US President Obama's policy aimed at isolating Russia and bringing the Kremlin to its knees has obviously failed, stressed Stephen Cohen, a prominent American historian and professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University, adding that US Secretary of State John Kerry's visit to Sochi has become a "turning point" in the saga of the Ukrainian crisis.
"The White House policy towards Russia during the last year has failed. What was that policy? We don't have to guess. President Obama told us on several occasions that the policy was to isolate Russia and bring its leadership and the person of Putin to his knees through economic sanctions and to thereby make the concessions that the United States and NATO wanted in Ukraine," Stephen Cohen emphasized.
Vladimir Putin's decision to meet Kerry after his negotiations with Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was a "very big symbolic diplomatic deal" that could be considered as a possible thaw in the new Cold War.
However, the question remains open, what the new American policy towards Russia will be like.
"What's the new American policy? And clearly it involves in fundamental ways Russia's cooperation… Now it appears that we [the United States] don't want [Russia] to be a pariah. We want it to come back and be a cooperative partner with us, certainly in Iran, certainly in regard to Syria, but the pivot now is of course in the Ukrainian crisis," the scholar underscored.
On the other hand Kiev has done many things in recent months that do not improve the White House's position in this crisis, Professor Cohen stressed. Kiev as made a lot of provocative statements about its intentions to retake Crimea and Donbass by the military force, evidently ignoring the Minsk II agreement's provisions.
And it has become clear that Washington's patience is not limitless when John Kerry publicly castigated the Ukrainian government in Sochi, saying that President Petro Poroshenko should act in accordance with the Minsk II accord.
"It was the first time a high American official in public has reproached the behavior of the Kiev government. So I ask myself does this signify that the Obama administration is now diminishing its previously unqualified support for Kiev. If that is so, that is as bigger turning point as Kerry's visit to Sochi," Stephen Cohen emphasized.
Still, it is very important that US Army War College has recently defined the future of US-Russian relations as "not confrontation, but competition and cooperation." Although this formula is echoing the US strategy towards the USSR during the Cold War, it still marks a possible shift in relationship between Washington and Moscow, according to the scholar.