Has Putin Revealed His True Self?
Amid the torrent of dismal news, frivolous television programmes, and the illiterate discourse of television presenters that fills the Arab satellite channels, important stories are often lost. They may be brief, yet at times they carry profound implications.
This morning my attention was arrested by a report broadcast on RT Arabic. I thought it prudent to verify it when the bulletin was repeated an hour later, and indeed it was. The report stated that President Vladimir Putin had declared:
“Moscow and Washington are the guarantors of world security.”
The report explained that this was the Arabic rendering of the original Russian phrase appearing in President Putin’s message of congratulations to President Donald Trump on the occasion of the American national holiday.
Every congratulation presupposes a reason. One congratulates a friend on the birth of a child or upon success achieved. Here, however, an obvious question presents itself: for what, precisely, should the American people be congratulated?
This people, formed from a curious amalgam of Europe’s outcasts, possesses a unique record in recorded human history. It was founded upon the seizure of another people’s land and the extermination of nearly one hundred million of its peaceful inhabitants. It then turned upon itself in a civil war that claimed another million lives. No sooner had that internal conflict ended than it embarked upon a career of invasion, aggression, plunder, and usurpation in every corner of the globe. Anyone who examines its record will scarcely find a single decade during the past hundred years in which it did not commit aggression against another nation. Yet after all this it bestowed upon itself the title of “Leader of the Free World,” a title proudly echoed by the rest of Europe.
If it be said that diplomatic courtesy and the conventions governing relations between states obliged Putin to congratulate Trump, one could readily accept that explanation within its proper context. But for Putin to declare that the United States—with its dark and aggressive history—is a guarantor of world security is a repugnant assertion, one that treats with contempt all the peoples against whom the United States has committed aggression since the end of its Civil War.
Had this been the first occasion on which Putin had uttered such words, one might dismiss them as nothing more than cheap flattery. But anyone who has followed Putin over the past thirty years will recognise that this statement is merely the verbal expression of the policies he has consistently pursued. Those policies rest upon his conviction that Zionism, in both its Germanic branch in Western Europe and the United States and its Slavic branch in Eastern Europe—the two now at war with one another—possesses the right to dominate the world and dispose of its affairs as it pleases.
This is precisely what Putin meant in today’s message. He merely said openly what he has been saying and doing, both publicly and privately, for the past thirty years. In essence, he believes that the world security supposedly guaranteed by American-Russian Zionism is achieved through the following:
- The right of Zionism to impose genocidal sanctions, as in Iraq—sanctions that Putin endorsed by approving the relevant resolutions of the United Nations Security Council.
- The right of Zionism to invade and occupy Iraq, which Putin likewise endorsed through his approval of Security Council resolutions.
- The right of Zionism to invade Libya and fragment it into a patchwork of tribal and sectarian statelets.
- The right of Zionism to occupy Idlib Province in Syria and protect al-Qaeda, an enterprise in which Russia participated alongside Turkey until the fall of the government in Damascus.
- The right of Zionism to expand its seizure of Palestine, a policy that Putin himself facilitated by sending one million of the refuse of his own people to settle yet more Palestinian land.
- The right of Zionism to perpetrate genocide in Gaza, in which thousands of Russians holding dual nationality have participated without a single word from Putin calling upon them to refrain, despite his repeated claim that it is his duty to defend Russians wherever they may be in the world.
- The exclusive right of Zionism to possess nuclear weapons in Western Asia. Putin, who supported the forcible disarmament of Iraq and Syria and has repeatedly declared his opposition to a nuclear Iran, has never once declared his belief in the necessity of eliminating nuclear weapons from Western Asia.
- The right of Zionism to invade any country and seize its president, as occurred in Venezuela. Evidently, this too forms part of Putin’s conception of guaranteeing world security.
- The right of Zionism to assassinate the leader of any state that incurs its displeasure, as happened in the assassination of Iran’s religious leader. Evidently, this too forms part of the world security to which Putin referred.
- The exclusive right of Zionism to redraw international frontiers by force. Iraq was destroyed because it sought to alter borders drawn by the occupying power. Yet Zionism may alter borders whenever it chooses, as in Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, and Ukraine.
A state that wages aggression against the world cannot be the guarantor of its security.
Nor can the possession of nuclear weapons confer upon a state the right to act as it pleases. On the contrary, their sole moral purpose is to deter aggression. Otherwise, every moral and legal justification for preventing other states from acquiring them disappears, and possession of nuclear weapons becomes the only guarantee of national security—as North Korea has done, and as Iran has finally come to realise.
Abdul Haq Al-Ani
4 July 2026