“I believed that I needed to correct the record”—DNI Coats on his first reaction to Trump’s performance in Helsinki #ClassAct #AspenSecurity
Ugh. “I don’t know what happened in that meeting”—DNI Coats on TrumpPutin summit in Helsinki #AspenSecurity
Coats directly contradicts Trump re Russia’s role on North Korea (for which Trump praised Putin in a tweet yesterday), says that Moscow is cheating on the existing sanctions regime
“I was not aware of that”—DNI Coats on whether he had advance knowledge of Trump’s infamous Oval Office meeting with Russian FM Lavrov and Amb Kislyak. Says there was “no nefarious intent.” #ThisIsNotNormal
“If you think the Russians are trying to be good neighbors, this [Skripal attack] is the kind of thing they do.” Makes a dig about Putin’s KGB background, says people (who?) shouldn’t be naive about who he is. #AspenSecurity

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More from @andrewsweiss

3 Sep
To put a finer point on the very wise comment by Amb. @RugeBoris: Russian crude oil trades freely on global markets, and these exports account for a staggeringly large percentage of revenues for the Russian state budget and the rents that keep the Putin regime afloat. 1/X
Gas pipelines like Nord Stream 2 are not money-makers for the Kremlin in the traditional sense. Make no mistake: Nord Stream 2 is a stinker of a project: the geopolitics and geoeconomics are exactly wrong. 2/X
German leadership and credibility have taken a big hit as a result. But German and Russian parastatals, utilities, and energy companies have been pursuing cozy projects like this since the 1960s. They resist EU scrutiny/oversight because these relationships are anti-market 3/X
Read 6 tweets
16 Jul
1/4 Russian interference in the 2020 election isn't a theoretical possibility. It's happening in plain sight. We're just not taking it seriously. Re-upping four recent examples.
2/4 Wherein a KGB-trained Ukrainian politician/agent provocateur leaks classified tapes of then-VP Joe Biden's phone calls with a foreign head of state.
3/4 Giuliani, Don Jr, FoxNews and OAN have all been pretty shameless about hyping and promoting the fruits of foreign interference. As one of them used to say at Trump Tower, they are "loving it."
Read 4 tweets
3 Jul
Citizens of Belarus start to lose their fear, revel in mockery of President Lukashenko's declining popularity (3% in online polls). But the risk that things could get out of hand in run up to August 9 election is palpable. 1/ reut.rs/2VF7ZpJ Image
Longtime Minsk-based @CarnegieRussia contributor Artyom Shraibman is worried about the potential for violence. 2/ carnegie.ru/commentary/821… @A_Shraibman Image
Belarus's ties with Moscow are increasingly tense. The testy relationship betw Putin and Lukashenko is getting nastier amid fights over COVID, energy subsidies, etc. Lukashenko is also accusing the Kremlin of interfering in the election. 3/ reuters.com/article/us-bel… Image
Read 4 tweets
5 Jun
Incredibly wrong-headed move by Trump.
Can only be read in Moscow as a huge gift to Putin.
And a big kick in the shins to US NATO allies and other front-line states.
@glubold @mgordonwsj
Trump, Steve Bannon, Richard Grenell, et al have been gunning for Angela Merkel since forever and using her as a symbol of all the anti-globalist, anti-immigrant, anti-EU hokum they can dream up. 2/X
These baseless and downright kooky attacks on Germany/Merkel, unquestionably America's most powerful and important European ally, have done immeasurable damage to the transatlantic alliance that was put in place after WW2. 3/X
Read 9 tweets
19 May
THREAD: This looks like the first blast of significant foreign interference in 2020 presidential race but hard to say exactly who is pulling the strings. 1/X
The Ukrainian parliamentarian who released tapes of Joe Biden's & John Kerry's phone calls with fmr President Poroshenko is a perennial agent provocateur who tried to insert himself in the middle of the Trump impeachment drama and Rudy Giuliani's fever dreams about the Bidens 2/X
Andrii Derkach has so many unseemly connections in Ukraine, Russia, and pro-Trump circles and such a problematic personal history (more on that in a sec) that it's all too easy to discount what comes out of his mouth. 3/X
Read 11 tweets
10 Apr
THREAD: What to make of Putin’s under-the radar initiative to use the #coronavirus crisis to normalize US-Russian relations? Putin and Trump spoke 3 times in past week. That’s the most active level of dialogue during Trump’s entire presidency--and the one w biggest results. 1/X
In this instance, Putin followed a playbook similar to when he tried to make common cause with George W Bush and Barack Obama on 9/11 and ISIS. While US/Russian interests, in theory, overlap in dealing with the pandemic, Putin never operates out of the goodness of his heart. 2/X
So what did Putin want and what did he achieve? He effectively played to Trump’s vanity/foibles by suggesting that only Trump could help him solve an urgent problem: the collapse of global oil prices. (Oil/gas exports generate +40% of the Russian state’s budget revenues.) 3/X
Read 15 tweets

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