Failure

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 429.

On the whole, we have to admit that we have failed to recognise the complexity and dangerous nature of the processes taking place in our own country and the world in general. In any case, we have failed to respond to them appropriately. We showed weakness, and the weak are trampled upon. Some want to cut off a juicy morsel from us while others are helping them. They are helping because they believe that, as one of the world's major nuclear powers, Russia is still posing a threat to someone, and therefore this threat must be removed. And terrorism is, of course, only a tool for achieving these goals. But as I have already said many times, we have faced crises, mutinies and acts of terror more than once. But what has happened now, this crime of the terrorists, inhuman, unprecedented in terms of its cruelty, is not a challenge to the president, to parliament or to the government. This is a challenge to the whole of Russia, to the whole of our people; this is an attack on our country. The terrorists believe they are stronger than us, that they will be able to intimidate us with their cruelty, that they will be able to paralyse our will and demoralize our society. And it would appear that we have a choice of resisting them or agreeing to their claims, surrendering, allowing them to destroy and split Russia, in the hope that they will finally leave us in peace.

As president, the head of the Russian state - the person who swore an oath to defend the country and its territorial integrity - and simply as a citizen of Russia, I am convinced that in reality we simply have no choice. Because if we allow ourselves to be blackmailed and if we give in to panic, we will submerge millions of people into endless and bloody conflicts like those in Karabakh, in the Dniester region, and other well-known tragedies we know only too well. One cannot fail to see the obvious. We are dealing here not just with separate actions aimed at frightening us, not just with separate terrorist sorties. We are dealing with direct intervention of international terrorism against Russia, with a total, cruel and full-scale war in which our compatriots die again and again. The entire world experience shows that these wars, unfortunately, do not end quickly. In these conditions, we simply cannot, we must not live as carelessly as we have done until now. We must create a more effective security system, demand from our law-enforcement bodies' actions, which are appropriate to the level and scale of the new threats that have emerged.