Zee Beam News

MOSCOW, February 26, 2009 (RIA Novosti) - A former Russian presidential aide known for his criticism of current Kremlin policy has hit out at the U.S. administration's intention to "reset" ties with Moscow. Speaking in English on Wednesday before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs at a hearing on U.S.-Russia ties, Andrei Illarionov suggested that Washington's desire to improve relations with Moscow had been met with "joy and satisfaction" by what he called 'the Russian Chekists," a reference to the former Soviet secret police organization, a forerunner to the KGB. U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said earlier this month in Munich that relations with Russia would be given a new start after years of tension between Moscow and the administration of former U.S. president George W. Bush. "It is time to press the reset button and to revisit the many areas where we can and should be working together with Russia," Biden said. The Kremlin critic told the House that Biden's so-called Munich statement had been interpreted by the Russian leadership as the acceptance by the U.S. of "the idea of the de-facto restoration of the Russian Chekists' influence and power over the post-Soviet space." Illarionov, who served for three years as an economic policy advisor during Vladimir Putin's presidency, is currently a senior fellow of the Cato Institute, Washington, DC, and president of the Institute of Economic Analysis in Moscow. He resigned from his position as economic policy advisor in 2005, saying "the country has stopped being free and democratic." He also said Biden's statement was "not even an appeasement policy that is so well known to all of us by another Munich decision in 1938. It is a surrender. A full, absolute and unconditional surrender to the regime of the secret police officers, Chekists, Mafiosi, and bandits in today's Russia." Illarionov also issued a warning about the consequences of such a "surrender." "Those who retreat and surrender will get not peace, but war, war with unpredictable and nasty results," he said.