Source: The UnPopulist
by Vladimir Kara-Murza
“As Putin was clearly building an authoritarian state, silencing the media, rigging elections, persecuting his opponents, Western leaders continued with business as usual. American presidents of both parties looked into Putin’s soul and pushed reset buttons. European leaders rolled out royal red carpets, signed lucrative deals, launched new gas pipelines all the while, I suppose, hoping to maintain some sort of a modus operandi with Mr. Putin in the international arena, at the price of ignoring and enabling his abuses inside of Russia — an immoral policy, if there ever was one. But also, a very impractical one. Because one other clear lesson from Russian history is that internal repression and external aggression are always two sides of one coin — because a government that tramples on the rights of its own people will never respect the borders of its neighbors.” (08/18/25)
https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/appeasing-an-aggressor-never-leads