Ukraine slams Obama for making ‘excuses’ over his Russia policy

Former U.S. President Barack Obama should start admitting critical mistakes in his administration’s Russia policy, including Moscow’s illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea, a senior Ukrainian official said Friday.

“The current Russian […] regime is a blatant reflection of a specific pre-war ‘Western policy,’” said Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s office. “Maybe it’s time to start admitting critical mistakes instead of coming up with new excuses?”

Podolyak’s comments are in reaction to former U.S. President Barack Obama’s defense of his administration’s reaction to the annexation of Crimea in an interview on CNN. Obama argued the full-scale invasion launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin last February came in a different context.

“Both myself but also [then-German Chancellor Angela] Merkel, who I give enormous credit for, had to pull in a lot of other Europeans kicking and screaming to impose the sanctions that we did and to prevent Putin from continuing through the Donbas and to the rest of Ukraine,” Obama said in the interview, which aired on Thursday night on the U.S. East Coast.

“Given both where Ukraine was at at the time and where the European mindset was at the time, we held the line.”

Both the U.S. and the EU imposed sanctions on dozens of Russian and pro-Kremlin Ukrainian officials after Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014. But they faced criticism first from analysts for not targeting Putin or his inner circle and later from scholars for the sanctions’ overall ineffectiveness.

Obama, who famously launched a “Russia reset” after taking office in 2009, sought to restore relations between Washington and Moscow during his two terms.

As he campaigned for reelection in 2012, the former president famously scoffed at his Republican opponent Mitt Romney for being out of touch with the new realities of American foreign policy after the former Massachusetts governor called Russia the U.S.’s “number one geopolitical foe.”

“When you were asked, ‘What’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America,’ you said ‘Russia.’ Not Al Qaeda; you said Russia,” Obama said then to Romney. “And, the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years.”

Obama doubled down in a long interview with The Atlantic in 2016, during his last year in office, saying Russia’s influence in Ukraine was inevitable “no matter what we do.”

“But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for,” he added.

After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, some commentators pointed out that the war might, in fact, have proven Romney right.

“The Ukraine of that time is not the Ukraine that we’re talking about today,” Obama said in this latest interview, arguing the situation in and around Russia had changed since 2014.

“There’s a reason why there was not an armed invasion of Crimea: because Crimea was full of a lot of Russian speakers and there was some sympathy to the view that Russia was representing its interests,” he added.

“We challenged Putin with the tools that we had at the time given where Ukraine was at the time.”