clipped from: www.guardian.co.uk August 2008
The former US national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, has called on the world community to isolate Russia in protest over its campaign in the Caucasus, likening its tactics to those of "Hitler or Stalin".
said the Russian prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was "following a course that is horrifyingly similar to that taken by Stalin and Hitler in the 1930s".
He said that Putin's "justification" for splitting up Georgia - because of the Russian citizens living in South Ossetia - could be compared to when Hitler used the alleged suffering of ethnic Germans in the Sudetenland as a pretext for annexing Czechoslovakia in 1938.
There are also parallels between Putin's strategy against Georgia and Stalin's invasion of Finland in 1939. He added: "Georgia is to an extent the Finland of today, both morally and strategically."
The world was now being confronted with the question as to how it should react to Russia and what he saw as its efforts to "reincorporate old Soviet areas into the Kremlin's sphere of control". He said at the heart of the issue was access to oil and specifically who controlled the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline which runs through Georgia.
"If Georgia no longer has its sovereignty it means not only that the west is cut off from the Caspian Sea and Central Asia, but we can also assume that Putin will exercise a similar strategy against Ukraine
"If Russia continues on this path it has to be isolated by the international community," he said, including economic sanctions on which all alliances from the European Union to NATO would have to take a joint stand.
The failure of the White House during George Bush's eight year tenure, to recognize the "Putin regime" for what it really was.
"He [Medvedev] has about as much influence over the current situation as the official head of state in the Soviet Union of the 1950s
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