Putin as bad as Stalin?

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Start	2014/09/15 01:00:00 AM
End
Description	Cheering on the warmongers, Labour MP, former Defence Secretary and union rep declares that "Russian president Vladimir Putin has the potential to be as bad as Stalin".

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Senior Labour MP Bob Ainsworth called for a new review of defence capabilities before the election, warning Russia is a bigger threat to peace than the Islamic State (Isis) insurgents in Iraq and Syria. "No leader of a major power has behaved as overtly aggressively since Stalin in the postwar period, and sadly Putin would be very pleased with the comparison," he wrote. "He has said the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century and he claims the right to act on behalf of Russian minorities in other states.

He first became active in politics as a trade unionist at the Jaguar Cars plant in Coventry

Ainsworth – who was deputy chief whip at the time of the Iraq War vote in March 2003 –"supported the war in Iraq based on the arguments that were put at the time and a big part of those arguments was – and I firmly believed that they existed – was the existence of WMD at that time."

In 2008, as Armed Forces Minister, he became famous for dismissing the concerns of military personnel from his safe Coventry seat.