Posted on 07/28/2014 2:49:39 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, is a “thug” and a “liar”, one of Britain’s most senior ambassadors has said, as the EU prepares today to approve tough new sanctions against Moscow.
Sir Peter Westmacott said the West’s increasingly firm response to Russia was beginning to have an impact on the Kremlin.
The British ambassador to the United States said Moscow’s aggression in Ukraine was starting to look like “the wrong call”.
He spoke as the Ministry of Defence announced that a battle group of 1,350 troops and armoured vehicles, including Challenger tanks, would join Nato exercises in Poland.
The Government said Exercise Black Eagle in south-west Poland would see Britain’s biggest deployment to Eastern Europe since 2008.
The exercises were designed to reassure Nato’s eastern members that the alliance would shield them from Russian aggression.
Sir Peter said Mr Putin’s behaviour in Ukraine had been “thuggish, dishonest and reckless” and he “thought he’d done pretty well after he stole Crimea”.
“It doesn’t look so good now,” he said on the US cable channel MSNBC, part of the NBC group. “It’s starting to look like this was the wrong call. This is a defining moment for what is going on in Ukraine.
“We’ve had some very bad behaviour from the Russian side for a long time now, and now we’ve had this terrible atrocity — the shooting down of the aircraft. We have to change the cost/benefit analysis for Putin, for the Russian people, for the government that they have elected there.”
Nato has stepped up manoeuvres in Eastern Europe since the annexation of Crimea with generals believing the alliance needs to reset its stance towards a more aggressive Kremlin.
Exercise Black Eagle is the latest Nato war game to be bolstered at short notice in the area.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Nyah! Nyah! Nyah!
So, what?
The reality is that is has been his incompetence that has lost the Ukraine as a reliable buffer for Russia.
His domestic policy has been a failure (witness the Russian economy, if you want to call it an economy). Even with high oil prices, the Putin economy is a failure. His foreign policy has also been a failure. What you're seeing is his desperate effort to regain some of what his incompetence has lost.
And, now, somehow this genius has gotten himself tangled up with a bunch of drunken derelicts who are using his weapons to commit terrorist acts against commercial airliners. And, he's so proud of his genius that he can't tell the truth about any of it. The problem is that he's even incompetent at lying.
As Charlie Sheen used to stumble around and say, "Winning!"
Sheeeeesh! Putin's an awful joke.
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