Natalia Antonova of the Moscow NEWS, in the Soviet-era, the old KGB-controlled organ used to deliver Kremlin news to foreigners in English, has an article on the Guardian trying to portray Russia as a victim of the Snowden affair — and that this is engineered by the US, deliberately.

My reply:

I never cease to be amazed at the incredible talent of the agitpropsters for turning Russia's aggressive actions into a cause for Russia's victimology. But it does get old.

Remember, it was WikiLeaks — affiliated with the Kremlin with its leader having his own TV show on RT — with the provocateur Israel Shamir staging various active measures — that urged Snowden to go to Moscow. Perhaps, of course, he felt an affinity all along to the home of technocommunism. But in any event, to describe the US as "driving" him — when the US government, democratically elected by its people, is the injured party here — is quite loathsome.

It's Russia's desire to punish the West for embodying standards of liberty and justice it never achieves that is really feeding this drama. They hate our freedom, you know? There are numerous reasons to boycott Sochi, starting with the massive corruption of the Olympics tradition in Putin's hand, making it cost 10 times more than any other venue in the world, going on through LGBT rights, Pussy Riot, Navalny, Khodorkovsky, the Bolotnaya 6 and much more, present and past. The Magnitsky List rules the country, as one writer said.

And shame on your pretending the new anti-gay law is only about preventing the promotion of gay relations between minors. There is more to it than that as anyone can see by reading it and it creates a climate of harassment which is acted upon again and again.

With Snowden, the Kremlin didn't do the moral thing, but cunningly, using WikiLeaks as a cat's paw, lured him into a position where it could exploit the anarchists and hackers to its advantage against the US, but maintain plausible deniability. Yes, we saw what you did there.

As for safe passage to Latin America, you know, the time to have organized that was BEFORE the flight to Hong Kong and after the leaking. You know, it could have been incorporated into the long-pre-existing plans that took months, and maybe a year or more, of effort. There is no reason for Snowden not to have gone immediately to Venezuela and leaked from there. You never answer that question.

Putin's cautious words for fake, we get all this, and we get how it will end.

Say, if you're troubled by the US inaction on Saudi Arabia, you're welcome to take up the cause any time. And add Iran while you're at it, since it's so much worse and you do nothing about it. Oh, and Syria — that mass crime against humanity for which Russia alone among the great powers bears direct and unequivocal responsibility. Work on those serious cases, and, um, set an example for that recalcitrant US, eh?

Snowden appeared just when Putin had to achieve a number of things:

o enact his theory of the "unipolar world" that needs smashing with replacement by himself

o continue the spy wars that began with expulsion of Anna Chapman et. al.

o distract from failure to tell the FBI what it knew about the Tsarnaevs in time and letting nature take its course

o discrediting of both the domestic and international human rights movement by enabling it to serve as a mouthpiece for a "foreign agent"

o intimidation of its own Internet providers

o and knocking of heads between intelligence factions at odds over how to handle the provocative figure and emerge as Putin the necessary peace-maker.

All of it is sickening, all of it is in bad faith, as are you.