Posts Tagged ‘obama’
Obama and Putin May Meet at APEC Summit
President Vladimir Putin could meet U.S. President Barack Obama on the sidelines of an economic summit in Indonesia on Monday to discuss a range of topics including Syria, a Putin aide said Thursday.
“This was our proposal, which was taken up immediately by the American side,” Yury Ushakov said at a news briefing, Interfax reported. “We think the meeting will take place.”
The meeting would take place in Bali at a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, or APEC, forum,
which is aimed at developing trade and economic cooperation within a group of 21 countries from the Asia-Pacific region. Apart from Russia and the U.S., group members include China, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Canada.
The two leaders plan to discuss the “development of agreements and the prospects of working together on Syria,” Ushakov said, among other issues.
Despite last week’s United Nations Security Council agreement on the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons that codified an earlier deal brokered by Russia and the U.S., bilateral relations between the countries have been deteriorating since Putin returned to the presidency last year.
The U.S. Senate passed the Magnitsky Act in December, banning entry to the U.S. for Russian officials suspected of involvement in the 2009 death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky and other suspected human rights violators. Russia retaliated with the Dima Yakovlev law, which prohibited U.S. adoptions of Russian children and banned entry to certain U.S. officials implicated in human rights abuses.
Last September, Obama skipped the APEC summit in Vladivostok, which some saw as a response to Putin backing out of last May’s Group of Eight meeting at Camp David near Washington, D.C. payday loan unshaven girl https://zp-pdl.com https://zp-pdl.com/fast-and-easy-payday-loans-online.php займы на карту без отказа
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Obama Gets an Earful on Syria From Russian Human-Rights Activists
Daily Beast
Only a handful of Russian activists bothered to show up to meet the president in St. Petersburg, and those who did gave him an earful on Syria and Snowdon.
President Obama must have been disappointed to see the group of activists at St. Petersburg’s Crown Plaza hotel. Only nine showed up.
Some of Russia’s top human-rights defenders, it seemed, realized the American leader had failed to reset relations not only with Russian authorities but Russian society as well, and turned down their invitations to meet on Friday afternoon. Activists said they doubted that a president who accepted the convictions and pursuit of whistleblowers in his own country would be an influential advocate for the issues they face in Russia.
One of the nine, opposition leader Yevgenia Chirikova, admitted that she felt she needed to talk to Obama about his own challenges. “I came to criticize Obama, to make him realize that impeachment, which he might face soon, is a trifle compared to the blood he would always have on his hands if he bombs Syria now,” Chirikova, the winner of the 2012 Goldman Environmental Prize, told The Daily Beast. But she added that sitting down to talk was still important, even if the chances for any positive changes were low.
At the meeting, Chirikova urged Obama to consider the Magnitsky Act, the 2011 law that punishes the Russian officials implicated in the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky by banning their entry to U.S. Russians paid a high price for that law, including new anti-U.S. adoption measures last winter, the activist said. “I wonder how to add more names to Magnitsky list. For instance, the mayor of Khimki town, who is responsible in the death of his critic, journalist Mikhail Beketov. But Obama did not answer my question,” said Chirikova, who’s been jailed numerous times for her activities and officials have threatened to take away her two children if she did not stop her activism.
The scene was different back in 2009, during Obama’s first visit to Russia. Dozens of civil activists and human-rights defenders met with the newly elected president, hopeful that his “reset” ideas would bring more political freedom to Russia. Unlike today, the U.S. and Russian presidents were meeting at a summit; at one such meeting, the president mentioned the physical assault on activist Lev Ponomarev, the founder of All-Russian Movement for Human Rights. Ponomarev was among those who skipped the meeting with Obama this year.
“If they told me they needed to save a person, I would have immediately come,” Ponomarev explained. “We recently met with John Kerry without any results—these meetings with the U.S. leaders make no sense. But they are a nice tradition. We complain to them and they tell us that we are great,” he added.
Svetlana Gannushkina, chairwoman of the human-rights group Civil Support Committee, also declined the invitation, instead sending her appeal in writing. She complimented America’s leadership for feeling responsible for the world’s fate, but warned President Obama in her letter: “Military operations leading to the death of new victims among the civilian population are not the best expression of this responsibility.” Of Obama, she said “we can see that he is ready to send whistleblowers to jail and bomb other states—this is a horrible example for Russian authorities and a disillusioning one for Russian youth.” займы онлайн на карту срочно займ онлайн на карту без отказа female wrestling https://zp-pdl.com/fast-and-easy-payday-loans-online.php https://zp-pdl.com займы на карту
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U.S.-Russian Ties Still Fall Short of ‘Reset’ Goal
Just days before Vladimir V. Putin reassumed the presidency of Russia last year, President Obama dispatched his national security adviser to Moscow. Mr. Obama had made considerable progress with Dmitri A. Medvedev, the caretaker president, and wanted to preserve the momentum.
