Absent that.

Editor,

I find it wearisome being one tiny voice protesting incessant Putin bashing in the pages of the NY times. Mr. Putin should know that for one reader of this newspaper time does not begin when the NY Times says it does.

Mr. Putin took Crimea because his national security was threatened. His navy was tied up in a base nominally under control of a government that had assumed power in the wake of a violent coup supported by the USA.

U.S. aggression always comes masked by accusations of aggression by the target of U.S. aggression. There is always a Tonkin Gulf, a mushroom cloud smoking gun, an imminent invasion of Texas by the USSR.

Mr. Putin is responsible for the interests of Russia on a world stage that is dominated by the ruthlessness, violence, and duplicity of the USA. Russia is not Shangrila, and I doubt if Russia claims to be. But the relentless hostility of the USA toward Russia and its leadership is, as I said, tiring.

The USA does not have oligarchs sucking the life blood out of the American body politic? The American oligarchs go one better: they suck the life out of the entire world. Russian violence? Yes, Chechnya has been devastated. Need we mention Iraq? And that is just for starters.

The sanctimony wears thin after a while. All this carrot-and-stick talk in American-Russian relations is predicated on the unremitting hostility of the USA towards Russia. Full stop. Absent that there is no issue that the U.S. and Mr. Putin could not resolve.

Re: "Mr. Putin’s Global Courtships " (12/27/2014)