Former Formula 1 boss Bernie Ecclestone told Good Morning Britain he would “take a bullet” for long-time friend Vladimir Putin, the Russian President currently leading the invasion of neighboring Ukraine.
“I’d take a bullet for him,” Ecclestone said on the show. “I’d rather he didn’t get hurt, but if he did, I’d take a bullet because he’s a first-class person. What he’s doing is something he believed was the right thing to do for Russia.”
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The illegal invasion of Ukraine has its roots in deep Soviet revanchism, with territorial expansion a cornerstone of Putin’s vision to restore Russia as a key mediating power of world order. But the reality has seen the Russian economy isolated and crippled by sanctions as the country loses more soldiers in a few months than the US has lost in 20 years in the Middle East. The invasion has been condemned by countless human rights experts for flagrant violations of international norms and high civilian casualties. Ecclestone, however, believes the whole war is just a misunderstanding because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky did not do a good enough job of preventing Putin from invading his country.
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“I’m sure that Ukraine, if it wanted to get out of it, could have done it,” he said. When asked by the hosts if he thought it was Zelensky’s fault for not avoiding that conflict – a ridiculous charge considering Russia invaded Crimea long before Zelensky took office – Ecclestone replied “absolutely”.
He also mentioned Zelensky’s past as a comedian and said he still acts like a comedian now. Putin, meanwhile, Ecclestone considers a serious, respectable businessman and a “first-class person” who had no intention of launching the most ferocious military campaign on the European continent since World War II in an attempt to drag Russian state back to the Stalinist era.
“Unfortunately, [Putin]He’s like a lot of business people, certainly like me,” Ecclestone said. “We make mistakes from time to time. When you make a mistake, you have to do your best to get out of it.”
Of course, Putin could get away with this simply by withdrawing his troops. However, Ecclestone puts the onus on Zelensky, for whom coming to the table would likely mean relinquishing land rightfully given to the Ukrainian state by the Russian government itself.
This is certainly not the first time the former F1 boss has said something remarkably controversial with incoherence. The Guardian points out that Ecclestone, in a 2009 interview with The Times of London, appeared to praise Adolf Hitler as a lover.
“In a lot of ways, it’s terrible to say this, I guess, but apart from the fact that Hitler was taken and persuaded to do things that I have no idea whether he wanted to or not, it was the way he could. he runs a lot of people, capable of getting things done,” Ecclestone told The Times.
While some of the Nazis’ crimes were other men’s ideas, Hitler literally wrote the book on the racist and anti-Semitic ideology that underpinned their most heinous acts. Like all powerful men – including Putin – despite the fact that he was not directly involved in all the crimes of his regime, Hitler created a cult of personality where everyone knew what the mission was. Carrying out this goal in the most brutal and slanderous manner was rewarded, eventually leading him to lose touch with any sense of reality on the ground. As Putin’s invasion stumbles and Russian stocks are chewed up, this historical example is probably more instructive for him than Ecclestone.
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