Sunday, February 27, 2022

January 2022: Putin Warned That Social Inequities Have Been Exacerbated By The Pandemic, This Could Lead To a Collapse of Global Development, and an "All Against All" Fight

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned the World Economic Forum that the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated preexisting imbalances and tensions. 
He said these could deteriorate to a point where there is a fight of “all against all.” 
Putin’s virtual address at the WEF was unexpected. 
“The coronavirus pandemic has become a major challenge to mankind, and it has accelerated structural changes, the preconditions for which were already in place,” he said at a virtual meeting of the World Economic Forum. 
“We have every reason to believe that the tensions might be aggravated even further,” Putin warned, citing experts that have likened the current state of global affairs to the 1920s and 1930s and that parallels could be drawn between then and now when it comes to the scale and scope of what he called systemic “challenges and potential threats.” 
He said the crisis had increased social stratification, populism, right- and left-wing radicalism, adding that domestic political processes were becoming more violent. 
“All of this cannot but impact international relations, making them less stable and predictable,” he said, according to a translation. 
“In the 20th century, the failure and inability to centrally resolve such issues resulted in the catastrophic World War II. Of course, nowadays such a heated conflict is not possible, I hope that it’s not possible in principle, because it would mean the end of our civilization. But I would like to reiterate, that the situation might develop unpredictably and uncontrollably if we will sit on our hands doing nothing to avoid it. And there is a possibility that we may experience an actual collapse of global development that might result in a fight of all against all.”

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