Opinion: How Washington Misunderstood Putin since at least 2005 like the current Director of the CIA

Recommendable! Another apologist of Putin the Terrible!

It looks like there are a lot of fools in the administration of the senile, demented and corrupt 46th President! Here is another one!

"Williams J. Burns is widely considered the most skillful US diplomat of his generation. He boasts a golden career, including ambassadorship to Moscow 2005-8, Undersecretary of State for Policy, and Deputy Secretary of State. He has served in top positions under both democrats and republicans. ...

In 2019, Burns published his highly acclaimed memoir, The Back Channel: American Diplomacy in a Disordered World. Given his current prominence, I have just finished reading it to try to figure out where he actually stands on Russia and Ukraine. ...

Russian President Vladimir Putin has actually been remarkably transparent, and Burns reports it well. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Putin in Moscow in 2005, he stated: “Saakashvili is nothing more than a puppet of the United States.” He continued: “If Georgia causes bloodshed in Ossetia, I will have no alternative to recognizing South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and responding with force” (p. 202). 

Already then, Putin threatened to attack Georgia. One would have expected the US to respond forcefully and prepare measures against Russian expansionism (sharp statements, threats of sanctions, arms deliveries). Yet, Burns simply states: “Putin’s pugnacity left an impression.”

Burns expresses contempt for former Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who launched Russia’s freedom and economic reforms, while he is respectful of Putin: “He seemed in many ways the anti-Yeltsin – half a generation younger, sober, ruthlessly competent, hardworking, and hard-faced, he offered promise for Russians tired of the Yeltsin-era chaos and disorder” (p. 206). ...
Burns continues: “Putin made a brutal object lesson of the billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky in 2003, seizing his oil and gas company, Yukos, and sending him to prison.” Putin’s absence of good values is mentioned just in passing where Burns states that he “has never been a democratizer” (p. 207). ...
Instead of taking Putin’s new aggression seriously, Burns acts like a psychotherapist, seeing his speech as “the self-absorbed product of 15 years of accumulate Russian frustrations and grievances…Putin was giving voice to the pent-up frustrations of many Russians” (p. 224). Well, so did Adolf Hitler in Weimar, Germany, and we knew how that ended. ..."

Opinion: How Washington Misunderstood Putin Re-reading the memoirs of a top US diplomat who now heads the CIA, one understands how badly Washington, Berlin and France got Russia wrong – for which we are all now paying.

William J. Burns, Director of the CIA