Barack Obama’s comments about Russia’s weakness originate in a refusal to acknowledge the multi-polar world and Russia’s role in it, says the chair of the Federation Council.
“Such statements are manifestations of not even panic, but agony, and the refusal to acknowledge the mistakes made in Ukraine,” the head of the Upper Chamber of the Russian Parliament, Valentina Matviyenko, was quoted as saying by the RIA Novosti news agency. She also called upon journalists not to take such words too seriously.
She added that President Obama’s words were proof the US authorities still reject the idea the World is no longer uni-polar, that Russia now is a serious power integrated into the global economic system.
Matviyenko’s comments came soon after Barack Obama’s speech at the nuclear security summit in The Hague in which he dismissed the allegations that Russia was the main geopolitical foe of the United States and called it "a regional power that is threatening some of its immediate neighbours, not out of strength but out of weakness."
The United States and Russia are currently in a standoff over the major political crisis in Ukraine where pro-democracy rallies of last year eventually resulted in mass riots and a coup executed with heavy support of rightist radicals.
Nationalist leaders of the coup capitalized on numerous anti-Russian statements and moves, and as a result the Autonomous Republic of Crimea held a referendum on which over 90 percent of participants voted to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation.
Russian authorities have supported the move and quickly passed the necessary laws making the Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol new subjects of the Russian Federation.
Western nations have refused to recognize the Russia-Crimea reunion. The USA, the EU and some other countries have introduced sanctions against Russia, and also against a few dozen Russian and Ukrainian officials and businessmen whom Washington and Brussels hold personally responsible for the situation.
Russia blasted these measures as counterproductive and ineffective and replied with some mirror sanctions against Western civil servants.