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WestCoastJoe
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http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/r ... html?hp=t1
Obama executive order expands Russia-related sanctions

Obama's executive order authorizes the Treasury and State secretaries to impose sanctions. | Getty

By JENNIFER EPSTEIN | 3/17/14 9:46 AM EDT

President Barack Obama has expanded sanctions related to Russia’s involvement in Ukraine, on Monday signing an executive order targeting seven Russian government officials and using an existing order to sanction four Ukrainians, including the country’s former president.

The order authorizes Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to work with Secretary of State John Kerry to impose asset freezes and travel restrictions on “any individual or entity that operates in the Russian arms industry, and any designated individual or entity that acts on behalf of, or that provides material or other support to, any senior Russian government official,” the White House said in a statement.

Though senior aides to Vladimir Putin are targeted, the Russian president isn’t on the list because that would be an even more dramatic step to take, a senior administration official said. “It is a highly unusual and rather extraordinary case for the United States to sanction the head of state of another country,” the official said on a conference call with reporters held just after the sanctions were announced. Putin will, though, feel the effects on those close to him, the official said.

The sanctions are intended to “impose costs on named individuals who wield influence in the Russian government and those responsible for the deteriorating situation in Ukraine,” the White House said in its statement.

Monday’s executive order specifically targets seven Russian government officials: Vladislav Surkov, Sergey Glazyev, Leonid Slutsky, Andrei Klishas, Valentina Matviyenko, Dmitry Rogozin, and Yelena Mizulina.

Four others are targeted under the executive order Obama issued earlier this month: Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and former chief of staff Viktor Medvedchuk, as well as Crimea separatist leaders Sergey Aksyonov and Vladimir Konstantinov.

(PHOTOS: Ukraine turmoil)

“We expect that these sanctions will be effective,” a senior administration official said. “Going forward, we have the ability to ramp up our pressure.”

The European Union on Monday imposed an asset freeze and travel ban on 13 Russians and eight Crimean leaders. The list of those 21 people will be released on Tuesday, but overlaps with the 11 facing U.S. sanctions, a senior administration official said. The aim is for them to be “as synchronized and consistent as possible,” another official said.

The measures are “by far the most extensive sanctions imposed against Russia since the end of the Cold War,” an official said.

There’s evidence that ballots in Sunday’s referendum were “pre-marked,” a senior administration official said. In all, 96.8 percent of votes were in favor of joining Russia and turnout hit 83.1 percent, the official said. The election commission “didn’t receive a single complaint.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2014/03/r ... z2wELIO000
“We expect that these sanctions will be effective,” a senior administration official said. “Going forward, we have the ability to ramp up our pressure.”
The measures are “by far the most extensive sanctions imposed against Russia since the end of the Cold War,” an official said.
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Sir Purrcival
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They want to put pressure on the Russians. Stop buying their oil and gas. Stop shipments of goods and services to Russia. Stop purchases of any Russian made goods. Sales to the West account for about 15% of Russia's gross national product. Hell, I'd even see if I could undercut their arms dealing.
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TheLionKing
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Sir Purrcival wrote:They want to put pressure on the Russians. Stop buying their oil and gas. Stop shipments of goods and services to Russia. Stop purchases of any Russian made goods. Sales to the West account for about 15% of Russia's gross national product. Hell, I'd even see if I could undercut their arms dealing.
Hit them where it hurts......their pockets.
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Sir Purrcival
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I was watching Putin and friends today as they signed the various documents and I gotta say, they didn't seem particularly happy for such a "joyous" occasion. Just intuition but something looked just a little off like maybe they were worried about something. Perhaps they didn't think that the International Community would be quite so obvious in their displeasure. I certainly wasn't impressed by a member of the Russian media who made the comment that his country was the only one that could blast the US into oblivion. That kind of rhetoric is dicey even for Russians.
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WestCoastJoe
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Sir Purrcival wrote:I was watching Putin and friends today as they signed the various documents and I gotta say, they didn't seem particularly happy for such a "joyous" occasion. Just intuition but something looked just a little off like maybe they were worried about something. Perhaps they didn't think that the International Community would be quite so obvious in their displeasure. I certainly wasn't impressed by a member of the Russian media who made the comment that his country was the only one that could blast the US into oblivion. That kind of rhetoric is dicey even for Russians.
Blast the US into oblivion? LOL

Rhetoric worthy of Nikita Khruschev. Whatever happened to "We will bury you.". Came and went I guess.

