Biting his fingernails

Kim Zigfeld writes,

On April 10th, the Putin regime shut down the Voice of America radio broadcasts in Russia, calling them “mere spam in our frequencies,” and it evicted the American Councils, which is responsible for organizing student exchanges between the USA and Russia. The same day, it was revealed that the Kremlin had willfully withheld critical information about the Boston Marathon bombers from U.S. security forces, in other words playing an important role in helping the bombings to go forward. We learned that Russia had been ritualistically violating its nuclear arms treaty obligations, and Russia announced as well that it intended to flout U.S. sanctions against the terrorist rogue regime in Iran.

Putin is also imposing Soviet-style approach to domestic policy. Rachel Denber of Human Rights Watch has written: “I do not recall a more dramatic silencing of the media in post-SovietRussia.” All of the last remaining web portals inside Russia that could be counted on to fairly report the news and publish criticism of the Putin regime have come under virulent attack, and many have simply been blocked from the Internet entirely. All significant TV news reports already come from the Kremlin, leaving Russians almost completely blind, just as they were in Soviet times.

Obama did nothing and said nothing in response to the slaughter of not one but two major U.S. organizations in Russia, and he continued to do nothing more than mumble about the “possibility” of imposing economic sanctions if Russian tanks roll into Eastern Ukraine. He has made no significant military preparations to guard against the advent of a major military conflagration on NATO’s borders, much less to stand up against wanton neo-Soviet imperialism.

Yet Obama continues to bite his fingernails and watch as Putin gorges himself on Eastern Europe. A big part of the reason, of course, is that he’s afraid Americans will start remembering his “reset” policy, where he lectured Republicans about having misunderstood Russia and assured us that if treated with proper respect Russia would be a valuable partner in international affairs.

Putin saw the “reset” as an open invitation to roll his tanks into former Soviet space and start rebuilding his beloved USSR, and so that’s exactly what he’s done.

Read more here.