Europe
Viewpoints
Russian Submarine Disaster
WARSAW Gazeta Wyborcza (liberal), Aug. 21: The Kursk became a casket for its 118 crewmen, but Putin needed several endless days to find the proper words.…[His] false pride and pathological, blind nationalism made the Russian government at first reject foreign help and wiped out any chance of saving the crew.…Chernobyl showed that the Soviet Union was not able to face a truly critical situation.....The drama of the Kursk is proving that the Russian system has the same defect....In Chernobyl…the death certificate of the Soviet Union was signed. What kind of sentence is being passed for Russia by the Kursk?
—Leopold Unger
MOSCOW Izvestiya (liberal), Aug. 18: The Russian elite’s reflexes have not changed....It slips into its old ways whenever there is a danger, exactly as in the days of the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Its first reflex is to hide the truth. But it cannot—this country and the world have changed so. That makes their antics look even more monstrous.
—Georgy Bovt
MOSCOW Nezavisimaya Gazeta (liberal), Aug. 18: Why keep an enormous and costly fleet of nuclear submarines if we can’t support them on combat missions as short as three days?…We should live within our means.…The crisis in our Northern Fleet in a small way reflects a crisis in our army reform.
—Vadim Solovyov
MOSCOW Kommersant (business-oriented), Aug. 17: Experience shows that you can fight terrorists successfully without naming the criminals. But you can’t be a success in a rescue operation unless you rescue people. Someone must answer for the loss of human lives. This is exactly why state officials refuse to take responsibility for anything.
—Nikolai Gulko
EDINBURGH The Scotsman (independent), Aug. 15: If there is to be anything positive coming from the Kursk disaster, it has to be the need for Russia and the G-7 Western countries to intensify cooperation both in reducing the potential risks from the obsolete Soviet arsenal left over from the Cold War and in securing nuclear safety at sea.…Russia’s sea dreams from the Cold War cost her precious resources and many brave men. The crew of the Kursk should be the last potential sacrifice to that folly.
OSLO Dagbladet (liberal), Aug. 16: For Putin, the Kursk accident is extremely inconvenient. I doubt whether any West European government would have survived the information catastrophe Russia has experienced these past days.
—Halvard Helle
