RFE/RL's resident Kremlin watcher, Brian Whitmore, has been looking at what may be behind Vladimir Putin's remarks yesterday, when he said a NATO "foreign legion" was fighting for Kyiv in Ukraine. His analysis is not for the fainthearted:
You can learn a lot about someone from their delusions.
Consider Vladimir Putin's comments on January 26. Speaking to students at St. Petersburg, the Kremlin leader said the Ukrainian Army is not really the Ukrainian Army at all. Those soldiers fighting pro-Moscow separatists in Donbas? They're actually NATO's foreign legion.
"We often say: Ukrainian army this, the Ukrainian army that. In actual fact though, who is fighting there? These are indeed official subunits of the armed forces. But to a large extent these are so-called volunteer nationalist battalions," Putin said.
"In effect, it is no longer an army but a foreign legion -- in this case NATO's foreign legion -- which does not of course pursue Ukraine's national interests. They have a completely different agenda that is connected with achieving the geopolitical objective of containing Russia."
Yep. He actually said that.
Putin is doing a number of things here. On one level he is playing that old Kremlin game of drawing equivalencies.
The West has long accused Moscow of manufacturing the separatist conflict in the Donbas, arming and supplying the militants, and sending in Russian troops to direct and reinforce them.
So Moscow naturally -- indeed almost instinctively -- says the West is doing the same with the Ukrainians: Look! NATO has little green men too!
But there is more here than the Kremlin's standard run-of-the-mill -- and entirely false -- whataboutism. It is more insidious than that.
Read the entire Power Vertical blogpost here
Meanwhile, Victoria Nuland has also been taking issue with some of the things being said in Russia about the Ukraine crisis:
The United States' top diplomat for Europe has denounced "lies" by Russian state media about the Ukraine conflict.
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland said on January 27 that the signatories to September's Minsk agreement aimed at ending the fighting should be held to account "when state-owned Russian media spews lies about who is responsible for the violence."
She added that some claims by the Russian government on state media "are so outlandish" that the Russian people "are no longer believing them."
Her remarks at the Brookings Institution in Washington came as violence in eastern Ukraine has escalated in recent days with pro-Russian separatists launching an assault on the port city of Mariupol.
Nuland also said the United States would consider an additional $1 billion in loan guarantees to Kyiv if Ukraine "stays the reform course."
As the previous tweets indicate, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has been getting a bit of stick for apparently using Auschwitz to score political points.
His Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, however, has also had similar charges laid at his door. Here are a couple of choice quotes from remarks he made today at an International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow:
"History shows how horrific an edge can the humanity be driven to by ambitions of global supremacy; what kind of tragedies are brought about by attempts of military pressure against sovereign countries and disrespect of their rights. And, of course, we all know very well how double standards and indifference to the fate of others are dangerous and destructive; just like today's tragedy in Ukraine's southeast where peaceful population is being fired upon over the course of many months in Donbas, Luhansk and other towns and cities."
"Historical facts are undeniable. They show, for example, how [Stepan] Bandera followers and other collaborators -- Hitler's accomplices -- themselves took part in the extermination of the Jewish people -- in the extermination of Jews in Lviv, Odesa, Kyiv, and other Ukrainian towns; how Nazis in the Baltic region carried out ethnic cleansing in Vilnius, Riga, Kaunas, and Tallinn."