Русский агент
Путин - мl
HA! HA! HA! HA!
Russia used the Biden administration’s obsession with a new Iran deal to distract from the Ukrainian invasion.
While Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into eastern Ukraine, the Biden administration was once again caught flat-footed.
Its first year in office has been filled with unpleasant surprises, from the collapse of the government of Afghanistan to skyrocketing inflation to the stubborn refusal of Yemen’s Houthis to stop behaving like terrorists — even though they were removed from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).
But Putin’s plans for Ukraine were hardly a secret — the Russian strongman has given speeches about his view that Ukraine is part of Russia, written papers on the topic, and has been systematically assembling men and materiel on Ukraine’s borders for months.
So how could any administration be so surprised when the invasion actually happened that they spent the first 24 hours debating the technical meaning of the word “invasion”?
The answer to this question may be found some 800 miles west of Ukraine, in the Austrian capital of Vienna, where the negotiations for a new nuclear deal with Iran are taking place.
Reviving the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) halted by President Trump in 2018 was a top priority for the Biden administration, which hastened back to the negotiating table last March of their first year in office.
Despite the serial humiliations doled out by the regime in Tehran, including escalating terrorist attacks on America’s allies in the Middle East and a refusal to meet directly with U.S. counterparts, the Biden team has persisted through third-party intermediaries, including the Russians.
the Russian lead, Mikhail Ulyanov, while hardly a household name, has become something of a celebrity owing to his colorful English-language Twitter feed.
Ulyanov’s popular Twitter feed has, however, in recent days clearly demonstrated the connection between the JCPOA talks and Ukraine from the Russian perspective, as he has begun to intersperse his tweets about the negotiations with messages praising Putin’s action against Ukraine and mocking the U.S. and NATO.
For example: Berlin decided to suspend certification of #NordStream2. Some analysts say that #Germany has shot itself in the leg. In Russian language we have another “juicy” saying: Just to spite Grandma I will freeze my ears off. It seems to be applicable.
It may seem curious to have the lead Russian nuclear negotiator joshing publicly about Putin’s weaponization of energy against Western Europe, unless of course the point all along was to exploit the American eagerness to get to a new Iran deal at the expense of every other consideration to Moscow’s advantage as Putin prepared to invade Ukraine.
The Biden administration’s actions are also being closely watched by President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China, who also has a negotiating team in Vienna and is even more eager to take advantage of American myopia and fecklessness.
https://tinyurl.com/56fpz2an
Russia used the Biden administration’s obsession with a new Iran deal to distract from the Ukrainian invasion.
While Vladimir Putin’s tanks rolled into eastern Ukraine, the Biden administration was once again caught flat-footed.
Its first year in office has been filled with unpleasant surprises, from the collapse of the government of Afghanistan to skyrocketing inflation to the stubborn refusal of Yemen’s Houthis to stop behaving like terrorists — even though they were removed from the State Department’s list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs).
But Putin’s plans for Ukraine were hardly a secret — the Russian strongman has given speeches about his view that Ukraine is part of Russia, written papers on the topic, and has been systematically assembling men and materiel on Ukraine’s borders for months.
So how could any administration be so surprised when the invasion actually happened that they spent the first 24 hours debating the technical meaning of the word “invasion”?
The answer to this question may be found some 800 miles west of Ukraine, in the Austrian capital of Vienna, where the negotiations for a new nuclear deal with Iran are taking place.
Reviving the Obama-era Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) halted by President Trump in 2018 was a top priority for the Biden administration, which hastened back to the negotiating table last March of their first year in office.
Despite the serial humiliations doled out by the regime in Tehran, including escalating terrorist attacks on America’s allies in the Middle East and a refusal to meet directly with U.S. counterparts, the Biden team has persisted through third-party intermediaries, including the Russians.
the Russian lead, Mikhail Ulyanov, while hardly a household name, has become something of a celebrity owing to his colorful English-language Twitter feed.
Ulyanov’s popular Twitter feed has, however, in recent days clearly demonstrated the connection between the JCPOA talks and Ukraine from the Russian perspective, as he has begun to intersperse his tweets about the negotiations with messages praising Putin’s action against Ukraine and mocking the U.S. and NATO.
For example: Berlin decided to suspend certification of #NordStream2. Some analysts say that #Germany has shot itself in the leg. In Russian language we have another “juicy” saying: Just to spite Grandma I will freeze my ears off. It seems to be applicable.
It may seem curious to have the lead Russian nuclear negotiator joshing publicly about Putin’s weaponization of energy against Western Europe, unless of course the point all along was to exploit the American eagerness to get to a new Iran deal at the expense of every other consideration to Moscow’s advantage as Putin prepared to invade Ukraine.
The Biden administration’s actions are also being closely watched by President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China, who also has a negotiating team in Vienna and is even more eager to take advantage of American myopia and fecklessness.
https://tinyurl.com/56fpz2an
