The post-Soviet Russia foreign minister warned that US democracy itself was at stake with the challenge of some GOP senators to the election victory of President-elect Joe Biden.
Andrei Kozyrev, who was foreign minister under President Boris Yeltsin between 1991 and 1996, compared the challenge of President Donald Trump and his allies to the November 4 election results with concessions made in Russia in the 1990s, undermining his burgeoning democracy. snatched away and ushered in. Vladimir Putin’s grip on power.
In August 1991, Kozyrev filed an op-ed The Washington Post which called on the US to help its country’s new democracy. This followed a constitutional crisis in which communist hardliners tried to institute a coup.
“The US government has given us support,” Kozyrev said Newsweek. But referring to Yeltsin, he added that Russian politicians and observers had bowed to political pressure from “the demanding leader in power in the late 1990s”.
“In defense of their cowardice, they promised that it would be a one-time concession, not a change to the constitutional order,” Kozyrev said in an email.
“Democracy is easy to lose, but difficult to regain. The free and fair elections, coupled with the subsequent orderly transfer of power, have never returned.”
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Congress on Wednesday will confirm the election college results that formulate Biden’s victory in the election. However, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley is among a group of GOP lawmakers who say they will contest the outcome.
“The behavior of President Trump’s supporters is also painfully well known,” Kozyrev said, with lawmakers “afraid to follow the Constitution against the will of their party leader” and a “powerful media ready to attack everything” … about the autocrat’s seizure of power. ‘
Kozyrev, whose book Firebird gives a detail on the democratic development of Russia towards the Soviet Union, and said the path that his country followed in the nineties led to a ‘stagnant economy’ led by legislators who ‘servants of the strong man and his acolytes are ‘.
Although it lasted several weeks, Putin congratulated Biden on his victory amid speculation about what it will mean for relations between Moscow and Washington, DC, which are already at an all-time low.
The key point of Biden’s foreign policy after its inauguration is what to do with the New START treaty that expires in February and limits what strategic nuclear warheads, missiles and bombers both countries can use.
Kozyrev worked with two U.S. administrations to mediate the predecessor of the bilateral treaty, START 1. He said the agreement, which stretched the administrations of George HW Bush and Bill Clinton between the agreement and its implementation, was never hampered by the change of president, but he was concerned about the lack of cooperation in this transition.
“I must confess that I took this orderly transfer of power for granted because the United States was known as the beacon of stability and constitutional order,” he said. “I hate to say that those times seem to have gone for both the United States and Russia – hopefully not forever.” ‘
Kozyrev, who now lives in the US, said: “I’m still betting on America, my country of choice, and here’s my appeal: Stand by the US, stand by the US Constitution. Confirm the victory of Biden- Harris. “
The image below by Statista shows how long Vladimir Putin has been in power.
Statista