Technologically the US has a few tricks up its sleeve. And we know about Russian inefficiency. They have the nukes alright. But I would not count on their delivery.

Empty bluster. Foolish talk. But it does indicate a slide back in time for the USSR, errr, I mean Russia.

Isolation from the World community is the problem for Russia. Enforced ignorance on the people. Wealth for the empowered corrupt officials. Crimea is not all gravy for Russia. It will be a burden. They have earned much more mistrust from other nations.

Putin has power and wealth. That is what matters to him.

Investment from the West? Ummm, No.

Intellectual exchange? Not so much.

Freedom for the people? Not so much.

Democracy? No.

High level conferences in Sochi?. Not so much.

This is all debris from the breakup of the Soviet Union. More to come.
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TheLionKing
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Might we see a similar referendum if the Parti Quebecois wins the election.
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TheLionKing wrote:Might we see a similar referendum if the Parti Quebecois wins the election.
Support for separation stands at less than 40% in Quebec at this point. It seems that they don't have the "winning conditions" that they frequently refer to.
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WestCoastJoe
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South Pender wrote:
TheLionKing wrote:Might we see a similar referendum if the Parti Quebecois wins the election.
Support for separation stands at less than 40% in Quebec at this point. It seems that they don't have the "winning conditions" that they frequently refer to.
Saw this article this morning ...

http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/201 ... bers-slip/
Graeme Hamilton: PQ unable to put sovereignty genie back in bottle as poll numbers slip

Graeme Hamilton | March 18, 2014 8:14 PM ET

Life was simpler for Pauline Marois back in 2012 when she was an opposition leader clanging a pot in student protests and accusing Jean Charest of leading a corrupt government.

Now it is Ms. Marois who is campaigning for re-election as premier, and a CROP poll, published Tuesday by La Presse, suggests with less than three weeks left before the April 7 vote, Quebecers are souring on her Parti Québécois.

The PQ lead that had strategists picturing a majority when the election was called March 5 has evaporated. Philippe Couillard’s Liberals now outpace the PQ by three percentage points overall and are eating into its lead among francophone voters.

Tuesday, Ms. Marois seemed to be longing for her 2012 glory days as she repeatedly invoked Mr. Charest to attack the Liberals. She was even flanked at her morning news conference on education by two leaders of the tumultuous student protests, Léo Bureau-Blouin and Martine Desjardins, now running as PQ candidates.

Ms. Marois accused Mr. Couillard of falling into “the old Liberal ways,” surrounding himself with the same players as Mr. Charest and promoting the same policies.

“What would lead us to believe he has fundamentally changed?” she asked.

She seized on a morning headline in Le Devoir concerning Mr. Couillard’s business partnership with Arthur Porter, former chief executive of the McGill University Health Centre, now facing corruption charges.

“The leader himself is in the hot seat,” she said, adding electing the Liberals would bring a return of “ethics problems.”

Mr. Couillard has said the partnership never resulted in any business and when it was created in 2010, Mr. Porter’s reputation was unblemished. The partnership was dissolved in 2012, just before Mr. Couillard announced his leadership bid.

Tuesday he expressed exasperation the issue had resurfaced.

“I understand the little smear attempts that are made during an election campaign,” he said. “But I spent months answering to this, day after day after day. I have had it up to here.”

Ms. Marois’ decision to come out swinging at Mr. Couillard and Mr. Charest — who stepped down immediately after the September 2012 election that produced a PQ minority government — betrays some panic at the poll numbers.

A two-way race has emerged, with Coalition Avenir Québec support moving largely to the Liberals. The poll of 1,400 people, conducted March 12-16, gave the Liberals 39%, compared with 36% for the PQ, 13% for the CAQ and 10% for Québec Solidaire. Among francophones, the PQ still leads the Liberals, 43% to 30%, but that is a 10-point drop from a month ago.

Most troubling for Ms. Marois are the poll’s findings on sovereignty and the prospect of another referendum if the PQ is elected. Two-thirds of respondents said they do not want another referendum, but the same proportion said they expect the PQ to call one if it wins a majority. Just 38% said they would vote yes to sovereignty, down from 41% a month earlier.

It turns out the PQ’s sovereignty strategy of promising a white paper on Quebec’s future but refusing to say whether it would hold a referendum was not half as clever as the party thought. The arrival of former Quebecor Inc. chief executive Pierre Karl Péladeau as a PQ candidate, with his clenched-fist plea for independence, has persuaded Quebecers the party means business this time.

