Friday, 30 January 2009

Approach Russia with great caution

Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, does not make it easy to grasp the barbed olive branch that he may be trying to offer.

Speaking at the Davos gathering of world leaders, he called for global co-operation in response to the global economic crisis. And he made the not unhelpful, though hardly original, suggestion that “excessive dependence” on the US dollar as the single reserve currency was “dangerous for the global economy”.

But the message came loaded with so much anti-US bile, with Mr Putin crowing over the US’s role in causing the crisis, that he did nothing to contribute to the trust on which the co-operation that he says he seeks must be built.

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