Obama's Ukraine Folly Comes Full Circle

Obama's Ukraine Folly Comes Full Circle

09/06/14

Robert W. Merry

The Presidency, Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, United States, Ukraine

"The mismatch between the realities on the ground and the nature of the president’s pronouncements reveals a president who is out of touch with reality."

President Obama doesn’t seem to know what hit him in Ukraine the past week. He has been thoroughly outmaneuvered by Russian president Vladimir Putin. And yet the U.S. president expresses himself as if he still has something of consequence to say on the matter. The mismatch between the realities on the ground and the nature of the president’s pronouncements reveals a president who is out of touch with reality.

On Wednesday of last week, Putin unveiled a cease-fire concept for the Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatist insurgents in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko promptly embraced the concept as a basis for a cessation in the fighting. The next day, the parties announced they would begin observing a cease-fire that likely would include provisions put forth by Putin: offensive operations halted, including airstrikes; Ukrainian artillery withdrawn from proximity of separatist-controlled cities; prisoners exchanged; “safe corridors” established for the delivery of aid and reconstruction materials to war-torn areas; international observers deployed to monitor the truce and the Ukrainian-Russian border. 

In terms of the ongoing diplomatic drama involving Ukraine, Russia and the West, this was a huge development. The New York Times on Friday quoted Timothy Ash, a London-based expert on the region at Standard Bank, as saying the agreement probably signifies that the Ukrainian-Russian conflict now will be congealed into a kind of diplomatic standoff like those involving other Russian-dominated, quasi-independent “gray zones,” such as Transnistria in Moldova, or Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia. 

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