The West should be flexing its muscles. Two policies stand out. One is to bolster the countries that may be next in the Kremlin’s firing line. Georgia and Moldova are both worried that their move towards Europe will incur the same pressure and interference now being experienced by Ukraine. We should support them, and the most exposed countries that are already in Western clubs, such as the small Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Second, the Achilles’ heel of both the Yanukovych regime and his Kremlin backers is money. However much they steal, they cannot dispose of it at home. They need our banks, our real-estate market, our stock exchanges and our secretive company law to hide and launder their assets. They use our law firms and auditors to make it look legal. This happens in Vienna, New York – and London. It is to our lasting shame that we have been accomplices in this. We should unleash our money-laundering and anti-bribery laws. We should freeze assets and impose visa bans on those involved in looting and repression on our doorstep. Ukrainians are fighting and dying for the right to be European. Theirs is not a naive belief in the EU’s virtues, but a profound belief that liberty, legality and decency are better than crony capitalism and the neo-Soviet bombast of the Putin Kremlin. They believe in our values more than we do ourselves. Why are we letting them down? telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10649170/Ukraine-protests-Were-letting-Putin-win.html
Posted on: Fri, 21 Feb 2014 13:09:58 +0000
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