive his declarations long — he was poisoned in 2006 with a lethal isotope, Polonium-210. It took a microgram (a millionth of a gram) of it dissolved in a drink to cause him an excruciatingly painful death within 20 days. All clues in that case led the same way: toward the former KGB colonel and spymaster of communist East Germany, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Putin misses that time, and wants to restore Soviet domination of this land.

Just in case you didn't know, Putin is also the grandson of Stalin's personal chef. Ukraine is one of Europe's chief producers of grain. Its fertile plains are wheat production platforms. Its sin is to want to move closer to the EU's model of democracy and away from its past as a republic dominated by Soviet, or Soviet-style, Russia.

Under Stalin, the Ukrainian language was banned and the Soviet Union sought to Russify the country entirely. Putin misses that time, and wants to restore Soviet domination of this land. Since Russia has no industries or export technologies (only weaponry and raw materials), it exports what it can — chaos.



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Society

What's Spoiling The Kids: The Big Tech v. Bad Parenting Debate

Without an extended family network, modern parents have sought to raise happy kids in a "hostile" world. It's a tall order, when youngsters absorb the fears (and devices) around them like a sponge.

Image of a kid wearing a blue striped sweater, using an ipad.

Children exposed to technology at a very young age are prominent today.

Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ — A 2021 report from the United States (the Youth Risk Behavior Survey) found that 42% of the country's high-school students persistently felt sad and 22% had thought about suicide. In other words, almost half of the country's young people are living in despair and a fifth of them have thought about killing themselves.

Such chilling figures are unprecedented in history. Many have suggested that this might be the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but sadly, we can see depression has deeper causes, and the pandemic merely illustrated its complexity.

I have written before on possible links between severe depression and the time young people spend on social media. But this is just one aspect of the problem. Today, young people suffer frequent and intense emotional crises, and not just for all the hours spent staring at a screen. Another, possibly more important cause may lie in changes to the family composition and authority patterns at home.

Firstly: Families today have fewer members, who communicate less among themselves.

Young people marry at a later age, have fewer children and many opt for personal projects and pets instead of having children. Families are more diverse and flexible. In many countries, the number of children per woman is close to or less than one (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong among others).

In Colombia, women have on average 1.9 children, compared to 7.6 in 1970. Worldwide, women aged 15 to 49 years have on average 2.4 children, or half the average figure for 1970. The changes are much more pronounced in cities and among middle and upper-income groups.

Of further concern today is the decline in communication time at home, notably between parents and children. This is difficult to quantify, but reasons may include fewer household members, pervasive use of screens, mothers going to work, microwave ovens that have eliminated family cooking and meals and, thanks to new technologies, an increase in time spent on work, even at home. Our society is addicted to work and devotes little time to minors.

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