Tuesday, Ms. Marois said the election simply represents a choice of the best government “to manage Quebec” and Mr. Péladeau stated his priority is creating jobs.

But their attempts to return the sovereignty genie to the bottle are regularly thwarted, as was the case on the weekend when former PQ premier Jacques Parizeau cheered Mr. Péladeau’s arrival in politics.

Good riddance to the PQ’s uninspiring talk of “good government” and its reluctance to talk up sovereignty during an election campaign, he wrote in the Journal de Montréal.

“He doesn’t fear independence; to the contrary he wants to participate in its achievement,” Mr. Parizeau wrote of Mr. Péladeau, concluding, “At last, Quebec sovereignty is back at the centre of the debate. It was time.”

Ms. Marois said Tuesday her party’s position on a referendum could not be clearer.

“On the question of Quebec’s future, we say to Quebecers we want to resume discussion and dialogue. There will therefore be a white paper on the future of Quebec,” she said. “We will not push you.”

However, the poll shows Quebecers expect some heavy jostling if the PQ is elected and a growing number is preparing to push back on election day.

National Post
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WestCoastJoe
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Support for sovereignty slip sliding away, at least for now.
Now it is Ms. Marois who is campaigning for re-election as premier, and a CROP poll, published Tuesday by La Presse, suggests with less than three weeks left before the April 7 vote, Quebecers are souring on her Parti Québécois.
Most troubling for Ms. Marois are the poll’s findings on sovereignty and the prospect of another referendum if the PQ is elected. Two-thirds of respondents said they do not want another referendum, but the same proportion said they expect the PQ to call one if it wins a majority. Just 38% said they would vote yes to sovereignty, down from 41% a month earlier.
It turns out the PQ’s sovereignty strategy of promising a white paper on Quebec’s future but refusing to say whether it would hold a referendum was not half as clever as the party thought. The arrival of former Quebecor Inc. chief executive Pierre Karl Péladeau as a PQ candidate, with his clenched-fist plea for independence, has persuaded Quebecers the party means business this time.
Referendum? Our position is perfectly clear. In that we are not showing our hand just now. It depends. We will conduct a study. Is that clear? (my words) LOL
But their attempts to return the sovereignty genie to the bottle are regularly thwarted, as was the case on the weekend when former PQ premier Jacques Parizeau cheered Mr. Péladeau’s arrival in politics.
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Sir Purrcival
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Could it be that some common sense is starting to emerge from the electorate in Quebec? While the word independence evokes some ideas of strength, self-reliance and pride, the reality of the word is something entirely different in the world today. Quebec, whether it wants to admit it or not is propped up by the rest of Canada both financially and culturally. Without the money and being forced to deal with the rest of the world on it's terms, Quebec would likely find itself in 3rd world status. The simple facts are that "French" Quebec, isn't the size that it currently is. It would be much smaller. Business currently located in the province would likely relocate to English Canada taking much needed jobs and economic activity with it. As a market, a "French" Quebec isn't all that attractive. I'm pretty sure that some manufacturers would simply drop the French on their labelling and simply write off the region as not big enough to justify the cost. If you want it, you are going to have to deal with the English or do without. As a tourist destination, they would have a bit of a shock there too. Based on principle alone, many Canadians would likely shun the region. Who wants to go where you aren't welcome? Americans too may have more aversion to a totally "French" Quebec.

One could go on ad nauseam. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be a worth it to see them go and let them find out first hand the kind of challenges that would come from independence. Maybe that would shut them up on the subject once and for all and if I am wrong, then separation would really be the best thing for them. I would never want to stand in the way of people trying to make their lot in life better.
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TheLionKing
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Sir Purrcival wrote:Could it be that some common sense is starting to emerge from the electorate in Quebec? While the word independence evokes some ideas of strength, self-reliance and pride, the reality of the word is something entirely different in the world today. Quebec, whether it wants to admit it or not is propped up by the rest of Canada both financially and culturally. Without the money and being forced to deal with the rest of the world on it's terms, Quebec would likely find itself in 3rd world status. The simple facts are that "French" Quebec, isn't the size that it currently is. It would be much smaller. Business currently located in the province would likely relocate to English Canada taking much needed jobs and economic activity with it. As a market, a "French" Quebec isn't all that attractive. I'm pretty sure that some manufacturers would simply drop the French on their labelling and simply write off the region as not big enough to justify the cost. If you want it, you are going to have to deal with the English or do without. As a tourist destination, they would have a bit of a shock there too. Based on principle alone, many Canadians would likely shun the region. Who wants to go where you aren't welcome? Americans too may have more aversion to a totally "French" Quebec.

