And then, onto these weapons that “nobody knows about…yet. With these weapons we will destroy any part of the planet within 15 minutes. No explosion, no ray burst. Not some kind of a laser, not lightning. It is a calm and quiet weapon with which whole continents will be put to sleep, forever…I say, if you want the tiniest Kuril Island from us you will have to dig in the wreckage and debris of their buildings. And 120 million of you will all die!”

Is he just making trouble for Putin? The impression I get is that he is engaging in what can only be called diplomatic trolling. Either that or he’s just a bit nuts. Maybe both.

Quite an interesting cat:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhirinovsky#Controversies

“Racist remarks

Zhirinovsky has been accused of anti-Semitism (for his part, he suggested that Jews were often to blame for anti-Semitism^[7]) for statements in which he accused Jews of ruining Russia, sending Russian women to foreign countries as prostitutes, selling children and organs to the Western world, and provoking the Holocaust. He reportedly even praised Adolf Hitler‘s ideology of Nazism^[17] and befriended Edwin Neuwirth, an Austrian industrialist and a “proud” former officer of the Waffen-SS who has denied that the Nazis used gas chambers to kill Jews during World War II, leading some of the German media to denounce him as “Russia’s Hitler”.^[8][15] Zhirinovsky has expressed admiration for the 1996 United States presidential election contender Pat Buchanan, referring positively to a comment in which Buchanan labeled the United States Congress “Israeli-occupied territory”, and said that both countries were “under occupation” and that “to survive, we could set aside places on US and Russian territories to deport this small but troublesome tribe.” Buchanan strongly rejected this endorsement, saying he would provide safe haven to persecuted minorities if Zhirinovsky were ever elected Russia’s president, eliciting a harsh response by Zhirinovsky: “You soiled your pants as soon as you got my congratulations. Who are you afraid of? Zionists?”^[18] Zhirinovsky repeatedly denied his father’s Jewishness until he published Ivan Close Your Soul in July 2001, describing how his father, Volf Isaakovich Eidelshtein, changed his surname from Eidelshtein to Zhirinovsky. He rhetorically asked, “Why should I reject Russian blood, Russian culture, Russian land, and fall in love with the Jewish people only because of that single drop of blood that my father left in my mother’s body?”^[5]

Besides expressing his hatred for Turks and Caucasians*,^[19] Zhirinovsky also called for the deportation of all Chinese from Russian Far East.^[20] During the 1992 visit to the United States, Zhirinovsky called on television “for the preservation of the white race” and warned that the white Americans were in danger of turning their country over to black and Hispanic people.”

*(means current inhabitants of the Caucasus in this context, not Europeans/whites)