Any hopes of that, however, were quickly dashed when Mr. Putin sat down with the visiting American adviser, Tom Donilon, at the lavish presidential residence outside Moscow. Rather than talk of cooperation, Mr. Putin opened the meeting with a sharp challenge underscoring his deep suspicion of American ambitions:
“When,” he asked pointedly, “are you going to start bombing Syria?”
At the time, Mr. Obama had no plans for military involvement in the civil war raging in the heart of the Middle East, but Mr. Putin did not believe that. In Mr. Putin’s view, the United States wanted only to meddle in places where it had no business, fomenting revolutions to install governments friendly to Washington.
The meeting 16 months ago set the stage for a tense new chapter in Russian-American relations, one that will play out publicly this week when Mr. Obama travels to St. Petersburg for a Group of 20 summit meeting hosted by Mr. Putin. Although Mr. Obama had no intention of bombing Syria last year, on Saturday he said he now favored military action against Syrian forces, not to depose the government of Bashar al-Assad, a Russian ally, but in retaliation for gassing its own citizens — an assertion Mr. Putin denounced as “utter nonsense” to justify American intervention.
While it was the Kremlin’s decision last month to shelter Edward J. Snowden, the National Security Agency leaker, that finally prompted Mr. Obama to call off a separate one-on-one meeting he had scheduled with Mr. Putin while in Russia, the core of the schism is not so much that case as the radically different worldviews revealed by the Syria dispute. Where Mr. Obama feels compelled to take action to curb the use of unconventional weapons, Mr. Putin sees American imperialism at work again.
The story of the administration’s “reset” policy toward Russia is a case study in how the heady idealism of Mr. Obama’s first term has given way to the disillusionment of his second. Critics say he was naïve to think he could really make common cause with Moscow. Aides say it was better to try than not, and it did yield tangible successes in arms control, trade and military cooperation before souring.
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Putin’s own Cold War
Whose side is Vladimir Putin on? It’s a question worth asking, because of late the Kremlin has come closer and closer to the tipping point between obstreperousness and outright hostility towards the West. Last week Barack Obama cancelled a September summit with Putin after Russia offered asylum to the National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden. But in truth the Snowden affair is only the latest and most trivial of a long and growing list of issues where Russia and the US are on radically opposite sides.
Syria probably tops the list — at least in terms of urgency and human cost. Russia has offered diplomatic support to the Assad regime by using its veto on the UN Security Council to block sanctions and intervention. More seriously, Russia has become the arsenal of dictatorship, selling over $1.5 billion of arms to Assad since the start of the civil war. Last month Russia escalated its military aid still further after foreign minister Sergei Lavrov confirmed that Kremlin would deliver S-300 anti-aircraft missile systems to Damascus — the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, visited Putin in May to beg him not to do that. Lavrov insists that only ‘defensive’ materiel is being supplied to the Syrians. But the S-300 missiles will change the balance of the war — for instance by substantially complicating any western effort to impose a no-fly zone.
For the first time in a generation Russia and Nato find themselves backing opposite sides in a proxy war. Last June a Turkish jet was shot down off the coast of Syria by a Russian-supplied Panshir M-1 missile — possibly, according to Russian press reports, targeted by one of the Russian advisers sent to install the missiles and train Syrian operators. More Russian personnel are due to come and install the S-300 systems. At the same time the Pentagon confirmed in June that US F-16 warplanes and Patriot anti-aircraft missiles would remain in Jordan after the end of a joint drill this month, fuelling speculation that Washington was preparing for a no-fly zone. There’s debate over just what the S-300s can do, and whether they can be installed soon enough to make a difference. But the moment when a Russian officer aims and fires a missile at a Nato pilot — which almost never happened during the real Cold War — is likely to become a reality.