One could go on ad nauseam. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't be a worth it to see them go and let them find out first hand the kind of challenges that would come from independence. Maybe that would shut them up on the subject once and for all and if I am wrong, then separation would really be the best thing for them. I would never want to stand in the way of people trying to make their lot in life better.
I would like to think so but there is a percentage of Quebecers who yearn for independence. I laugh everytime the separatist talk about an independent state within Canada.
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Sir Purrcival
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There is always segment of any population who thinks that things could be done differently and that all of life's issues will somehow magically go away if we could just adopt this new sort of methodology. The truth is that never happens. The players may change a little but issues of poverty, inequity, hardship, strife are still just as prevalent. Crimea regardless of what happens will still have it's issues. Different task masters maybe but I doubt life is going to be any better overall. Probably far worse by the sounds of it. Nothing like living in a militarized zone because that is exactly it is going to be for some time to come. Quebecer's would just as readily find something to be unhappy about even in an independent Quebec. Might be a lack of jobs, poor economy, what have you but they most assuredly will find new issues to replace the one of sovereignty and they will still be unhappy and complaining.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/24/world ... me315_8525
3 Presidents and a Riddle Named Putin

By PETER BAKERMARCH 23, 2014

WASHINGTON — Bill Clinton found him to be cold and worrisome, but predicted he would be a tough and able leader. George W. Bush wanted to make him a friend and partner in the war on terror, but grew disillusioned over time.

Barack Obama tried working around him by building up his protégé in the Kremlin, an approach that worked for a time but steadily deteriorated to the point that relations between Russia and the United States are now at their worst point since the end of the Cold War.

For 15 years, Vladimir V. Putin has confounded American presidents as they tried to figure him out, only to misjudge him time and again. He has defied their assumptions and rebuffed their efforts at friendship. He has argued with them, lectured them, misled them, accused them, kept them waiting, kept them guessing, betrayed them and felt betrayed by them.

Each of the three presidents tried in his own way to forge a historic if elusive new relationship with Russia, only to find their efforts torpedoed by the wiry martial arts master and former K.G.B. colonel. They imagined him to be something he was not or assumed they could manage a man who refuses to be managed. They saw him through their own lens, believing he viewed Russia’s interests as they thought he should. And they underestimated his deep sense of grievance.
Photo

To the extent that there were any illusions left in Washington, and it is hard to imagine there were by this point, they were finally and irrevocably shattered by Mr. Putin’s takeover of Crimea and the exchange of sanctions that has followed. As Russian forces now mass on the Ukrainian border, the debate has now shifted from how to work with Mr. Putin to how to counter him.

“He’s declared himself,” said Tom Donilon, President Obama’s former national security adviser. “That’s who you have to deal with. Trying to wish it away is not a policy.”

Looking back now, aides to all three presidents offer roughly similar takes: Their man was hardly naïve about Mr. Putin and saw him for what he was, but felt there was little choice other than to try to establish a better relationship. It may be that some of their policies hurt the chances of that by fueling Mr. Putin’s discontent, whether it was NATO expansion, the Iraq war or the Libya war, but in the end, they said, they were dealing with a Russian leader fundamentally at odds with the West.

“I know there’s been some criticism on, was the reset ill advised?” said Mr. Donilon, using the Obama administration’s term for its policy. “No, the reset wasn’t ill advised. The reset resulted in direct accomplishments that were in the interests of the United States.”

Some specialists said Mr. Obama and his two predecessors saw what they wanted to see. “The West has focused on the notion that Putin is a pragmatic realist who will cooperate with us whenever there are sufficient common interests,” said James M. Goldgeier, dean of international studies at American University. “We let that belief overshadow his stated goal of revising a post-Cold War settlement in which Moscow lost control over significant territory and watched as the West expanded its domain.”

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Presidents tend to think of autocrats like Mr. Putin as fellow statesmen, said Dennis Blair, Mr. Obama’s first director of national intelligence. “They should think of dictators like they think of domestic politicians of the other party,” he said, “opponents who smile on occasion when it suits their purposes, and cooperate when it is to their advantage, but who are at heart trying to push the U.S. out of power, will kneecap the United States if they get the chance and will only go along if the U.S. has more power than they.”

