Robert Parry: Putin's Subtle Message to Obama

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/23571-focus-putins-subtle-message-to-obama

Official Washington’s shock and disbelief at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s calming words about Ukraine reveal more about the widening chasm between real-world nuances and the U.S. political/media elite’s hysteria than any dramatic shift in course by Putin.

I’m told that what Putin is doing – in urging ethnic Russians in east Ukraine to put off a referendum on possible secession and agreeing to pull Russian troops back from the border – is part of a behind-the-scenes initiative coordinated with President Barack Obama to prevent the Ukraine crisis from spinning further out of control.

On the American side, this also appears to be the latest example of Obama’s extraordinary way of conducting foreign policy, often at odds with his own State Department bureaucracy and relying on White House insiders and CIA analysts to counter the belligerence often exhibited by Obama’s two secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

Obama’s unusual style arose from his fateful decision to appoint a “team of rivals” to top national security posts after winning the presidency in 2008. To close a rift in the Democratic Party, he gave the hawkish Clinton the job of Secretary of State; and to maintain some continuity during wartime, he left George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates in place and kept Bush’s high command, including neocon favorite Gen. David Petraeus.


What Obama Can Do to Save Ukraine

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/23534-focus-what-obama-can-do-to-save-ukraine

If President Barack Obama is to help defuse the worsening crisis in Ukraine, he will have to show a level of leadership on foreign policy that he has not demonstrated in his five-plus years in office. In particular, he will have to repudiate the one-sided narrative that has been created by his own State Department and the mainstream U.S. media.

Obama will have to recognize the complex reality of Ukraine, a society deeply divided between the west and east, and acknowledge that the U.S.-backed Maidan revolt overthrowing elected President Viktor Yanukovych was indeed spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias who continue to brutalize political opponents, including the May 2 massacre in Odessa that killed dozens of ethnic Russians.

What makes Obama’s position so politically difficult in the United States is that the political/media elite has adopted a narrative that excludes the nasty reality of what has actually occurred in Ukraine over the past six months. Instead, the simplistic U.S. narrative made first Yanukovych and then Russian President Vladimir Putin the cardboard villains, and conversely, the Maidan protesters the idealistic heroes.

The black-hat/white-hat narrative has systematically distorted the depiction of Ukraine reaching the American people. So, Obama would have to start back at the beginning and explain how the U.S.-backed regime in Kiev is not all sweetness and light and how the ethnic Russians in the east, who were the political base for Yanukovych, are not just mindless pawns of Moscow.

[malaise]

1. K & R

Yep - siding with neo-Nazis can produce no positive spin.
Further the biased coverage of the May 2 slaughter further exposed the West.