26-March-2014: Putin leaking private phone calls in challenge to West
Yesterday, Barack Obama shrugged off the suggestion that Vladimir Putin had become an antagonist to US and Western interests. Insisting that the move on Crimea came out of “weakness,” Obama dismissed Russia as only a “regional power,” and that he’s more worried about terrorist attacks than a relaunch of the Cold War. But that dismisses what Putin’s thinking, or more to the point, doing. Eli Lake reports today that Russian intelligence has begun a campaign to undermine Western leaders by tapping their phone conversations and leaking them to the public:
It started in the first week of February. As Ukraine’s political elites were scrambling to form a new government, a recording of a cellphone call emerged between Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine. The intercept featured Nuland privately saying, “F*** the EU,” and disclosed the preferences of two senior U.S. diplomats for who should serve in Ukraine’s interim government.
Follow-up article from The Guardian... US official apologises to EU counterparts for undiplomatic language
The frustration of the Obama administration at Europe’s hesitant policy over the pro-democracy protests in Ukraine has been laid bare in a leaked phone conversation between two senior US officials, one of whom declares: “F*** the EU”.The US state department did not directly confirm that the leaked audio clip posted on YouTube captures the voices of the top US diplomat for European and Eurasian affairs,Victoria Nuland, and US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. However, the department’s spokeswoman Jen Psaki said that Nuland, who made the disparaging remark about the EU, “has been in contact with her EU counterparts and of course has apologised for these reported comments”.
This, folks, is the caliber of our Diplomatic Corps today.
-PJ
Why does any president ever need to make phone calls to any foreign leader like this over matters such as this, anything they say should always be public and plain spoken.
Only in cases of severe urgency or secrecy shoudl phone calls ever be made that are “private” and even then they should be ALWAYS be recorded by both sides for history purposes and for auditing purposes, and they should be relesed after a certain prescribed period of time.