Eric S. Edelman, who was undersecretary of defense under Mr. Bush, said American leaders overestimated their ability to assuage Mr. Putin’s anger about the West. “There has been a persistent tendency on the part of U.S. presidents and Western leaders more broadly to see the sense of grievance as a background condition that could be modulated by consideration of Russian national interests,” he said. “In fact, those efforts have been invariably taken as weakness.”

After 15 years, no one in Washington still thinks of Mr. Putin as a partner. “He goes to bed at night thinking of Peter the Great and he wakes up thinking of Stalin,” Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House intelligence committee, said on “Meet the Press” on NBC on Sunday. “We need to understand who he is and what he wants. It may not fit with what we believe of the 21st century.”

Bush’s Disillusionment

Mr. Clinton was the first president to encounter Mr. Putin, although they did not overlap for long. He had spent much of his presidency building a strong relationship with President Boris N. Yeltsin, Mr. Putin’s predecessor, and gave the benefit of the doubt to the handpicked successor who became Russia’s prime minister in 1999 and president on New Year’s Eve.

“I came away from the meeting believing Yeltsin had picked a successor who had the skills and capacity for hard work necessary to manage Russia’s turbulent political and economic life better than Yeltsin now could, given his health problems,” Mr. Clinton wrote in his memoir. When Mr. Putin’s selection was ratified in a March 2000 election, Mr. Clinton called to congratulate him and, as he later wrote, “hung up the phone thinking he was tough enough to hold Russia together.”

Mr. Clinton had his worries, though, particularly as Mr. Putin waged a brutal war in the separatist republic of Chechnya and cracked down on independent media. He privately urged Mr. Yeltsin to watch over his successor. Mr. Clinton also felt brushed off by Mr. Putin, who seemed uninterested in doing business with a departing American president.

But the prevailing attitude at the time was that Mr. Putin was a modernizer who could consolidate the raw form of democracy and capitalism that Mr. Yeltsin had introduced to Russia. He moved early to overhaul the country’s tax, land and judicial codes. As Strobe Talbott, Mr. Clinton’s deputy secretary of state, put it in his book on that period, George F. Kennan, the noted Kremlinologist, thought that Mr. Putin “was young enough, adroit enough and realistic enough to understand that Russia’s ongoing transition required that he not just co-opt the power structure, but to transform it.”

Mr. Bush came to office skeptical of Mr. Putin, privately calling him “one cold dude,” but bonded with him during their first meeting in Slovenia in June 2001, after which he made his now-famous comment about looking into the Russian’s soul. Mr. Putin had made a connection with the religious Mr. Bush by telling him a story about a cross that his mother had given him and how it was the only thing that survived a fire at his country house.

"I don’t have a bad personal relationship with Putin. When we have conversations, they’re candid, they’re blunt, oftentimes they’re constructive. I know the press likes to focus on body language and he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom."
— In a news conference in August 2013

President Bill Clinton "I called to congratulate him and hung up the phone thinking he was tough enough to hold Russia together and hoping he was wise enough to find an honorable way out of the Chechnya problem and committed enough to democracy to preserve it."
— President Bill Clinton, writing in “My Life” about Vladimir Putin’s election in March 2000 Vice President Dick Cheney "I think K.G.B., K.G.B., K.G.B."
— Vice President Dick Cheney, on his impression of Mr. Putin, in private conversations in 2001 President George W. Bush "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul."
— President George W. Bush, after first meeting with Mr. Putin in June 2001 President George W. Bush "He’s not well-informed. It’s like arguing with an eighth-grader with his facts wrong."
— Mr. Bush, to the visiting prime minister of Denmark in June 2006 Robert M. Gates "I had looked into Putin’s eyes and, just as I expected, had seen a stone-cold killer."
— Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary for Mr. Bush and President Obama, writing in “Duty” about his meeting with Mr. Putin in February 2007 President Obama "I don’t have a bad personal relationship with Putin. When we have conversations, they’re candid, they’re blunt, oftentimes they’re constructive. I know the press likes to focus on body language and he’s got that kind of slouch, looking like the bored kid in the back of the classroom."
— President Obama, in a news conference in August 2013

Not everyone was convinced. Mr. Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, privately told people at the time that when he saw Mr. Putin, “I think K.G.B., K.G.B., K.G.B.” But Mr. Bush was determined to erase the historical divide and courted Mr. Putin during the Russian leader’s visits to Camp David and Mr. Bush’s Texas ranch.

