But Some Things Are Still Unsayable

The Guardian still will not permit any comment like this on any article about Russia:

If Akhmed Zakayev and Boris Berezovsky are not being extradited from Britain to Russia, then why should Russia extradite anyone to Britain?

Berezovsky is even permitted to travel on a British passport using the assumed name Platon Elenin, in order to visit the former Soviet Union stirring up support for a coup in Russia. And Zakayev, like the Chechen separatists generally, is an important example of how neoconservatism is not in any sense hostile to "militant Islam" (the only kind that there can be), but in fact hand-in-glove with it: in Chechnya, Kosovo, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey today, just as in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and just as in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

NATO should have been wound up in 1991, and it is only to be expected that Russia is furious, not only at its continued existence (which is bad enough), but even more so at its outrageous expansion to within one hundred miles of Saint Petersburg.

Why has this happened, if not to menace Russia, which can in fact switch off our gas for so long as we refuse to have anything like enough civil nuclear power, and which is therefore is a position to view us, not as a threatening menace, but, much more dangerously from our point of view, as merely a tiresome and impertinent menace?

Instead, we should be cultivating Russia’s sense of herself as an integral part of the Biblical-Classical civilisation that is the West, as that civilisation’s bridge both to the Islamic world and to the Far East, and as its bulwark against either Islamic or Far Eastern domination, a mission shared with all the Slavs.

Why not?