Putin's Russia - an elephant in a china shop

I heard this commentary on the radio last Friday morning (rebroadcast from Thursday night) and felt it was worth finding the text on-line (on the excellent Echo of Moscow website, of course) and translating it for general consumption. It's a little bit stale now but still interesting. In the course of translating this piece, I found another interesting website - the Ukrainian Central Election Commission.
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"Replika Buntmana" ("Buntman’s Report")
November 25th, 2004, Echo of Moscow radio station.
By Echo of Moscow Deputy Editor Sergei Buntman

And so Putin congratulated Yanukovych a second time, and declared a second time that the Ukrainian people have chosen stability and all the rest. This was the second time that the Russian president had to congratulate his Ukrainian favorite son from foreign soil, this time from Holland, in quite a Petrine manner. Just like the tsar-carpenter, Putin traveled to the Hague to hammer together the Russo-European house. But what he's being asked to do there -- to patch up the footstools that he's broken in Ukraine -- is really more like joinery. That's why it is very convenient right now for the Russian head of state to take a formalistic position and refuse to acknowledge any reality other than the declarations of the Ukrainian Central Election Commission. In so doing he is able to say that the West is interfering, and Russia is not.

Of course the West is interfering. How can one not interfere when half of the country, backed up by half the world, is shouting about violations and falsifications, when people have come out into the streets and it's not even clear anymore what is keeping them orderly. The West is interfering now, because a way out of the current situation (the real situation) must be found. And Moscow thinks that it can sit around and complain about this, because the situation in Ukraine is wonderful, the mission was accomplished: they've beat it into their heads that Russia can't live without President Yanukovych, and they accomplished the mission by pulling him through in the elections. Unfortunately, though, this is very far from reality.

Russia, as though in a police interrogation room, is doing the devil knows what, but that's not a mirror on the wall but a two-way mirror, on the other side of which the world is sitting and wondering. President Putin very much wants to be respected and even feared, he wants to be listened to attentively and taken along to play with the adults, to be seated at the grown-ups' political table. And they've taken him along, and seated him at the table; after all, only Gorbachev, perhaps, in his time, was favored with so many overtures from the West.

But to desire respect and serious partnership while behaving like a clever teenager is at the very least naive and short-sighted. So here's the interim finish to the Ukrainian operation: Russia is sitting in it's own virtual reality, and it's not Russia that is being invited to patch up footstools and glue back together broken china, it's Poland and Lithuania -- the [here the author uses a derogatory slang term - ляхи - for Poles, I think, although I had to figure that out using context clues from the few times I found that term in internet posts; I couldn't find it in any dictionary] are being invited. And the elephant rarely gets let into the china shop a second time.