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Mr. Putin liked to brag that he was the first foreign leader to call Mr. Bush after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and he permitted American troops into Central Asia as a base of operations against Afghanistan.

But Mr. Putin never felt Mr. Bush delivered in return and the relationship strained over the Iraq War and the Kremlin’s accelerating crackdown on dissent at home. By Mr. Bush’s second term, the two were quarreling over Russian democracy, reaching a peak during a testy meeting in Slovakia in 2005.

“It was like junior high debating,” Mr. Bush complained later to Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to notes of the conversation. Mr. Putin kept throwing Mr. Bush’s arguments back at him. “I sat there for an hour and 45 minutes and it went on and on,” Mr. Bush said. “At one point, the interpreter made me so mad that I nearly reached over the table and slapped the hell out of the guy. He had a mocking tone, making accusations about America.”

He was even more frustrated by Mr. Putin a year later. “He’s not well-informed,” Bush told the visiting prime minister of Denmark in 2006. “It’s like arguing with an eighth-grader with his facts wrong.”

He told another visiting leader a few weeks later that he was losing hope of bringing Mr. Putin around. “I think Putin is not a democrat anymore,” he said. “He’s a czar. I think we’ve lost him.”

‘A Stone-Cold Killer’

But Mr. Bush was reluctant to give up, even if those around him no longer saw the opportunity he saw. His new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, came back from his first meeting with Mr. Putin and told colleagues that unlike Mr. Bush, he had “looked into Putin’s eyes and, just as I expected, had seen a stone-cold killer.”

In the spring of 2008, Mr. Bush put Ukraine and Georgia on the road to NATO membership, which divided the alliance and infuriated Mr. Putin. By August of that year, the two leaders were in Beijing for the Summer Olympics when word arrived that Russian troops were marching into Georgia.

Mr. Bush in his memoir recalled confronting Mr. Putin, scolding him for being provoked by Mikheil Saakashvili, then Georgia’s anti-Moscow president.

“I’ve been warning you Saakashvili is hot-blooded,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Putin.

“I’m hot-blooded too,” Mr. Putin said.

“No, Vladimir,” Mr. Bush responded. “You’re coldblooded.”


Carlos
35 minutes ago
What's the riddle?He doesn't play by the rules. Simple as that. There was a statement "Putin is playing chess and Obama is playing marbles"...



Putin has rebuffed overtures from the West since taking office.Credit Alexei Druzhinin/RIA Novosti Kremlin, via Associated Press
Worried that Crimea might be next, Mr. Bush succeeded in stopping Russia from swallowing up Georgia altogether. But on the eve of the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the global financial meltdown, he did not impose the sort of sanctions that Mr. Obama is now applying.

“We and the Europeans threw the relationship into the toilet at the end of 2008,” Stephen J. Hadley, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, recalled last week. “We wanted to send the message that strategically this was not acceptable. Now in retrospect, we probably should have done more like economic sanctions.”

If Mr. Bush did not take the strongest punitive actions possible, his successor soon made the point moot. Taking office just months later, Mr. Obama decided to end any isolation of Russia because of Georgia in favor of rebuilding relations. Unlike his predecessors, he would try to forge a relationship not by befriending Mr. Putin but by bypassing him.

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Ostensibly complying with Russia’s two-term constitutional limit, Mr. Putin had stepped down as president and installed his aide, Dmitri A. Medvedev, in his place, while taking over as prime minister himself. So Mr. Obama decided to treat Mr. Medvedev as if he really were the leader.

A diplomatic cable obtained by WikiLeaks later captured the strategy in summing up similar French priorities: “Cultivating relations with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, in the hope that he can become a leader independent of Vladimir Putin.”

Before his first trip to Moscow, Mr. Obama publicly dismissed Mr. Putin as having “one foot in the old ways of doing business” and pumped up Mr. Medvedev as a new-generation leader. Mr. Obama’s inaugural meeting with Mr. Putin a few days later featured a classic tirade by the Russian about all the ways that the United States had mistreated Moscow.

