President Barack Obama said Tuesday the United States wanted a strong, prosperous but also democratic Russia, as he set out his vision of the US relationship with its former Cold-War era foe. In the most eagerly awaited address of his two-day visit to Moscow, Obama reached out to Russia by emphasising its place as a "great power" but also did not shy away from the differences between the two countries.
The speech to students graduating from the progressive New Economic School came as Obama sought to revive ties with Russia bruised by a string of crises over the last decade. "America wants a strong, peaceful, and prosperous Russia," Obama told the elite audience of more than one thousand in crammed into the Gostiny Dvor convention centre in central Moscow.
"We recognize the future benefit that will come from a strong and vibrant Russia." He acknowledged the difficulties in forming a lasting partnership between the two former bitter enemies but said Russia and the United States now shared "common interests" on the main issues of the 21st century.
The challenges facing the modern world "demand global partnership, and that partnership will be stronger if Russia occupies its rightful place as a great power," he said. Russia has repeatedly been criticised by the West for a lack of full democratic freedoms under the former president and now Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the new Kremlin chief Dmitry Medvedev.
"The arc of history shows us that governments which serve their own people survive and thrive," said Obama. "Governments which serve only their own power do not." He also took aim at corruption, widely seen as one of the scourges of Russia's post-Soviet society and something that Medvedev has pledged to end.
"People everywhere should have the right to do business or get an education without paying a bribe," Obama said. The address was promoted as a landmark foreign policy speech on US relations with the post-Soviet world, following Obama's August Prague speech on nuclear weapons and the June Cairo speech on the Middle East.
In the Moscow speech, Obama quoted from Russia's greatest poet Alexander Pushkin and paid tribute to the country's sacrifices in defeating fascism in World War II. He lauded Russian culture, saying its writers had "helped us understand the complexity of the human experience" while painters, composers and dancers had "introduced us to new forms of beauty." Obama noted that himself, his audience and his Russian counterpart Medvedev were "not old enough to have witnessed the darkest hours of the Cold War."
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