China and America as partners appealed to those Greeks like Varoufakis who thought of themselves as “modernizers” and did not have deep roots in the Greek Communist milieu. For the Old Guard of Syriza, Russia was the obvious option.45 In 2015 Merkel and Hollande were still struggling to contain the Ukraine crisis. Putin was making increasingly interventionist moves in Syria. Could Greece exploit its strategic location in the Eastern Mediterranean to gain leverage? On April 8 Tsipras traveled to Moscow to meet with Putin. But in the Kremlin he heard the same thing that the Greeks were hearing
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