President Barack Obama and President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine talk after statements to the press following their bilateral meeting at the Warsaw Marriott Hotel in Warsaw, Poland, June 4, 2014.
(Image by (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)) Details DMCA
President Barack Obama and President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine talk after statements to the press following their bilateral meeting at the Warsaw Marriott Hotel in Warsaw, Poland, June 4, 2014.
(Image by (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)) Details DMCA
We observed in our Aug. 30, 2014 memorandum that President Obama "has only tenuous control over the policymakers in his administration." That this includes senior military leaders can be seen in Obama's failure to remove Gen. Breedlove, who -- in addition to his intense maneuvering behind Obama's back -- made little effort to hide his open disdain for the cautious approach of his commander in chief toward the possibility of armed confrontation in volatile places like Ukraine.
An Appropriate "Nein!"
One factor encouraging us to write to you again is your proven record of insistence on tenacious diplomacy rather than saber rattling and provocation. We noted, for example, that at a press conference with President Obama in Washington on Feb. 9, 2015, you personally experienced Breedlove-type pressure for sending lethal weaponry to Ukraine -- the kind of pressure still being applied to Obama himself. You stuck to your guns, so to speak, when the first designated questioner noted that the U.S. was considering providing lethal weapons to Ukraine and that your view was "very different."
"I have given you my opinion on the export of arms," was your unequivocal answer. Nor did you diverge from your insistent preference for diplomacy over arms, as you replied to a final, plaintive question: "Mrs. Merkel ... diplomacy, as you said yourself, has not brought much progress. Can you understand the impatience of the Americans when they say we ought to now deliver weapons?"
We believe your resolute "nein" to providing weapons to Ukraine was a key factor in scuttling that ill-conceived idea last year. And, as you know far better than we, your clearly expressed stance helped bring about a ceasefire that, however imperfect, was infinitely better than the escalation of fighting that would have inevitably resulted from sending weapons to Kiev's government forces.
You stuck to your position, even though it put you in opposition to nearly all political, military, and media voices in the U.S., which were expressing disdain for diplomacy and preference instead for war.
It is inevitable that there will be more proposals to send weapons to the Kiev government, particularly in view of the continued hostilities in eastern Ukraine. We hope that unbiased scrutiny can be given to which parties are responsible for blocking full implementation of the Minsk accords that you, Foreign Minister Steinmeier, and your French and Russian counterparts have worked hard to offer as a plan for peace in Ukraine.
Secretary of State John Kerry is visiting Kiev on July 7, a day before the Warsaw summit opens. He might be asked to share his impressions on the stormy political events in Ukraine over the past few months.
In our view, things have gone from bad to worse there, with Andriy Parubiy now speaker of the Ukrainian parliament. Parubiy is one of the most conspicuous leaders of Ukrainian ultra-nationalist, and outright neo-Nazi, movements. In 1991 he founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine, together with Oleh Tyahnybok, another February 2014 coup plotter, who now leads the extreme right Svoboda party.
The name of Parubiy's Social-National Party was chosen to identify it with Hitler's National Socialist Party. Its official symbol is the somewhat modified Wolf's Hook (Wolfsangel), used by the SS. Both parties blame Russia for the ills besetting Ukraine.
Parubiy as Parliament Speaker makes a mockery of NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg's insistence that NATO has resolved to make sure that a law-abiding Kiev is "committed to democracy."
On Monday, Parubiy stated on TV, "I have not supported the Minsk agreements from the very start," adding that Moscow's "plans on Ukraine may be stopped only by force and international sanctions."
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