Though Obama has spoken with Putin on the sidelines of some recent international conferences, their last formal meeting was in June 2013. That fall, Obama canceled a summit meeting because Putin gave refuge to National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, who had revealed legally questionable bulk collection of data about Americans. Obama wanted Snowden prosecuted and imprisoned for the disclosures.
U.S.-Russian relations worsened in February 2014 when neocon Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland helped orchestrate a coup d'etat in Ukraine, on Russia's border, overthrowing democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych and installing a regime hostile to Russia and to ethnic Russians living in Ukraine.
The coup -- and the resulting Ukrainian nationalist violence directed against ethnic Russians -- sparked a referendum in which the residents of Crimea voted by 96 percent to leave Ukraine and rejoin Russia, a development that was treated by the Obama administration and The New York Times as a "Russian invasion."
When ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine also resisted the new order in Kiev, the coup regime announced an "Anti-Terror Operation" and dispatched troops including neo-Nazi, Islamist and other irregular militias to crush the rebels. Some 8,000 or more people were killed, mostly ethnic Russian civilians. When Russia supplied help to this resistance, the Obama administration and the Times deemed the assistance "Russian aggression."
So, according to the latest "group think" of Official Washington, the current Ukrainian regime is a paragon of virtue, reform and human rights -- despite its continued corruption and its deployment of neo-Nazis and Islamists to kill ethnic Russian Ukrainians -- and Putin is the fount of all evil for not permitting the slaughter to go on unchallenged.
Though I'm told that Obama understands how inaccurate this black-and-white depiction is, he feels that he must go with the flow to avoid being denounced by the neocons and liberal interventionists as "weak." Thus, Press Secretary Earnest was dispatched to describe Putin as "desperate" and lacking good posture.
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