Dosvedanie to All That{US ambassador to Russia on freedom, security, Putin wanted Obama in Sochi}

The New Republic ^ | February 14, 2014 | Julia Ioffe

[cunning_fish]

Before he headed to Moscow in January 2012 as Barack Obama’s new ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul was itching to get out of government. He had dreams of moving back to Palo Alto. The weather’s nice, his family missed the place. But Obama had come to rely on McFaul, a longtime Russia scholar and the National Security Council’s point man on the country. So he offered him a posting he couldn’t decline.

McFaul’s academic specialty is revolution—a detail that Vladimir Putin, hounded by a bubbling uprising, immediately seized on. State television vilified McFaul as the man Washington had sent to bring chaos to Russia (something Putin seemed to actually believe). Pro-Kremlin mobs started showing up outside the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

Despite complaints from the Obama administration, the intimidation and scapegoating never stopped, even after Putin won reelection and crushed the protests. Two years later, U.S.-Russia relations have soured dramatically, and Putin is in the midst of an epic crackdown on civil society, the very thing McFaul spent two decades of his career trying to nurture.

On February 4, McFaul announced his resignation from what has been a very controversial ambassadorship. Some career State Department types fault him for taunting the bear: One of his first meetings in Moscow was with the opposition, and he has avidly used social media to reach out directly to Russian citizens, all of which is said to drive Putin to distraction. Needless to say, McFaul takes a very different view of his tenure. Two days after the Winter Games’ opening ceremonies, he and I met up in Sochi for a beer in a hotel bar just outside the Olympic security bubble.

McFaul had just completed one of his last official duties, leading the U.S. delegation and its several gay athletes—a gesture he’d helped

[PghBaldy]

A quote from the article, by the Ambassador, showing how serious Obama takes US-Russian relations:

"The president of the United States has spoken out on these issues publicly, on the Jay Leno show."

Forget the policies, which are atrocious. Look at the silliness, the preening silliness.

[cunning_fish]

McFaul is a liberal academic. He is not a trained diplomat, probably the first amateur sent as ambassador to Russia in a history of US-Russian relations.