Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack Obama couldn’t even pronounce President-elect Petro Poroshenko’s name correctly, butchering it as “Porochenko” every time he said it during nine minutes of public remarks. Everybody makes mistakes but, combined with the lack of substance, the moment symbolized the problems on both sides.
Obama’s weak response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin war in eastern Ukraine shows the West is not willing to live up to its commitments in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum to protect Ukraine’s sovereignty. In response, by not articulating the threat in public and the need for Western military aid and tougher sanctions, Poroshenko blew one of his first moments on the international stage. One can hope that their private discussion was more productive, but we doubt it.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, at the G7 summit in Brussels, Belgium, gave another warning about the possibility of further sanctions. But frankly, the time for warnings ended in February when Russia invaded the Crimean peninsula. Deep sectoral sanctions should have been levied and military aid should have been sent to Ukraine immediately. Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine and disruption of the May 25 presidential election were supposed to trigger tougher sanctions, but they never did.
Instead, the West continues to refuse to give Ukraine critical military aid.
After offering the Ukrainian military meals-ready-to-eat, provoking jokes and derision, Americans followed up this week with an offer of night vision goggles as part of $5 million in aid. So now Ukrainian soldiers know what they’re eating in the dark or who they are shooting at in the dark, if they only had weapons and ammunition, that is.
Obama’s superficial meeting with Poroshenko shows the American president is still disengaged. America still refuses to consider this a military conflict, even as Ukrainian troops continue to die – at least 61 men so far – and as, from the Russian side, weapons continue to pour over the border into Ukraine. The Interior Ministry estimates that as many as 10,000 Russian-backed armed insurgents are working in the Donbas.
Given that Russia is an authoritarian state, the Kremlin would have to be supporting this military adventure. Despite fighters openly acknowledging that they are from Russia, as well as the dozens of corpses sent back home to Russia, the West still continues to look indulge in the Kremlin PR that this is a civil war in Ukraine. It’s not. If Russia stopped supporting the insurgency, it would eventually go away. The way to stop the war is to stop Vladimir Putin.