The idea that Russia and the West are engaged in a ‘new Cold War’ was first floated six years ago in a brilliant book of that name by Economist correspondent Edward Lucas. Lucas argued that the Kremlin’s bullying of its neighbours by cutting off gas supplies, sending assassins to murder dissidents in London and invading Georgia constituted acts of war. By that logic, Russia’s subsequent behaviour — Syria, Snowden, banning Americans from adopting Russian children, shutting down USAID offices for alleged ‘subversive activity’, wild accusations that the US is fomenting a rebellion against the Kremlin — are more bellicose still.
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It’s Time to Call Out Russia
President Obama decided to cancel a one-on-one meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin next month.He canceled for a host of reasons, not the least of which is Russia’s decision to grant Edward Snowden asylum. Nevertheless, there is a rising chorus of foreign policy realists in Washington who are alarmed by the decision. They’re wrong — Russia has taken a turn for the worse, and it’s time for the President to issue more gestures of contempt.
When Barack Obama came into office in 2009, American relations with Russia were at a low point. George W. Bush began his first term saying he saw into Putin’s soul, but ended his second with a bitter disagreement over Russia’s 2008 invasion of Georgia after Georgian troops killed Russian soldiers in South Ossetia. The “reset” policy, which Obama hoped would restore or, at the very least, de-escalate tensions, has not worked out as well as its authors hoped (though it is often unfairly maligned — relations with Russia are still not as bad as they were at the end of 2008).
Even so, Obama and President Medvedev seemed to have a polite, if not warm rapport at first. But when Putin came back into the presidency in May of 2012, that began to change.
Actually, the change happened earlier, in December of 2011. That was when Putin’s party, United Russia, lost its supermajority in Russia’s parliament. The protests that resulted sparked an outpouring of state violence against otherwise peaceful marchers, all for the crime of opposing a return of Putin to lead Russia.
In the U.S., the crackdown led to an odd congruence of commentary: Both human rights groups and conservatives condemned Russia in equally strong terms (culminating in Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney calling Russia “our biggest geopolitical foe” in March of 2012).
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McCain: Canceling Putin meeting not enough
Sen. John McCain said Sunday it’s “fine” that President Barack Obama canceled a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but Obama’s actions and statements show he does not understand how to deal with Putin.
“The president comparing him to a kid in the back of the classroom, I think, is very indicative of the president’s lack of appreciation of who Vladimir Putin is,” the Arizona Republican said on “Fox News Sunday,” referring to a comment Obama made in a press conference on Friday. “He’s an old KGB colonel that has no illusions about our relationship, does not care about a relationship with the United States, continues to oppress his people, continues to oppress the media and continues to act in an autocratic and unhelpful fashion.”
Canceling the meeting, which the president did last week after Russia granted asylum to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, was “symbolic,” McCain said, but the U.S. needs to expand the Magnitsky Act and enforce human rights, get Georgia into NATO and expand missile defense systems in Europe.
“We also need very badly to understand that Mr. Putin does not have the United States-Russia relationships in any priority and treat him in a realistic fashion,” the senator said. “hat’s the way to treat Mr. Putin, not just canceling a meeting.” займ онлайн на карту без отказа срочный займ https://zp-pdl.com/fast-and-easy-payday-loans-online.php https://zp-pdl.com/online-payday-loans-cash-advances.php микрозаймы онлайн
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End of the Affair: Inevitable Collapse of Obama’s Russian Reset
After Snowden and snubs, the relationship between Obama and Putin has reached an all-time low. Peter Pomeranzev on the death of the Russian reset.
It usually ends in tears. The Kremlin-White House romance, has fallen repeatedly from starry-eyed hope and foreign policy petting to hysterics and blame-gaming.
Jimmy Carter thought he could find a partner in Brezhnev. He cast off ‘containment’ and encouraged America to lose the ‘inordinate fear of communism’: by the end of his term he was boycotting the Moscow Olympics as the USSR invaded Afghanistan. Bill Clinton went in for drinking sessions and back-slapping with Boris Yeltsin, but the more he backed him the more corrupt Yeltsin’s regime became and the more the US was discredited: by the time NATO bombed Yugoslavia, the Kremlin was already grinding its teeth. George W. looked into Putin’s eyes and claimed he could “see his soul” (“I looked into Putin’s eyes and saw KGB” quipped the less smitten Colin Powell): by 2008 they were almost at war over Georgia and relations were back to a “Cold War low”. Obama’s decision today to snub his September tête-à-tête with Putin “due to a lack of progress on missiles, arms control, trade, commercial relations, global security, human rights, civil society and…Edward Snowden “ fell on the five year anniversary of the Georgian war. It feels like the beginning of the end of the ‘”reset with Russia”, the policy that has defined Obama’s own dalliance with the Kremlin.
