Communist leader says Putin letting USA drag Russia into war with Muslim worldNovosibirsk, 20 November: Russian Communist Party leader Gennadiy Zyuganov believes that President Vladimir Putin's foreign policy "is destroying the country's national security". At a news conference today in Novosibirsk where he arrived for a working visit he criticized Russia's attitude to the anti-Taleban operation in Afghanistan.
"For four hours I tried to persuade Putin and for two hours (Prime Minister Mikhail) Kasyanov that we have no right to get involved. Americans are dragging us into a war with the enormous Muslim world in which 1.4bn people live, into a war with the Arab world," Zyuganov said.
He is convinced that there will be no winners in Afghanistan. "If Putin wants to demonstrate to the world community that he is combating terrorism, he has Chechnya for that. Let him catch (field commanders) Basayev and Khattab and all the rest this winter," he said.
In Zyuganov's opinion, Russia should now organize a kind of cordon sanitaire in the direction of Afghanistan. Otherwise Russia will get 5m refugees from Central Asian countries. The problem of forced migrants is already acute in Russia. Some 100,000 refugees live in Omsk Region of Siberia alone, Zyuganov claimed.
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