19 July 2023

The Long, Destructive Shadow of Obama’s Russia Doctrine

Adrian Karatnycky

In an interview with Times Radio in May, Richard Dearlove, the former head of Britain’s MI6, observed that “the policy that [U.S. President Barack] Obama followed in 2014, when there was this initial Russian invasion … the way that this was handled, with the benefit of hindsight, was probably a mistake.” Dearlove was right, but he missed a salient point: The decisions made in the Obama years aren’t just something to observe through the rearview mirror. Obama’s policies continue to exercise a major influence on the course of the Russia-Ukraine war and have resulted in the unnecessary loss of tens of thousands of civilian and military lives.

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