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Letter Calls on President Obama to Cancel Meeting with Putin in Moscow
In light of recent disturbing developments for human rights in Russia, we urge President Barack Obama to cancel his summit meeting with President Vladimir Putin in September in Moscow and to revise U.S. policy toward Russia to reflect the aggressive, systematic assault on political and civil liberties taking place in Russia.
The Honorable Barack Obama
President of the United States
The White House
Washington, DC
August 2, 2013
Dear Mr. President:
In the past several weeks, the already alarming deterioration of Russia’s respect for political and civil rights has accelerated. Ordinary citizens who participated in peaceful protests against the government are being tried in court on trumped-up charges, lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was convicted posthumously in an absurd tax evasion case after having died from abuse in prison, and anti-corruption blogger and leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny was convicted of embezzlement in a politically-motivated trial.
Over the past year, Russia’s Kremlin-friendly Duma has hastily adopted laws that make Russians, particularly those engaged in civil society and journalism, vulnerable to arrest and imprisonment. Russia’s security services and law enforcement are pursuing a government agenda to harass and intimidate anyone perceived as a critic. Hundreds of non-profit organizations have been raided and investigated. Activists and opposition figures are targets of surveillance and harassment, even outside of Russia.
In light of these disturbing developments, we urge you to cancel your summit meeting with President Vladimir Putin in September in Moscow and to revise U.S. policy toward Russia to reflect the aggressive, systematic assault on political and civil liberties taking place in Russia. This request is independent of our concern about Russia’s handling of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who was granted temporary asylum today in Moscow. Even if Snowden were to be returned to the U.S. before your planned visit to Russia, which looks highly unlikely, we would still urge you not to travel to Moscow in September for the reasons stated.
While we recognize that certain levels of engagement with the Putin government are important and unavoidable, we also feel that U.S. policy should reflect Russia’s backsliding on human rights and recognize that it has an impact on the broader U.S.-Russia relationship. Such a policy is also important in dealing with other repressive governments elsewhere.
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Obama May Cancel Moscow Trip as Tensions Build Over Leaker
President Obama may cancel a scheduled trip to Moscow to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin in September as the standoff over the fate of Edward J. Snowden, the former National Security Agency contractor seeking asylum there, takes its toll on already strained relations between the United States and Russia, officials said Thursday.
Canceling the meeting in Moscow would be seen as a direct slap at Mr. Putin, who is known to value such high-level visits as a validation of Russian prestige. While the White House may be using the meeting as leverage to win cooperation as it seeks the return to the United States of Mr. Snowden, who is now staying at a Moscow airport, the reconsideration also reflects a broader concern that the two countries are far apart on issues like Syria, Iran, arms control and missile defense.
The conviction on Thursday of Aleksei A. Navalny, a prominent leader of the opposition to Mr. Putin, on embezzlement charges further underscored the deepening divide between the two countries as the White House pronounced itself “deeply disappointed” at what it called a trend of “suppressing dissent and civil society in Russia.” The verdict and five-year sentence came a week after the posthumous conviction of Sergei L. Magnitsky, a lawyer investigating official corruption who was arrested and died in custody.
“We call on the Russian government to cease its campaign of pressure against individuals and groups seeking to expose corruption, and to ensure that the universal human rights and fundamental freedoms of all of its citizens, including the freedoms of speech and assembly, are protected and respected,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.
The talk of human rights rang hollow to the Kremlin given the Snowden case. Mr. Putin has suggested that Washington is being hypocritical in complaining about Russian actions while seeking to prosecute a leaker who exposed American surveillance programs. But Mr. Putin has also made clear that he does not want the showdown to harm ties.
“Bilateral relations, in my opinion, are far more important than squabbles about the activities of the secret services,” he told Russian reporters who asked Wednesday about the scheduled Moscow meeting.
The White House announced the coming meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Putin when the two leaders met in Northern Ireland last month. It was added as an extra stop on a trip to St. Petersburg for the annual gathering of the Group of 20 nations. But while Mr. Obama is still committed to going to St. Petersburg, officials said he is now rethinking the Moscow stop, not just because of the impasse over Mr. Snowden but because of a growing sense that the two sides cannot agree on other issues enough to justify the meeting.
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