…the big news of CNN and NBC NEWS today, along with most people’s New Year’s Eve newsfeed, is the Vermont electric company claiming Putin’s Russia hacked into their system..
But from FOREIGN POLICY magazine, a very good article..
The money quote:
Various government spokespeople began to paint a picture of sanctions pushed personally by a bitter man. These were Barack Obama’s sanctions, not Donald Trump’s — not even U.S. sanctions. They were the sanctions pushed in a final, futile burst of hatred by a lame-duck president. Even Secretary of State John Kerry was a “good man,” undermined by an emotional president, according to the Foreign Ministry’s Zakharova.
The surprise came around 4 p.m. local time, via a statement was published on the Kremlin’s website. Russia would resist even the minimum expected diplomatic response of retaliatory expulsions, the statement read: “[Russia] will not resort to irresponsible ‘kitchen’ diplomacy but will plan our further steps to restore Russian-US relations based on the policies of the Trump Administration.”
Putin even invited the children of U.S. diplomats to his New Year’s party.
With that statement, the Russian president marked a complete about-turn of his traditionally petulant diplomacy. Tactically, it was a triumph. Suddenly “Obama’s sanctions,” designed so as to be untouchable by a future Trump administration, no longer seemed so irreversible.
“It is a very smart move,” Lukyanov says. “It will humiliate Obama even more.”
