US must learn from past Russian examples

Obama has to stop lecturing Putin — it didn’t work in the past and won’t work now, writes Nina Khrushcheva.

NO matter how counterintuitive it may seem, the US needs to stop lecturing Russian president Vladimir Putin if it wants to resolve problems with him.

In George Kennan’s celebrated 1946 “long telegram”, the diplomat and scholar explained why Russia’s conduct was so often duplicitous. Kennan might well have been writing about Putin when he laid out the West’s problems with the Kremlin leaders’ behaviour.