Among those skeptical of Mr. Obama’s strategy were Mr. Gates, who stayed on as defense secretary, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the new secretary of state. Like Mr. Gates, Mrs. Clinton was deeply suspicious of Mr. Putin. In private, she mockingly imitated his man’s-man, legs-spread-wide posture during their meetings. But even if they did not assign it much chance of success, she and Mr. Gates both agreed the policy was worth trying and she gamely presented her Russian counterpart with a “reset” button, remembered largely for its mistaken Russian translation.

Obama’s ‘Reset’ Gambit

For a time, Mr. Obama’s gamble on Mr. Medvedev seemed to be working. They revived Mr. Bush’s civilian nuclear agreement, signed a nuclear arms treaty, sealed an agreement allowing American troops to fly through Russian airspace en route to Afghanistan and collaborated on sanctions against Iran. But Mr. Putin was not to be ignored and by 2012 returned to the presidency, sidelining Mr. Medvedev and making clear that he would not let Mr. Obama roll over him.

Mr. Putin ignored Mr. Obama’s efforts to start new nuclear arms talks and gave asylum to Edward J. Snowden, the national security leaker. Mr. Obama canceled a trip to Moscow, making clear that he had no personal connection with Mr. Putin. The Russian leader has a “kind of slouch” that made him look “like that bored schoolboy in the back of the classroom,” Mr. Obama noted.

In the end, Mr. Obama did not see how the pro-Western revolution in Ukraine that toppled a Moscow ally last month would look through Mr. Putin’s eyes, said several Russia specialists. “With no meaningful rapport or trust between Obama and Putin, it’s nearly impossible to use high-level phone calls for actual problem solving,” said Andrew Weiss, a former Russia adviser to Mr. Clinton and now a vice president at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Instead, it looks like we’re mostly posturing and talking past each other.”

As Mr. Obama has tried to figure out what to do to end the crisis over Ukraine, he has reached out to other leaders who still have a relationship with Mr. Putin, including Angela Merkel, the German chancellor. She privately told Mr. Obama that after speaking with Mr. Putin she thought he was “in another world.” Secretary of State John Kerry later said publicly that Mr. Putin’s speech on Crimea did not “jibe with reality.”
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That has sparked a debate in Washington: Has Mr. Putin changed over the last 15 years and become unhinged in some way, or does he simply see the world in starkly different terms than the West does, terms that make it hard if not impossible to find common ground?

“He’s not delusional, but he’s inhabiting a Russia of the past — a version of the past that he has created,” said Fiona Hill, the top intelligence officer on Russia during Mr. Bush’s presidency and co-author of “Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin.” “His present is defined by it and there is no coherent vision of the future. Where exactly does he go from here beyond reasserting and regaining influence over territories and people? Then what?”

That is the question this president, and likely the next one, will be asking for some time to come.
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WestCoastJoe
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No riddle that I can see.

He is ex KGB. Cold blooded. Deceptive. Goal oriented. Does not reveal his true intentions.

Do not take his words at face value. Expect him to do those things that displease the world but satisfy a more selfish agenda. He would be pleased to be in the old Soviet system once again. He knew how to survive in that old system. This present state of affairs is easy meat for him.

He is a fox in the chicken coop. He is somewhat of a sociopath amongst the innocents and the trusting.
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Jimmy Johnson's Game Keys: Protect the ball. Make plays.

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Sir Purrcival
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Yep, it seems like we are back to the bad old days of East West relations. It isn't all that easy to distinguish Russia from the old Soviet Union. It might be wise to bring some of the old satellite states into NATO before Putin's wandering eye falls on them too. In the old days with the Soviets, it always came down to them pushing the limits, pushing the limits until the West finally got pissed enough to threaten some serious push back. They knew back then that the West although powerful was also fragmented to some degree by tradition, culture and geography; that it would take some serious degree of threat before they would act in unison. When that point was reached, the Soviets usually new that they couldn't push any further. It seems like the same thing is happening again. Russia is pushing the limits, waiting for the response and then deciding whether to push more or stand still. Now, like then, they are are using the threat of working with some of the more disfavoured nations like Iran, Syria and possibly N. Korea as leverage. Pushing, threatening, suggesting to see what the response will be. At some point, the west will have to draw a line in the sand. If Russia were to expand for example further into the Ukraine. The Ukrainians too come hell or high water are going to have to draw that line too regardless of the odds. If I were them, I would have scuttled the ships, blown up the ammunition and the aircraft and scorched anything that they didn't care to leave in the Crimea. Leaving operational aircraft, ships and bases is not help the Russians need.
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