The Russian Embassy took note of Mr. Steven Kuo’s article ‘Russia has lost it, so SA should realign’ published in Business Day on 30 June. We would like to point out the most ridiculous of numerous controversies in the author’s logic.

1. Claiming that ‘Russia is finished as a great power’ is just rich. We assume it is a sure sign of a finished great power if it can ‘shuffle the international system’s deck of cards’ by its actions. Honestly, it’s easy to get confused these days whether Russia is a mastermind that stands behind almost everything (usually the worst) that’s going on in the world, including the outcome of presidential elections in the USA, or it is a helpless and agonizing country with ‘shattered economy’. But how can two mutually-exclusive narratives co-exist in one and the same article?

2. The author states that the USA and its allies, even Germany and Japan, strongly oppose Russia’s foreign policy implying that SA needs therefore to profoundly reconsider its stance on cooperation with Russia. Firstly, how is this even an argument? Secondly, do we get this right that Mr. Kuo would prefer the country he currently resides in to follow the steps of those who are acting as the US puppets to the detriment of their own population’s wellbeing?

3. We would also appreciate if anyone could enlighten us with regards to who among top Russian officials has ever favoured regime change in Ukraine, which according to Mr. Kuo ‘Putin has failed to effect’. From what we know, it is the West that is infamous for orchestrating unconstitutional coups. By the way, two of them took place in Ukraine (in 2004 & 2014 – the ‘orange revolution’ and ‘Maidan’).
As our Foreign Minister S.Lavrov has put it, ‘we are not up for regime change in Ukraine, we want the Ukrainians themselves to decide how they want to live further’. And Russia has always been committed to such principles, be it Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Turkey or any other country.

4. It is indeed intriguing to know what Mr. Kuo actually refers to when he mentions, not once, ‘Russian atrocities committed in Ukraine’. Unfortunately, the author fails to name any of them leaving his readers empty-handed. But if the author doesn’t give a single fact, does that mean he knows that fact-checking will prove him wrong? Smart move.

5. Mr. Kuo apparently didn’t bother to read the Moscow Peace Treaty that ended the Winter War of 1939-1940 between the USSR and Finland before writing that ‘the Soviet Union’s Red Army lost the Winter War’. In brief, Finland ceded about 11% of the territories it possessed at the beginning of the war. There is no arguing about a great cost the USSR had to pay during the conflict but how do you like such peace conditions for the ‘winner’? This might explain, though, why the author believes that ‘Russia has lost it’ regarding the Ukraine crisis.

We are in no position to give Mr. Kuo advice about loyalty and patriotism but it appears only reasonable that if one was indeed so worried about not ‘getting caught pants down’, for starters, they would probably want to avoid passing pasquinades for analysis and prognosis in geopolitics.