Loyalty to US has led Germany & rest of EU into 'dead end' & they need to escape - top Russian Foreign Affairs official
At a time when some of the states of Central and Western Europe are reassessing their place in the world - amid the rise of China, US political flux, Covid-19 and Brexit - Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel has spoken about the need for "constructive" dialogue with Russia.
Novikov was responding to comments Merkel made on Friday during an interview with selected liberal European newspapers such as the Guardian and Le Monde, indicating she would continue to "strive for cooperation" with Moscow.
"Germany, like the other key states of the European Union, is now in a dual position: Angela Merkel has priorities in both the energy sector and in general security," said Novikov, the first deputy chairman of the Russian parliament's committee on foreign affairs.
"She is interested in developing normal relations with Russia, but because of Euro-Atlantic solidarity, they [that is, Germany and its EU partners] have reached a dead end, and, sooner or later, it will be necessary to get out of it."
Germany and Russia are Europe's two largest countries by population, and also have its two biggest economies, when measured by purchasing-power parity, according to current International Monetary Fund estimates.
Keeping the two from finding common ground and getting too close has long been an existential matter for so-called 'Atlanticists.' In 2015, George Friedman, founder of the geopolitical intelligence consultancy Stratfor - once dubbed "the shadow CIA" - admitted in an address to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs think tank that "the primordial interest of the United States, over which for a century we have fought wars... has been the relationship between Germany and Russia."
He explained that this was because "united, they are the only force which could threaten us" and cautioned that the US needed "to make sure that that doesn't happen." And his reasoning? The combination of Russian resources and manpower with German capital and technology "scares the hell out of the United States," he said.
"The individual plaintiffs have shown that they are injured by at least some ACA provisions — namely, various provisions regulating health-insurance plans that limit the 14 range and terms of plans the individual plaintiffs may obtain and that increase their costs of obtaining coverage."
The bill passed the House on Friday in a vote split almost exactly along party lines, with a single Democrat venturing a 'no' on the measure for a total of 232 for to 180 against. However, it's unlikely to see a vote in the Republican-dominated Senate, not least because giving DC statehood would outfit it with two - likely Democratic - senators.
Of the District's 700,000 residents, over 46 percent of whom are black, are effectively disenfranchised under the existing system, in which they are represented by a single member of Congress who doesn't even have a vote.
Comment: The avalanche of mockery was almost immediate: