Obama & Putin: ‘Putin Sees In Obama Not Just Someone Who Is Weak & Incompetent As A Figure On The World Stage’

The scope and intensity of the neo-Soviet crackdown now underway in Vladimir Putin’s Russia is truly breathtaking to behold, even for those of us who saw it coming. But even more terrifying is the craven, dishonorable response to that crackdown by the President of the United States.

Let’s start in the Duma, Russia’s answer to the U.S. House of Representatives. Within the last two weeks, two of the leading figures opposing the Putin regime in the legislature have been politically liquidated. First, deputy Gennady Gudkov was actually thrown out of the body; then his colleague Ilya Ponomarev was banned from speaking in it. Both are members of the “Just Russia” party, the only group in the legislature willing to tweak Putin from time to time. Gudkov was accused of criminal activity without even having been arrested, much less convicted, and Ponomarev was accused of calling Putin’s party United Russia a “party of swindlers and thieves” from the Duma floor.

For Putin’s United Russia to silence Ponomarev is like Obama’s Democrats silencing Paul Ryan. Ponomarev has that kind of profile in Russia, and Putin’s move is that heedlessly bold. Meeting a group of foreign ambassadors to receive their credentials recently, Putin told them: “Attempts to replace the universal principles of the U.N. Charter by unilateral actions or partisan deals, moreover to use force bypassing the U.N. do not do any good, as is well known.” This statement, made in defense of the murderous regime in Syria and ignoring the fact that in attacking Georgia in 2008, Putin acted as unilaterally and as heedless of the U.N. as he possibly could have, rivals the most deranged pronouncements of the Politburo in Soviet times. Putin simply does not care about consequences, because for him, as for the Politburo, there are none.