Putin’s tactics may be brilliant’ ‘Meduza’ interviews Celeste Wallander, one of Barack Obama’s top advisors on Russia
Meduza‘s own Konstantin Benyumov recently met with Celeste Wallander, the US National Security Council’s senior director for Russia and Eurasia, to discuss the goals and effectiveness of Russia’s actions in Syria, as well as the general state of affairs between the Kremlin and the White House.
.. What Russia has chosen to begin and execute in Syria did not take us completely by surprise. Uninformed commentators often claim that the United States was taken by surprise. That analysis is wrong. Sometimes you just have to listen very carefully to what President Putin says. He pretty clearly laid out what he was going to do in Syria. He gave a speech in Dushanbe [Tajikistan], and laid it out quite clearly that Russia saw—that he saw—the need for Russia to intervene to save the Assad regime. And that’s how he frames the Syria crisis, in terms of saving the Assad regime: stability and preventing color revolution, and preventing regime change. You just need to pay attention sometimes to what he says.